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:
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 --
find me! - 2008-02-12 |
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