Is it just me or does your mom drive you up the wall sometimes? Mine has been causing me so much grief lately, makes me wonder, is it her or is it me?? Has she perfected the art of guilt tripping/annoying me or have I just become hypersensitive to her perpetually unpleasant nature, making every encounter with her incredibly agonizing.
Just a few examples to demonstrate my point:
1) I've noticed that a lot of my clothes have holes in them lately. At first I didn't make anything of it but then I realized I do my laundry at home. For some strange reason my mom thinks that the washing machine isn't good enough for my clothes and she chooses to hand wash my stuff. I've seen her hand wash things and she always puts an excessive amount of elbow grease into it. She uses this really tough scrub and she's just going at it like she's trying to fight off demons. Once I recalled that, it was like putting 2 + 2 together, and it hit me that she might be scrubbing giant HOLES into my clothes. So I called her, in the most gentle manner, just explaining the situation to her and trying to reason with her to just let the washing machine do the work. She laughed it off at first, but when I said, "well, if you don't stop scrubbing holes into my clothes, I'm going to stop doing laundry at home" she just LOST it! She got all offended and started ranting off about how I have all these adverse feelings towards her now and nothing she does can please me nowadays. She sounded like she started to tear up and then hung up on me. I called her back to apologize and ask her if she's still mad at me and of course she starts guilt tripping me saying things like "I am not mad, I don't have the authority to get mad at you, I'm just your old mother, I just need to learn to shut up and be obedient to you...blah blah blah" and then she hung up on me. **UGH!!!**
2) My mother has these random needs to know where I am sometimes. So, naturally, of course these random needs fall in the hours of when I'm WORKING. So she calls my cell phone. No answer. 10 missed calls later, she calls my work phone. No answer. 3 missed calls on my WORK PHONE later, she freaks out. Then makes my brother text me. No answer. 5 text messages later, she makes my brother call me....you see where this is going. It's escalated to emergency status this one time when I was in Arizona, where she called my Dad when he was at work and got him all worked out. Then made my brother look up hospitals in Arizona and call them to look for me. If it wasn't because I called her back during my lunch break, she was about to make my Dad drive her to Arizona and look for me. I know......CRAZY. And of course, when I get mad at her for over-reacting, purely because I care about her and don't want her to worry so much about me, she CRIES and starts to guilt trip me again, calling herself a horrible mother. And of course, I cry every time I make my mom cry and it's just a HUGE MESS!! And you know how the whole fiasco ended?? I felt bad and I called my mom back and offered to call her EVERYDAY. Yes, so I call her EVERYDAY now....
3) My parents have always relied on me for almost everything. For sorting through mail, for filling out forms, for raising my younger brother...you name it. It's a lot of responsibility but I don't mind doing it, because I like to help my parents. I assuming that anyone that loves their parents would be willing to help their parents make their lives easier. But I don't like it when I feel like it's forced upon me or when my Mom guilt trips me into it. I don't understand why she doesn't think that saying things like:
"Amiee, your family really needs you, you are really important to us, you must help us!"
"Amiee, you must always keep in mind that you have an OLD mother and an OLD father to take care of, you have to stay strong and take care of yourself so you can care for us when we are older"
"Amiee, you know your father and I are going to live with you when we retire, we can't live with your brother, he's going to have a family and I wouldn't want to intrude on his life"
"Amiee, it's up to you to teach your brother, your brother only listens to you, he doesn't listen to his mom or dad, so it's up to you to raise him"
"Amiee, when you start working, I'm going to transfer our house mortgage payments to you so the payments can come from your account"
"Amiee, when you start working, I can finally retire"
My mom's convinced that telling me these things should make me feel more important and needed, almost like giving a sense of purpose to my life. "I live for my parents and I should continuing living for their sake." That's totally CRAZY!!! Why does she think that telling me these things helps me and makes me feel better about myself?? I don't understand. It just makes me feel suffocated and pathetic. Like I'm just a tool or their little pet. I always react to her comments with anger, but I think really deep down inside, I'm just hurt. I'm hurt that she constantly reminds me about these things like she's afraid I'm going to abandon her or something. I don't know how to express the amount of anguish and pain she inflicts on me when she says these things to me. She has so much power over me, too much power. I'm just afraid one day she'll know and abuse her power. Maybe she's already started....I just hope she doesn't throw me over the edge one day....
Swamped:
No interns, no techs, only 3 residents, 38 patients, you do the math. We were SWAMPED today. Some patients waited 2 hours to be seen, many rescheduled! We could just not keep up with everyone that showed up! And with no techs helping us today, there was just no way we could work out way through everyone! I didn't know if I felt worse for the people that re-scheduled because they took too long or for the people that waited >2hours to be seen! But now that I think about it, it's probably the people that were seen today because we were so swamped, I didn't even have time to figure how what was going on with the person because I cut them off every half a sentence that came out of their mouth and performed the bare minimum to get by the exam. It wasn't until AFTER they left and had more time at the end of the day to review their charts did I realize there were so many things that I had missed and I really shouldn't have let the patient go. Today was a mess! Tomorrow's going to be the same thing. God, Jesus, Buddha...please help us.
All Cut Up:
From all the commotion today, I somehow managed to slice up my two index fingers. I have two cuts (thin, sharp, and deep) on my left index finger and 1 cut (very deep, wide and blunt). I don't know how this happened but all the cuts are perfectly positioned where I would wrap my floss around my fingers so I can floss my teeth after I brush...so I guess this means no flossing for a while...ouch to my fingers and double whammy to my teeth! Sorry plaques, you are just going to have to wait for my cuts to heal!
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