Relationships

I make no bones about being good at relationships.  I am not a people person.  I like words and data and a quiet office with my demotivational posters on the walls to remind me that I am not the greatest thing since sliced bread for at least a part of my day, every day.

And yet I've chosen a profession where I am in communication with people all the time, and where miscommunication or noncommunication can be fatal.

Why?

In part because I figured out young that I was lacking natural social skills so I needed to build them, and I worked hard to do so.  In part because it's where my skills intersect the needs of the world.  In part because it's where I'm called to be.

The calling part I'm happy to keep a mystery. It just is, and that's cool.

My mother is visiting and it's stressful for whatever reason.  I think it's either that we're a lot alike and just enough different to rub each other the wrong way, or because we're very different and find the other one irritating, OR because of some old resentment on both our parts.

It irritates me that for whatever reason my mother can't make a decision herself.  Example: moving sale is tomorrow, she's doing laundry, and there was a pair of pants still with tags on it, so I said she should put it in the sale pile.  Instead of asking where that might be, or guessing that the big pile of things we've been sorting through might be the sale pile, or just doing something with the pants, she said that she'd just set it on a random empty box that happened to be next to her so we'd remember to take it out.

This begs the question: why on earth can't she just think independently of the solution to any problem she encounters?  Why must she decide she knows how to do everything better than me while being unable to figure out what to do with things (putting away dinner, putting away things for the sale, the list could go on for weeks)?

It is pretty entertaining to see such a high level of denial in a person walking and talking about a thing happening.  Example: the house is being sold, there's an awful lot of my folks' stuff here and much of it is trash (excuse me, beloved family heirlooms that have been stored in a barn for years and years), and yet she thinks she shouldn't have to help pay for the dumpster. Hmm.

Arg. Moving. Stuff.

I'm not sure if I care about the relationship with my mother to make any changes to it. Really.  She forgets things left and right and is indignant when corrected, so I sort of think it's not worth my time to change things, and that's sort of sad.