Let it be known, my mother gives me nightmares. All of them have to do with etiquette, and many of them have to do with career advancement, marriage, or reproduction (which are all favorite subjects of hers). So of course, speaking to her yesterday caused me to dream a dream in which she quietly and politely ripped me a new back orifice for attending my wedding dressed like Dave Lister from Red Dwarf.
But that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that she wants to come up for a visit. This sounds like approximately as much fun for all of us as having our toenails slowly and delilberately detached from our toes. So I try to deflect her, because I know that her coming into my home will make everyone uncomfortable. But you can't protect someone from something that you know they don't want to know about by telling them "I'm trying to protect you from something I know you'd rather not know about" -- that never works.
So instead, I say, "There's nothing to do in Kansas City - why don't we all go somewhere else instead." This seems to be well-recieved, but leaves me with the burden of finding somewhere that we can go for a weekend or so. We, in this case, might mean anything from me and my mother to me, my other two thirds, my mother, my dad, my grandparents, and other assorted relatives.
Yeargh.
But that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is that she wants to come up for a visit. This sounds like approximately as much fun for all of us as having our toenails slowly and delilberately detached from our toes. So I try to deflect her, because I know that her coming into my home will make everyone uncomfortable. But you can't protect someone from something that you know they don't want to know about by telling them "I'm trying to protect you from something I know you'd rather not know about" -- that never works.
So instead, I say, "There's nothing to do in Kansas City - why don't we all go somewhere else instead." This seems to be well-recieved, but leaves me with the burden of finding somewhere that we can go for a weekend or so. We, in this case, might mean anything from me and my mother to me, my other two thirds, my mother, my dad, my grandparents, and other assorted relatives.
Yeargh.