Parents

I just don’t know what to do about Mom. Now, all of a sudden, I’m not letting her eat anything??? It’s a joke at my house that you can’t bring anything food related home without Mom getting into it. Leftovers from going out to dinner? Gone. Frozen dinners meant to be taken to work for lunch? Gone. Leftover wedding cake from our anniversary trip? Gone. The woman eats constantly, and is always coming in and telling us she’s hungry, and that we don’t have anything to eat.

Granted, we don’t keep a lot of junk food in the house, because if we do, I eat the same way – eat it all until it’s gone, then bitch cuz we don’t have anything to munch on. So we generally only keep food that takes some preparation. At least then, I have to be hungry enough to cook.

In Mom’s case, all she wants to eat is: 1. ice cream 2. ice cream 3. ice cream, and then whatever she can open and eat directly from the box/bag/carton or throw in the microwave for 5 minutes.

So last night, Chris was cooking dinner (honey chicken fajitas – sounds weird but OH so good), and Mom came in and didn’t want to wait for dinner to be ready. I’ll grant her that we eat late. Chris always has been a late eater and no matter how hard I try, we do not eat dinner before 9:00 PM if he’s cooking. We’ve eaten as late as midnight before. So I understand, if you’re hungry at 7:00 and know that dinner’s not going to be ready before 9:00, you go find something to munch on in the meantime.

Except Mom starts getting into Chris’ leftover bbq ribs he was saving for lunch today. Not just 1 or 2 mind you, but a whole SLAB of ribs. So Chris asks her to please not get into them cuz he’s saving them for today. She doesn’t completely ignore him, she put ½ the slab back in the fridge, and puts the rest into the microwave.

The biggest problem I’ve had with Mom staying with me (and this goes all the way back to when she stayed with me last year) is that I don’t feel like she has any respect for me or my home. It doesn’t matter what it is, if I ask her to do something she won’t. If I ask her not to do something, it’s the very first thing she goes to do. Please don’t smoke in the house. If you go get the mail, please put it on the coffee table so I can be sure to get my part of it. Please don’t do my laundry, all of my work clothes are shrinkable.

She wants to rearrange my living room because she doesn’t like it – I had to threaten her with death to keep her from moving my furniture around.

So last night, when I heard Chris ask her not to get into his ribs and she did anyway, I got a little upset. Not over the ribs per se, but over the fact that she acts like we’re in her home inconveniencing her. So I tried to talk to her about it, and that’s when I got the we’re starving her to death speech and tears.

(Just for the record, I went and bought a weeks worth of frozen dinners for me to take to work, and some for Mom as well, so she’s have something easy – besides sandwiches which she flat refuses to eat – for lunches during the week. I bought them on a Friday, when I went to get some to take to work on Monday, they were ALL gone.)

The most frustrating thing about it is that you’ll be talking to her (calmly and without assigning any blame) and you think that she understands what you’re talking about and why you feel the way you do, and then she says or does something that proves that she wasn’t even listening to you in the first place.

It’s like talking to a 3 year old child, and trying to explain to them why they can’t play with fire, and they say OK, I won’t play with fire. And then they run right out and play with fire.

Oh yeah, and it’s my fault that she doesn’t have a car anymore.