Our First Ammendment Rights at Their Finest

The trick is with Mom, if you don't want to get pummeled in an argument you have to behave against your intuition. Where the normal adult person you generally are would like to have a rational, tame, informative yet heartfelt discussion about something that troubles you, Mom figuratively pokes you in the chest, waves her finger in your face, lords over you, encroaches, intimidates, insults and otherwise has you staggering backwards on your heels to safety. Or off a cliff, more often than not.

I have known this for decades. And for decades have employed some age appropriate escape route.
Run outside where she wouldn't dare chase me as a child.
Slam and lock the door and sulk in my room as a preteen.
Scramble out the window onto the porch roof and down the branches of the pear tree to trek across town to a friend's house as teen.
Not come home from college.
Find a roommate as a young adult with my shiny new paycheck.
Avoid avoid avoid whenever possible.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Nothing confronted, nothing resolved.

We have run in place as parent and child for decades past the expiration date of that relationship. Hard as Charlotte and I have tried, there is no transforming this parent-child relationship to and adult-adult relationship. So there is constant conflict. We approach things adult to adult. Mom approaches parent to child. So quite literally the lines of communication conflict. I have the book I'm OK You're OK by Thomas A. Harris MD to thank for my understanding of this. And Mrs. Harrison at Allgates for making me read it. A debt of gratitude to both fine folks. God knows my head would have been in an oven long before now. (Note: Joe is just fine with this. He has no notions about being an adult under any circumstances.)

Anyway, so tonight, maybe it was the bliss of Christmas shopping accomplishment, the magic of wine, or the pumped up feeling that football tends to give me, or perhaps the silver bullet combination of the three, but I had no intention of being backed into a corner by Devil in a Blue Dress.

After shrieking the words "SHUT UP" in a shrill voice that was clearly not my own, I went on a tirade of my invention, barely stopping to catch a breath and in a full bodied bellow that clearly indicated that it would be ill advised to try to interrupt me.

I touched on a lifelong accumulation of ever festering topics of agitation.

The constant bitching and haranguing.
The manipulation.
The splitting.
The insane political rants.
The craziness at the holidays.
The craziness in general.
The overarching Grand Dame of Bitchiness attitude.

She hung up on me.

She called back. Probably organized some completely denigrating comments and cocked the gun before dialing.

I didn't answer.

She left a message telling me never to call her again followed by a bunch of ragged sounding grousing about why she'd never want to hear from me which I deleted at once without reviewing.

I called her back immediately and left her a message that told her something like "Don't go betting the homestead that I'll be calling anytime soon to engage in more of this uniquely inane harassment from her. " Added that if she chose to have a rational conversation I'd be game but until such Mother Theresa type miracle came to pass, I'd not be holding my breath either.

I hung up and warned my sister that the triangular relationship would be rearing its pointed little head for sure.