I called home today to get a pretty cold, harsh reception from my mom. Apparently, a fellow JW acquaintance, who my mom doesn’t like, met up with her for their usual “field work” over the weekend (that basically means that they went around some neighborhood together trying to pass out their JW pamphlets to “spread the good news”). My mother has never liked this person or her family for what has always seemed to be irrational reasons, and she never liked it when I associated with this woman. Either way, this woman asked about how I was doing, and my mother decided to tell her that I got engaged. She immediately asked, “Is it Chris?” And my mother being my mother immediately got really aggravated. She told my mom that I’d told her that I had visited Chris’s family in Australia. That made my mom even more angry. “I condemn that,” she said to me on the phone today. “But it’s all over with, and I just want peace, so I’m not going to say any more to you about this.”

The irony about that statement is that as long as she keeps talking this way, I will never have any peace in my own life.

There’s no way I could live a life that 100% pleased my mother; I don’t think any of us are capable of doing that with any of our mothers. But in my world, if I 100% pleased my mother, I would not only have to live at home with her and my dad, I’d also have to clean their house, do their laundry, do all their dishes (and God, there are a LOT, even after just breakfast!), be my mother’s chauffeur when I wasn’t working, spend all my free time outside of work with her when she wasn’t doing JW work, never travel anywhere, especially internationally, have no friends (“no one really cares about you, so why do you spend so much effort on them?”), tell no one about anything other than work and current events, not cook, not spend money on “unnecessary things” (that really means… everything that is not groceries), never see any of my relatives or communicate with them, and never tell Chris “personal and confidential” things about my family (that’s pretty much everything about them). The fact that I tell people that I travel with Chris makes my mother very upset because she finds it inappropriate and apparently a disgrace to our family… because we don’t have enough disgrace as there is.