Thrilla in Manila

It is a noble thing to endeavor to conduct a fair fight with someone. The nature of fighting is adversarial but the fight can avoid being adversarial if you really, really want it to be. Correction: If BOTH of you really want it to be. But a talent for this feat does not come naturally. It has to be practiced and honed, and you must choose to avoid the off the cuff type of comments you are dying to make in an argument. (I know you are, but what am I???) A heated, passionate, worthwhile argument is not restrained on its own. It is lassoed into being so.

They should teach this in all those little pre-marriage classes you (are forced to) take before you walk (unwittingly) down the aisle. Being on the same page about birth control and finances and child rearing are indeed important things. But no one really tells you what you should do when you find yourselves on different pages - except maybe the mediator in your eventual divorce.

Mom, I am sure it comes as no surprise, has never had a fair fight. You can try to keep the disagreement focused and productive and above the belt, but sooner or later (usually sooner) she does one of two things - she zings you or she baits you. And the result is straight out of a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon: a match is struck and held to a little trail of gun powder that meanders all over hill and dale before reaching the crates of Acme dynamite. Usually someone hangs up in tears.

How the zingers and the baiting began this time I am still a little fuzzy about. There was quite a lot of ground covered and an unusually high body count.

What is clear, however, is that at some point, some of the more colorful excerpts from "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" came to the surface and it was clear to my mother that my sister and I had rehashed the 3 longest days of my life.

Mom was livid - and had to attack. Attacked me by reinventing history to cast my children and me in an unfavorable light, and to make me appear to have been lying (i.e. "There is no gun. It's a taser!) and to attack my sister by criticizing her life - as in, digs about the little town where they make their vacation home, and suggesting that if there was a gun, and there is not, it would be no worse than her husband owning a motorcycle (Which he does, but Mom didn't know that until the other day. Touche, Estelle!)

Note - When was the last time someone pulled a motorcycle on you in an alley?

What was odd, but not entirely unprecedented, was that she chose to hack away at me through my sister. As if she was supposed to pass along the message.

Which she did in a series of texts, emails, and phone calls to alert me to the fact that the heat seeking missile had a lock on me.

But it didn't.