Different Worlds

Blessings, Darlings!

As I pack, and we rent a truck (and I stop my husband from hitting the 'submit' key until I look for AND FIND a coupon for 20% off of the truck rental), my mother calls.

In every call, she tells me not to work too hard.  Now, I'm not a type A person, folks.  I'm laid back.  I like playing online, I like reading, I love cooking and gardening and all sorts of leisure activities.  And I totally ignore housework as much as I can.  I TOTALLY do NOT 'work too hard'.

But in her eyes, I work way too hard.  I don't hire folks to clean my house (at one time when I was young we had two women who helped clean our house) (and I was an only child, it wasn't like she had 8 kids like her Mother did) (and her mother didn't hire anyone to help with the house) (but I'm sure her older daughters were given PLENTY of chores).

Mom, altho' a Cancer and .... uh .... rather family obsessed and co-dependent, was the baby girl of the family.  She and her twin brother were the youngest of the 8 kids.  She didn't get taught to cook everything her older sisters learned to cook - by the time she was growing up my Grandmother wasn't making her own challah for Shabbos.  She wasn't helping raise younger children (at least until her sister Anne was widowed and came home to live, and needed childcare while she worked).

But Mom did work outside the family for a while, for the Corps of Engineers.  She even made it to supervisory level there.  And I'm SURE she never told anyone she supervised to 'not work too hard'.  In fact, she and a friend of hers from that time, who worked under her, tell a story about how Mom told the woman to get back to work (using some 'strong' Yiddish as part of her order).

Mom can't understand that we, like most of humanity, are doing the bulk of our moving ourselves.  We'll hire folks to help us one day, to move the heaviest furniture, and that's it.  The boxes, all 400 or more, we'll pack and handle.  She can't understand that we have more than 20 books.  I've not even tried to explain prepping to her, and the amount of stuff that involves having and moving.  She'd lose it at 'grind your own grain', let alone STORE your own grain.

I often wonder how she ended up with me as a daughter. We are alike in some things - a few from nature (whole family with anxiety disorders!) and some nurture (some of the manifestations of the anxiety disorders!), but so often so totally different.  She loves that I put my life on hold to homeschool.   She loves that I dropped everything when my Mother In Law had a heart attack and made sure she got the right drugs, followed thru', changed doctors, etc.  Co-dependence gets her full approval, possibly because I manifest that so VERY rarely!

My son and I have a far more natural relationship, at least in my view.  We're quite alike, I understand his grunts, jokes, etc. Helps that we're both Sagittarian, I suppose.


Well, I must get back to packing.

Frondly, Fern