Random Acts of Crazy - My Mother

I used to hear my husband, in hushed tones to his side of the family prior to marriage exclaiming "she is not related by blood, so it's ok."  While I am adopted, in all honesty, everyone else in the family is just fine, thank you.  My brothers, John and Dody are both within the levels agreed upon as acting with sanity.  Mother, however, is plain crazy, always has been. 

Trying to get the family back together, I've staged gatherings at the house and tried to get relatives far flung together for awhile.  Mother and brother Dody now live accross the alley from me in a retirement home. Brother John, in Seattle and with a schedule perhaps even busier than mine.

She is a master at keeping the attention focused on her.  She's 84 but relatively healthy.  She likes to speak of her immenent death in front of my terminally ill with bone cancer brother Dody. Every holiday includes a missive from her about dying.  In fact, she told Michael and I not to invite her to our wedding 15 years back because she would be dying soon.

So the visit with my brothers was so nice.  And the entire time was spent with all of us leaving her alone at some point on the sofa to go someplace else, kitchen, balcony, porch, to get a breather before diving back into dealing with her.

Michael prepared a lovely lunch feast to take to the winery, paying attention to her food preferences.  But on the way there, we hear "I've changed my mind,Times Ten is for young people, take me home."  Then she wanted to bolt home as lunch was being served the next day.  And, no, she did not want to rejoin us after resting, for dinner that evening with cousin Steve (one of her very favorite people).  I finally had to ask, since John was leaving the following day, should he just call his good bye to her? She got silent and I interjected that it was her choice being made to separate from her sons and her family because somehow she was trying to pin this one on me, much like everything else.  John was only here 3 days for pete's sake.  But I guess all the attetion was just not on her.  Most hurtful is her rants about what a bad daughter I am, that I have not been there for her or done enough for her lately or, even worse, stolen money from her.  She claimed, while my brothers were visiting that when she was laid up, a few years ago, I paid her bills and took out an extra $300.00 for myself.  In reality, we've bought so much for her, from furniture to groceries over the years, I am just shocked she'd go into a lie like that. She is on a tiny stipend that I subsidize routinely. But our subsidy has substantially reduced in scale over the last few years due to her ungreatful attitude and blame.  It made us both so weary giving and giving and getting blamed.  We still do things for her, but on a much more limited basis, on our time not hers.

My husband was so good, dealing with her this week, because we had to pick her up each day to visit over here with Dody and John, whereas, we normally limit our visits with her to once or twice a month because she is so intollerable when seen too much.  Fran hates everything, people, life, her apartment, living and dying. It gets old hearing it.  She sees a Mexican and shouts 'Oh, run him over!' whiile we are riding in the car together. 

You can't fix stupid and you can't fix crazy...not when crazy doesn't want to be fixed.  Now that John is back in Seattle, I am taking some time away from mommy dearest to decompress.

Upon her death I am going to try very very very hard to think on the good times.  We, none of us, can ever take back what is said.  Mother is a great lesson on what not to do and what not to say.

Sephora As Scrooge

I've been shopping at Sephora for decades....yeah, DECADES.  Not after this week.  It began first with my not receiving anything as a beauty insider but what I really wanted was a price match because their competition had the same exact thing for the same price, less a 20% off discount just for Christmas. 

Since the 20% would have saved me $82.00, this is a big deal.  I plan to refuse shipment since it took 3 days for Sephora to actually respond with any firm answer.  But how sad that a decent sized company would rather piss off and alienate their customer base instead of giving during the holiday season when their competition is.

Buy Bye Sephora....