I Love It When Someone Else Gets Pissed With My Mother

I’ve spoken with my brother twice in the last month & each time he had an angry story to tell about our mother.  I feel such joy when he is annoyed with her, like a kid at the circus watching the high trapeze act.  Yes!  Yes!  She’s pissed off someone other than me!

He has always been her favorite, and I understand it.  He would have been my favorite, too.  The mother/son thing is not describable in words.  Plus, he was just so entertaining as a kid.  Whether it was throwing kittens out the door, after finding them newly born in the washing machine, or flushing Avon perfume containers down the toilet, he was a fun brother.

 

His crowning achievement was climbing onto a chair to get to the top of the refrigerator, where Mom had hidden her most prized possession, a ceramic chicken.  Why she loved this thing, I have no idea.  But I know she really did because she cried so loud, for so long, when he threw it to the floor, breaking it into 100 pieces.  He couldn’t have been older than two at the time.

I also think he was incredibly cute.  I’ll never understand when people say their kids are chunky or hefty, because I compare them to my own family & it’s humorous.  I remember traveling with my mother & grandmother to numerous endocrinologists, looking for an explanation for my brother’s size.  I have such a soft spot for beefy guys because they remind me of Jim.

When I see hefty baby boys in the grocery store it seriously crosses my mind to grab them and run.  I actually asked my brother’s girlfriend just to have one single child with him, so I could have it.  She has three children & doesn’t want any more.  I seriously hate the fact that he’s clearly never going to repeat his individual genetic masterpiece.  Sigh.  He’s one of a kind.

I’m not saying he’s not annoying, because he can totally suck.  Like the fact that he convinced me to give him my share of our family home, a check for $10,000 that I signed over 20 years ago, with a promise to pay me back when my son began college.  He has no intention of paying me even a dime.  Do I choose the money over my brother?  No. 

My hero complex kicked in, causing that situation to occur in the first place.  I went home for his wedding & my mom was being a ridiculous bitch at the time.  She taught this kid that the only things that matter are money & material possessions, then arrived at his wedding with no gift.  She actually said, “I’m making tuna salad, so that’s my contribution,” after saying something about things being tight financially that month.  He was mortified in front of his bride-to-be.  So, although I was living hand to mouth as a single parent, I gave him $10,000 to make up for the tuna.

My family is such a pack of wolves that, rather than support me in ever receiving financial reimbursement, the train of thought runs more to: “Well, what’d you give it to him for?”  Love & kindness are not valued highly on our family crest.

So my brother still works for my mother, he’s a truck driver & she owns the company plus dispatches the trucks.  In other words, she is the puppet master.  He told her he wanted to be home for Father’s Day.  My mother said, “Well, I don’t celebrate Father’s Day any more, not since Dad died.”

According to my brother, it’s a good thing he wasn’t in the office with her when she said this because he believes he would have finally done it, he would have put his hands around her throat and killed her.  I believe him.  I would have been so annoyed if I missed that scene! 

See, our father died when he was six years old, at the ripe old age of 33, 38 years ago.  My mother’s father died at age 87, three years ago, when she was 64.  Rarely did my mother ever speak of my father again; however, she laments the death of her own father & her second husband every chance she gets.  She wears so many memorial diamonds on her fingers that I once told her that her hands remind me of a cemetery.

Even though I’ve known she’s nuts since I was about 7 years old, it’s still incredible to me that she is so self-obsessed, so self-centered, that she does not even have a thimble full of empathy for her favorite person in the world, her son, my brother.  Clearly, she’s certifiable.  We just don’t have a diagnosis.

The second story makes me laugh.  As background, you should know that although I love my brother, he is one of the laziest people ever created by God.  If you catch him doing hard work, the conversation will not be enjoyable.  If you catch him without a beer in his hand, the conversation will be short.

Mom called Jim & asked him what he was doing.  He said, “I’m mowing the lawn.”  Her reply, in a tone similar to someone who’s lost their best friend in the world, was: “You’re lucky you’ve got a lawnmower.  Mine is broken.”  This is my mother, condensed. 

She may have recently built herself a $30,000 glass room to use as office space, she might be driving a Chrysler 300, running a million dollar business, but she’s found a way to believe she is the most down-trodden individual on the face of the earth.  Mind you, she is not the one that would be pushing the lawnmower, even if it weren’t broken.

Jim hung up on her.

When I am able to distance myself I find my family so incredibly entertaining.