My mother has been calling almost every day, and the only real purpose of her calls is to guilt me into coming for Mother’ Day. Yesterday she flat out asked why I don’t want to come. I flat out told her a) it costs about $50 just to get there and back, even without any extraneous spending, b) it’s Lin’s busy season, and we never know when he’s suddenly going to need to work, and c) I don’t want to make the trip by myself so soon already, because the driving wears me out completely and leaves me achy for a couple of days. In a more perfect world where gas was cheap, traffic on holidays wasn’t insane, and Lin drove me anywhere I wanted to go, I’d be there for Mother’s Day. Maybe.

I say “maybe” for one good reason: I was just there for two whole, long, and busy days a mere three weeks ago. The way she is carrying on about me “not wanting to come see” her, you’d think I hadn’t been there for months and months.

She’s pulling out all the stops on the guilt trips too, and it’s really, really beginning to grate. I wonder if her mom did this to her too. The distance from my parents’ house to my grandparents’ house is the same as the one I make to go see her, and while gas used to be a lot cheaper, we were all a lot more poor and had crappy cars prone to breaking down. I don’t recall us going to see my grandparents more than a couple times a year (until their health failed and Dad started leaving Mom there for weeks at a time), and Mom most certainly never went by herself owing to the fact she didn’t get her driver’s license until 9 years ago. So did her mother nag her into insanity about coming to visit, even when it was an expensive and troublesome thing to do, and now she’s passing that insanity and all the guilt trips on to me? I have no idea, but I think I will ask her straight out about it.

This new Orb, the one who is tossing out all the rubble of her past, is even more intolerant of guilt trips and manipulation than the old Orb was (and she wasn’t all that tolerant of it either). New Orb expects the adults in her life to act like adults and to treat her like an adult. When I am asked to do something, and I say no, while supplying perfectly valid reasons, I expect that decision to be respected. When I ask her to come over for a visit, which I do from time to time, and she says no, because she doesn’t want to make the long drive alone and she can’t really afford it right now, I don’t call her every day whining, begging, and cajole her to come visit and lay on guilt trips about how she doesn’t want to come see me. I take her answer as an answer and leave it at that. All I want is to be treated the same way. I don’t think I am asking too much.

I’m going to go fume over another cup of coffee. Lin says I shouldn’t let her get to me the way she does, and that the only way someone gets the power to bother me that much is when I give that power to them, and he is absolutely right, but he doesn’t have anyone like this in his life, so he can’t possibly know what it is like living with a button-pusher. It’s really quite awful, especially when you really do care about the person and want them to be happy.

And so ends today’s Mom Rant.