Sometimes my daughter looks up at me from her phone when I have been speaking to her for a while. Her look clearly says oh, right, you’re here! And yet what you have been saying is outside of my sphere of interest, so you will have to repeat it.
For my part, I consider it part of my mom duties to find new ways to annoy her. This is especially true since I am a single mom, so when she can’t stand me, she has no backup slightly less annoying parent to turn to. Plus it’s ridiculously easy to exasperate her. I can sometimes do it just by existing.
The other day, for example, we were taking a road trip together. We love to drive and we love to drive together. I mentioned that I was feeling a sense of deja vu. I pronounced it, as the French do, deja vyew. Jessie looked at me witheringly. It’s deja voo, she corrected. Actually, I said, aware that I was about to be very annoying, I’m the person in the car who speaks French and I can thus verify that the correct pronunciation is vyew. She looked straight ahead. That’s not how anyone here says it, she answered firmly. And there it was: cemented in fact. I was wrong. But I was fine with that, because now I had a new way to annoy her. I said deja vyew a couple more times during our trip.
Sometimes my questions annoy her. Asking how her math test went, for example, is annoying because it reminds her she had a math test that she didn’t study that much for. Asking how she is: that’s bad. I can’t remember why.
And I am apparently very frustrating in my preference for sad songs. We share a lot of our taste in music, which is a happy thing as we both play music incessantly. But my tolerance for sad sack music is way higher than hers. And apparently it’s weird to have a Spotify playlist for driving called ‘Upbeat’ and then populate it with a bunch of slow, miserable songs. Who knew?
Possibly the thing that annoys my daughter most about me is my inability to provide her with food. I know that might sound like a sort of basic mom task, but it’s a particularly difficult one for me to perform correctly. She doesn’t live with me all the time, but her schedule is random and decided on the fly. It’s hard for me to keep in my head what nights she will be here, principally because she only texts me her plans late in the day sometimes. I do go grocery shopping. Feels like I go several times a week, and each time the bill has three digits. But no matter how often I carry out this chore, the food just seems to run out. She doesn’t eat that much, so I wonder whether she has teen hordes over when I’m not home and they pick my fridge clean? Or random strangers come by while I’m at work and eat all our groceries? This could be. Her interpretation, however, is that I never have food in the house.
I’ll be honest: keeping the fridge full of tasty, nutritious, fresh food is not my strong suit. That said, she can open a full fridge, stare in for a moment and then say despairingly Mom, there’s nothing in our house to eat!
One sure-fire way to get a reaction is to answer her honestly when she asks how work was today. I’m a hospice nurse. She knows my work frequently involves bodily fluids. What she really wants to hear is my day was great, thanks sweetie! But sometimes I decide that our relationship will be deepened if I tell her how my day really was and not just what she wants to hear. So I might recount some details from a manual disimpaction that afternoon, or throw in the wound care I did for some gangrenous toes. She really loves that. She wanted to be a nurse herself, for about ten minutes in junior year. Then she heard what a manual disimpaction was and opted for journalism instead.
On balance, I have to say that life with Jessie is very harmonious. We see eye to eye on most things. We have the same sense of humor, so we frequently crack each other up. And I think she can forgive me most of my more egregious flaws, like how I don’t moisturize enough. I do try to avoid the more obvious parental missteps, like showing her new boyfriend unflattering pictures of her when she was a baby (it’s hard to find those, but there are a couple). I try not to nag her about college applications or cleaning her room. But given the stressors of the job, I think every parent needs a couple of deja vyews up their sleeve.
No comments:
Post a Comment