I'm just joking. I LOVE my mother for life. But unfortunately I don't like her - let me rephrase that - I can't live with her. I don't know how I did it for the first 19 years of my life? My mother is sweet and she means well, but a lot of times her own idiosyncrasies gets in the way of me enjoying being around her .
Despite all this, about a month ago it seemed like a good idea to drive up to Queens, NY to bring my mother back home to Virginia to live with me. Understand that at the time I was really concerned for her health and well-being up there and plus, there were incidents that made me feel uncomfortable about her living situation. So the plan was to bring her back to her birth place, help her get readjusted to living here again and help her get her own housing eventually.
That first week I thought to myself, "What the fuck was you thinking?". I just recently moved into a quiet residential neighborhood filled with old, white folks. Right up my mother's alley right? Peace and quiet. Wrong. My mother is LOUD. As soon as I turn the corner to go down my street I already know she's on the porch. She is that loud. For two reasons; first, that's just the way she is, and second, for the last five years or so she's been having to talk over a house full of crying kids. Even when she realizes she's loud she she gets louder. She hasn't figured out yet how to turn herself down.
She also, unknowingly, suffers from insomnia and has been that way for as long as I've known her. I can maybe count on one hand how many times I've actually seen my mother asleep....with her eyes closed. So it's nothing to find myself awakened at 2:30 in the morning from the sound of someone downstairs rustling through the refrigerator for a snack, or "silently" talking on the phone. How do you tell your mom, "Will you carry your ass to bed!....please?"
All my mom's conversations start something like this: "I didn't get to sleep 'til about 3 o'clock last night." Long pause. Even longer pause now. You see, this where I'm suppose to chime in and say, "So why didn't you get to sleep 'til 3 o'clock?" And then, by law, she can continue to explain why. Honestly, it's the funniest shit ever. "Ma, why can't you just tell me why you were up 'til 3 instead of me having to pretend like I'm asking?" No answer.
Well, it seems she's not ready to come down and stay for good just yet (every time I say that I uncontrollably jump in the air and click my heels together). She lives with my younger brother and his wife and they need her to help out babysitting my three nieces (daycare in NY is a bitch). A big part of my mother's being is the joy of raising children. I don't have one yet for her to raise so when she's here she starts to feel a bit unuseful. So, this Saturday I'll be driving her back up to NY until the next time she gets stressed out and needs to come back home to relax. I'm okay with that because her short stay allowed me to learn a little about myself, and that is that I'm not ready to deal with my mother full-time yet. Saturday can't get here fast enough.
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