In which I steel myself to the task

2006-03-01 - 4:04 p.m.

Okay, I'm refining this mother-visit idea some more.

A woman I work with said it was always great to have her mother come visit, because her mother was just not any trouble. She liked to sit on the deck and read in the sun!

So here's my plan:


  1. Think of some discrete projects she can do without much input from me, i.e. pack up the photos. Pack up the yarn.
  2. Encourage dinner-making activities.
  3. Encourage child transport activities. This way I can go to work early and get home early, and then I can take her to IKEA to visit my cabinets. She'll like that.
  4. Explain to her that I can't keep her busy all the time, but it would actually be more helpful to me to have her read on the deck than for me to rack my brains for things for her to do that I don't really want done.
  5. Encourage trips to SF to do fun things. She's much more resourceful than she thinks, and she actually can go to museums by herself.
  6. Encourage her to also do things with my brother -- he's a fun guy, too. (He's a little busy with the garden show at the moment, but that might also be an opportunity.)
  7. Try to get her to make needed curtains. This can be combined with fun trip to fabric store.
  8. Plant stuff? Fun trip to nursery involved!
  9. Fun trip to rock store to get stone for little piece of driveway.

I think the key thing here will to mix fun things (trips to IKEA to look at cabinets) with time when we aren't doing anything, time when I'm at work, time when we're allowed to rest on the couch a little.

I don't know if you've read Bleak House, but there's this great character, Mrs. Jellyby, in it. Mrs. Jellyby is a sort of symbol of a type of activity that drives me crazy. Mrs Jellyby has many many children who are completely ignored because Mrs. Jellyby is completely occupied with her noble missionary quest to save all the poor heathen children in Africa. The Jellyby children go without food, clothing, attention or any fun at all in the name of some far distant, never seen children who probably don't even want Mrs. Jellyby's missionary attentions. It's kind of like that with my mother -- in her quest to "help" me with my overburdened, complicated life in the abstract, she can tend to overburden and complicate my actual life to the point of no return. So, in an effort to avoid my utterly losing my mind, I'm going to have to just tell her -- okay. Let's do this. But now we are not going to do that.

It's my life, after all.

God help me --

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01

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