Caterwauling

So I slept in today. So I haven’t spent one single weekend in D.C. in two months. So I’m paying a comma for this friggin’ apartment and have yet to do anything other than scrub my butt and re-pack my suitcase every few days.

(For the record, I scrub my butt every few hours; I just meant that I leave every few days, not cleanse my cooter!)

I awake to Mom wondering where the hell I am. I’m tired, people. I’m in bed. So I say fine, I’m up, but I need to pay bills and scrub cat shit out of the carpets and whatnot. So two hours later (just now), I get the call to tell me what hospital and what room number my grandfather is in. I said, “You do understand I am still in Northwest right now? As in, not on the road.” And she gets all pissy and “Fine” and “Maybe you should stay there today and we’ll see you when we see you.”

Blah blah, she wanted me there because I always drive her to the hospital and she’s tired of the drive and drama and pain and misery blah blah blah. Because I just love neglecting my own life all over the place and putting no fewer than 500 miles on the car each trip (more like 750, with all the running in-between).

Sorry, I take that back. I know I’m the youngest and everyone depends on me, but I’d just like to know when someone, somewhere is going to lend me a friggin’ hand because I am overextended right now and scrambling to keep up. I feel like I have no ability to show initiative to the people who are expecting it from me because initiative would take more energy than I can generate right now.

I have to go to Pgh again next weekend, which is fine — a day I’ve been waiting five years to witness, actually. 😉 (And do you THINK my fat ass fits in any of the 17 semi-formal dresses in my closet? JESUS.) But I got an invitation the weekend after it for a party, which I’d love to attend, but it’s 100 miles in the complete opposite direction. Go figure.

It’s the inaugural tacky Christmas sweater party — how could you pass up something like that? 😉

What I had to explain to Mom is that Maddie? SHIT all over the pile of bills I needed to pay today. And not just shit recently — oh, no, she must’ve done it the day I left town last week. So I had to pick crusted fucking shit off of my bills so I could see the account numbers (I know, online bill pay blah blah blah I don’t trust the Internet). So a task that normally just sucks now stinks as well!

I am pledging to myself right now: Next year, I will be with, if not the love of my life, then a ridiculously great lay. And our happy asses will be in Hawaii, far away from rain and highways and that double-helping of guilt.

I was talking to one of my favorite people today (it seems the majority of my favorite people are at work. Please allow me to pause to consider this phenomeon!) about Thanksgivings past, and I remembered a great story about my mom. (“Wobin,” for the unfamiliar.)

It was years ago, when my grandmother was still alive and Mom cooked one of her patented 40-course meals (it’s been awhile. Mmm, stuffing balls. *drool*). The thing with Mom is that you don’t know where to be while she’s cooking. If you’re sitting on the couch, you get yelled at to help her already because she can’t pull off this goddamned feast all by herself. So then you will go try to make yourself useful, only to be yelled at for getting under her fucking feet already. But when you vacate, she assumed the orders she had barked out in a frenzy had been executed and you will, surprise, get yelled at for fucking up the process.

The neuroses? Yeah, they all start there. 🙂

So anyway, it was one of those times in which I’d been exiled and was seeking safety in the living room, where my grandmother was in her hospital bed that would confine her for seven years after her stroke. (Yay for the idiot medics who came when she had the stroke, picked her up off the bathroom floor, left her on the couch, LEFT THE HOUSE and had to be summoned back when she wasn’t as OK as they thought she was. Christ on crackers.)

Ahem.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, so Gram and I were having a rip-roaring good time watching Mom drive herself insane for — oh — FOUR of us (my grandfather being the fourth — he was hiding upstairs. Smart man). We’re talking turkey and balls and eight other side dishes and 72 appetizers and maybe a pie or two cakes or something also in process. And Rosemarino salad. I don’t remember after whom it was named but it involved pasta and whipped cream and fruit. That was our family’s version of healthy.

ANYWAY.

Gah.

(We’re probably grabbing Chinese on the run again this year, so forgive the digressions!)

So my grandmother used to be the matriarch who cooked for the masses. As an Italian mother/grandmother, it was HER kitchen and HER ways of doing things — if you fucked it up, she wouldn’t eat it. So, understandably, PRESSURE.

(Ask me sometime about the year she refused to eat the turkey and demanded — and got — a frozen Swanson dinner. My mother was scarred for life!)

SO.

We were cackling at Mom. (Easy target, trust me.) My sweet-natured, mild-mannered Mom, however, had HAD IT with us. So, she calmly opened a cabinet, found two boxes of something or other, and effortlessly hurled one at her mother and the other at me.

And that bitch? Has AIM!

We were so stunned silent that she would actually DO that. And Mom, without batting an eye, turned back to her 20 projects and completed them wordlessly.

And that was the moment in which you realized you DO NOT fuck with Wobin.

I was never prouder of her!

Later she did feel bad for beaning us, but I told her to shut up and not give up that moment of victory, as she had SO earned it. Yay Wobin!