SON MIS LOCURAS

Today, I am reminded about two things I love, love, love about my mom.

First, she is intellectually curious.  This manifest today as she asked me to “check” her answers to a health survey she received.  If I was actually grading her, I’d give her an A-.  She only misread one question.  She won’t mail the survey though, because she doesn’t think her health is anyone else’s business, but she wanted to see if she tested well in reading comprehension.

Second, she makes my laugh–a lot.  Her favorite way to make me laugh is to joke about how she’s not fat, she’s “just has some inflammation going.”

“Tu lo que quieres es sacarme las palabras, y yo no te quiero hablar.”

This is what my mom says when she picks up the phone on a day when she has decided to be mad at me.

She gets mad for different reasons.  Sometimes it’s because I haven’t called her early enough.  Other times it’s because I have interrupted her with a call.  Most often it’s because I haven’t been able to play chauffeur at a moment’s notice.

And that’s what it was today.  I couldn’t take her to the dentist at 8 a.m. with only a day’s notice.  “But mom, if you let me know when you make the appointment, I can help you.  But you do realize I work, right?”

Of course she doesn’t, so rather than argue, I just figure I have to get her to talk to me—at least work through her anger.  And, she’s on to me.

She’s figured out that I don’t really care what she thinks of Elizabeth Taylor’s death, or about whether she got wet in the rain, or even about the state of her teeth.  And, I’ve figured out that if I just talk at her enough, even about random topics, she will eventually talk back, and that helps her through a day that was harder for her than it should have been.

I won today—her teeth are fine for now, she didn’t get wet, and she made a friend yesterday.

On the approaching rain:

“Ya viene la lluvia.  Vamos a descalzarnos y jugar en el arroyo!”

No, she wasn’t talking to me.  She was recalling the sheer joy a rainstorm brought her and her brothers over 60 years ago.

I always have a hard time describing my job to my mother.  She never worked in an office, so the concept of reading, writing, and talking to people for hours a day and getting paid for it doesn’t register to her as much of a job.

Today, circumstances turned this Thursday into a “Bring your Retired Mother to Work Day” and she had the chance to sit in on one of my meetings.

Her impression of my work, “Que bonito hablas.  Y unas palabrotas.”

She was visibly proud of how I’d done in the meeting.  Mostly, she was proud of how well I speak English, although I still don’t know if she understood a word I said.

I always think it’s funny that she’s proud of my ability to speak English, but I guess it’s no different than when she’s proud of herself for getting through basic interactions in this foreign language.

Being a mother, of course she couldn’t just leave it at a compliment.  She promptly followed her words with “Si haces esas juntas por horas todos los dias, con razon que cuando llegas conmigo no te callas.”

And, yes mom, it is hard to shut off the talking thing when you do it for hours on end every day.

If you leave my mom alone for too long, she comes up with ideas that are uncharacteristic of her.

Today, she decided she wanted to go to a casino. In the few hours I left her alone, she’d figured out how to get there and how long we should stay.

Such a plan is not typical of my mother because she is cheap and because she doesn’t waste money. “Trabaje muy duro para andar gastando en las maquinas,” she’ll say.

For whatever reason, today she wanted to play the slots. I tried to give her a $20, but she only wanted a $5. I settled in a few seats away and before I’d played my first spin, she was done. Apparently, she doesn’t understand the concept of playing a lot of credits on a lot of lines.

As if to punish a misbehaving child, I moved her into a seat next to mine and gave her a $20. It was as if to say, “Since you can’t play on your own, you’ll play under my watchful gaze.”

Then she took off. In the time it took me to get through $40 in twenty-five cent increments, she made $100. Then some guy started watching her and it freaked her out. Then we left.

I guess I’ve never known what my mom does with windfalls, since we really haven’t had any. I now know she goes to Walgreen’s.

She buys the good over-the-counter medicine for herself (real Tums, Icy Hot) , and candy for the neighbor kid, and a sweatshirt for a friend. Then she got me a milkshake and gave me what I’d loaned her. “Por darme los $20 de todo corazon,” she said.

Here’s the way it works.  I go off and play at the stuff that I enjoy for a few weeks, leaving my mom without my company.

She gets mad and demands equal time, so I have her tag along with me to something.

This means we’re on a road trip together for the next few days.

Stay tuned.

. . . has told my mother that I’m putting her stories on the internet?

Because she’s been withholding stories as of Thursday.

“Que me gano con decirte mis historias?” she says.

For our own good, ssssh, and don’t tell her how much we enjoy them or we’ll all be cut off.

On my birthday, my mom doesn’t break out old pictures or videos of me.  Instead, she tells me stories about the time surrounding my birth.  Today’s story was about how in the days after my birth, she was so scared of people touching, breathing, or even looking at me, that she’d put my carrier on top of the refrigerator to protect me from the people who wanted to see me.

My poor mother has really always wished she could lock me away from everyone and everything.

Why is it that my mom’s greatest medical crises happen when I am out of town?  Even if they are the ailments that always plague her, for some reason they all become my fault when they manifest themselves when I do something “selfish” like take a few vacation days.

Oh, and of course it’s accompanied by a “yo aqui ando sufriendo, y tu divertiendote por todos lados.”

Yeah mom, I specifically time my trips for when your joints are going to be aching.

I’ve described Vicks’ Vapo Rub as “the ointment of the gods” on this site before.  It made an appearance again recently, as my mom tried to cure some of the aches and pains that plague her.

Specifically, she was trying to get rid of hip pain.

“Caliente un poco de Vicks, y se lo pone en el dolor,” a friend told her.  Easy enough, you’d think.

But my mother didn’t try to heat the Vicks by rubbing her hands together.  Instead, she tried to heat it up  by putting it on her hands and then placing her hands over the stove’s burners.

You can imagine her surprise when she found flames shooting out of her hands.   But, spendthrift that she is, she still thought she’d get some value from her Vicks, so she snuffed out the flames—on her hip.

I’m pretty sure this experience is the only time her use of Vicks has led to actual scarring (and I’m amused by the fact that I even have to utter that sentence).  More amusing is that my mom is somehow proud that all she scarred was her hip, and not her hands.  Because, in her mind, burned up hands would have been really bad.

And she wonders why I act like an overprotective parent.

As you’ve probably guessed, my mom has a lot of unintentionally amusing moments. Afterward, she always notes two things: “You like to laugh at me, don’t you?” and “Don’t you put that on the internet.”

I’ll admit it, I have a happier life because her travails make me laugh, really hard. I also like that she is, sometimes, just a little silly. Such as when she’s trying to teach my niece that she shouldn’t be scared of the fake pirate.

As I’ve mentioned before, my mom is the lady who’s always yelling at the neighbors, seemingly enforcing her brand of apartment-complex law and order.

The holidays didn’t make her more charitable or forgiving of loud or late parties.  Instead, she decided that since I wasn’t willing to come and call the police for her, she needed a camera. Since that’s easier to get her than constantly going down to her house to explain why 7 p.m. isn’t too late for loud music (or worse yet, being nagged to report such behavior to the police), this morning I gave her my camera.

I spoke to her earlier this evening. She was soooooo excited to try it out.  Seems she’s just itching for some bad tenant behavior now.

Glad to have scored some unexpected good daughter points on that one.

It makes me smile that I have this picture with my mom.