Barb's Place

For the last week we've been in Florida, visiting Kathy's mom. She's 86 now, and starting to slow down a little -- she was a heavy smoker for many years; she quit thirty years ago, but her lungs are starting to give her trouble and she runs out of breath easily. She had surgery on one shoulder recently, and is going into physical therapy this week to increase the strength of her arm. For all that, she still gets around very well, and we had a mostly very nice vacation.

I say 'mostly' because the MIL can be taxing to deal with. She's very extroverted -- her idea of fun is plunging into crowded bar full of drunk, yelling strangers. Which is not really our thing. She never reads directions or listens to instructions (and I suspect that she feels, deep down, that the rules shouldn't apply to her anyway) and then gets frustrated and upset when things work the way they're supposed to, instead of the way she thinks they ought to. Part of this is due to her being increasingly hard of hearing, but she's always been like this to some extent. She's also a Republican -- not a Trumpy one, thank God, but prone to anti-immigrant and anti-tax grumbling nonetheless. So any time politics comes up, we end up arguing, which is very uncomfortable when she's the one footing the bill.

MIL's the kind of person who always has an immaculate house, with a minimal amount of tasteful modern furniture and decor items. We, needless to say, while we do not live in abject filth, have pets, and we collect stuff (Kathy much more than me, but I'm responsible for some of it.) Our house is, admittedly, small and somewhat crowded. We were cluttercore long before it was cool. But it's our house, and our stuff, we've put a lot of work into it. MIL finds this baffling, and is constantly suggesting that we get rid of all our stuff, which is irritating. Although this time, bizarrely, her idea was that we sell our house, buy a piece of land, and put a mobile home on it. When I asked her why on earth she thought we'd want to sell a perfectly good house and move into a mobile home, her reply was "But your house has all that stuff in it!" (Like we wouldn't take the stuff with us when we moved???) I don't think that she's ever really accepted, deep down, that we're adults capable of making our own financial decisions. Granted Kathy got into some fairly bad financial scrapes in her youth, but that was thirty years ago. She learned her lesson and we are both gainfully employed, making the median income for our area, with 401ks and everything.

Sigh. This makes MIL sound awful, and she's not, really. She's very kind and generous, and truly enjoys giving us things. Her personality is just finely calculated to make me (and Kathy) crazy.

There's so many mixed feelings because we also realize that she is 86, and is definitely slowing down, and she's doing the "OK, when I die, here's all the paperwork..." talks. And yes, it's good to deal with all that, but we have to bite our tongues a lot because like all parents she wants us to take all her stuff -- but A) her taste is definitely not ours B) we have no room for an entire condo's worth of furniture, and there is no way I am getting rid of my great-grandmother's bedroom set in favor of one she bought last year, no matter how nice it is C) she replaces all her furniture every few years so who even knows if a given piece will still be around in ten years D) shipping it all from Florida would cost a fortune.

But she is in relatively good health, and I would be surprised if she didn't live at least as long as my mom did, so we don't have to deal with that for a while yet.

We had a friend coming over to feed the cats while we were gone, and she reported all well last night, so we thought we could come home and just kick back. Of course, when we got here, we discovered that the cats, tired of being fed a mere once a day, had gotten up onto the counter and knocked over the jar of Greenies, along with a jar of very expensive artisan honey. There was broken glass and honey all over the kitchen floor. There were NOT Greenies all over the floor, except for a few which had gotten drenched in honey, and were therefore unacceptable to the cat palette.