Damned if I Do

Mom is Hell bent on getting me to call Joe when I know that I will not. She prattles on and on about Mary-ellen’s trouble making and foul mouth and then provides me with every cell phone and land line that I can reach Joe or Steve on.

Like I would call Steve for any reason ever. I would sooner run him over with my car.

She finally signs off with an impersonal and trailing off “Thank yooouuu…” It was the same impersonal, calling-someone-at-the-bank tone of voice she used when she made the obligatory call on New Year’s Eve to wish me and Scott and Happy New Year. She said all the right words but her tone was strictly I’m-making-this-call-out-of-obligation-only. I could practically see the gun at her head.

Charlotte texts me while I am on my conference call. Asks about how my day is going. I text back that it is exhausting…and so is our mother. She asks me to call her. I do, on the way from the conference call to an Affirmative Action meeting. Fill her in on the deets. She is appropriately horrified.

I tell her my knee-jerk reaction is to call Mom and tell her that I have way more serious issues to deal with than to become sucked into Joe’s nightmare, and that I have no intention of making his problems my problem.

I wish I’d known better when he and Mary-ellen were buying their first house and they were getting in way over their heads in a really tragic business deal. He would share new little shreds of alarming information and I would tell him, in between contractions of premature labor with Hil, that he needed to cancel the deal, get a lawyer, put on the brakes, tear up the contract, anything to be able to walk away, and he would not listen and would do nothing as the settlement date drew ever nearer. I ended up calling my mother and telling her that he was causing me physical distress with his nonsense, and she ended up engaging a lawyer to get him out of his contract. He’s that useless to himself.

I toy with the idea of making this call and wonder how I can go about doing so without screaming loudly and disrupting my entire office like raving lunatic.

Because really, that is the direction the conversation would quickly take. If not because I dare to refuse to do what she says (at the ripe old age of 40-something) then because I will not be able to refrain from screwing up my face and asking why in the Hell she would begin any phone message with the words “I know you probably don’t want to hear from me….”

And inevitably, that question would be followed by something like “I enjoy hearing from you, Mom. It is your miserable old drunken slob husband I don’t ever need to speak with again. But since he’s probably shared all of his complaints about me with you, maybe you and I don’t actually need to speak very much. And before you play dumb, let me tell you that I knew what he’d said to Charlotte by the time you reached the end of her driveway, and if you are curious, call her and ask her. And while you are at it, ask her what complaints he has about you, too. Since he was dumb enough to cover all of that material in great detail, too.”

But something stops me. I just don’t have the will to beat her about the head and torso about this right now. And I just can’t comply with her directive either. And all of this makes me feel defeated. Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.