It’s inevitable that when I go back home, especially if it’s for more than a week, I will probably get into a fight or two with my mom. It’s almost as though I wait for it to happen every time. With my dad, it’s more just getting annoyed with comments he makes, but with my mom, it’s actually getting instigated, and usually, unfairly.
Today, it started with her complaining about cousins and wives not having any “common sense,” and when I told her I didn’t want to hear her complaining, she got really angry and said she should be able to speak freely around me because I’m her daughter. Somehow, the conversation escalated and she accused me of not liking her and always being aware of this, and she said that I favored Chris’s parents. “His mom told me that you wake up early every morning and make them breakfast,” she said angrily. “But you can’t even wake up early to make your own parents breakfast!”
Well, that’s not really true. I did wake up early on Saturday to make pancakes for my two visiting friends and my parents. It’s just that it wasn’t early enough for my mother. I woke up at 7:15. She got angry and said I should have waken up an hour earlier because dad was already preparing his oatmeal. “You never do anything nice for your parents, but you do nice things for outside people!” Dad was never going to eat my pancakes and was always going to eat his oatmeal; he is hell bent on eating oatmeal with oat bran, flaxseed, chia seed, sunflower seed, and maybe ten other seed types every morning to prolong his life. He’s even gotten more fanatical about it post heart surgery. The other inaccuracy about this is that I really only woke up 15 minutes earlier than usual to “make” Chris’s parents breakfast when they came. It really encompassed turning on the coffee maker, which I would already have prepared the night before, and throwing a bunch of fruit and spinach and almond milk into a blender and blending for 60 seconds. I explained that to my mom, but that was useless because she of course embellished the story and insisted that Chris’s mom said that I had an elaborate spread of things for them to eat every morning. That is definitely not true.
Arguments with the parents are always extremely annoying, but they are even worse when they are making up “facts” that don’t even exist and just say delusional things that they believe to be true. Because how do you convince a delusional person that she is delusional?