Filial Hardball: Speaking Truth to Power

My mother was recently named Doctor of the Year by some medical organization and will be in NYC in March to receive the award. I didn't know this when I talked to her this morning, but that was probably a good thing. As it stood, I ended up speaking truth to power.

After exchanging vagaries about an emergency supply of medication until I can get in to see my doctor, Mother announced that she would be visiting me in late April. She had a conference in Chicago, she said, and she couldn't afford a hotel. This from a woman who is having an elevator shaft installed in her McMansion and somehow managed to put both me and my sister through private school with no debt. Mother never had this hotel problem when I lived in a dorm and later in a studio. After a long, stony silence, I told her she really ought to get a hotel. Offended, she asked why. And I launched into my experience the last time my parents came to visit, on my birthday last year. Mom spent a good part of the weekend at a conference and left my dad to repair various things around my apartment and criticize the weatherproofing. I was under orders to scrub the bathroom floor. I'm sorry, but I don't get down on my hands and knees to scrub anything. If a mop on a regular basis isn't enough, it's time for a new floor. I got kicked out of my bed and slept on the daybed, on the same mattress I slept on from fourth grade until after grad school. The real kicker was my chauffeurring my mother around the city and suburbs for those curtains she thought I so desperately needed. When I brought this up today, she said that I had said I wanted those curtains, at which I dropped what was probably a bombshell: I'll say a lot of things to get her out of my hair. What's ironic is that the curtain deal shouldn't have been news. She nagged me for months about did I like the curtains, were the curtains up, why weren't the curtains up. Also in the why I'm not ecstatic with joy at the prospect of a visitation question was the fact that she had taken over my life and bossed me around my own home, the one I paid rent on. I'll work at Kohl's till I'm eligible for Social Security to pay off their loan for the security deposit, but I'll be damned before I let her do that to me again. The bright side of the whole ordeal was watching Raising Arizona together on the DVD player in uncomfortable chairs. That was the highlight. The end of the whole discussion was my mother asking in a sniffly voice if she could spend the weekend at my place and my telling her that I'd have to think about it, which she agreed was fair.

Then we got into an argument about my old car. I thought I had put the title in the glove compartment of the Honda and instead had left it safely in my files at home. So, I was supposed to send it to my parents this week. Part of the reason I had called was because I needed to get the exact name of the high school program I was going to donate to on the title. I was told just to sign it over to them, they'd get more of a tax write-off than I would. I said that it was my car, and I should get the write-off. Mom said that they had sold the car to me for a dollar. I pointed out that I had paid the recent insurance, I paid for the repairs (which I am still paying off, much to the delight of my credit card company), and I drove it. I did not say that if they thought they were getting a raw deal, they should have negotiated the sale better. After all, at the time, they had had something I wanted. We ended up agreeing that in exchange for my emergency prescriptions I would send the title in their name and we'd split the tax write-off.

If all this negotiating makes me a bitch, my only excuse is that I am my mother's daughter. She didn't get to be a leader in children's safety or a doctor, let alone Doctor of the Year by playing nice. As it says on my bumper sticker, well-behaved women rarely make history.