As focused as I’ve been in thinking about being a mother to adult children from the point of view of the mother, I seem to have lost sight of the fact that I also have a stake in this issue from the point of view of the child. My mother, God bless her, is still alive and opinionating at age 85, and our relationship in recent years has become a lot more mellow than it was at its worst. (And its worst, contrary to conventional wisdom, was not during my adolescence, when I was a pretty placid and agreeable teenager, but during my young adulthood, when there was something about my sense of a self as a mother of daughters that poisoned the way I felt about myself as the daughter of a mother.)
But sometimes, even though our relationship is basically good, we flare up at each other. We did today. It seemed to come out of the blue with a phone call this afternoon, in which my mother — what should I call her as a blog nickname? how about Ur-Momma — called to inform me that she was very offended by what she heard as “disdain” in the outgoing voicemail message I had left on her new cell phone. “Don’t bother to leave a message, she can’t retrieve it,” I said in what I remember was meant to be a sort of joshy tone. “Just call back.”
I was leaving the message on her behalf because I was giving her a different cell phone — my old phone, since I had caved in and accepted the hand-me-down smartphone that Nutmeg was offering me. (This was a difficult decision on my part, which I arrived at mostly because whenever I heard myself saying things like, “But my own stupidphone works just fine,” I knew I was sounding just like Ur-Momma. I didn’t want to turn into Ur-Momma.) And here’s the crucial bit: on her old cell phone, Ur-Momma’s own outgoing voicemail message was, essentially, “Don’t bother to leave a message, I can’t retrieve it.” She had made exactly the same joke.
Now, I told her that. I told her I was only trying to imitate her own clever message. She told me to listen to it again myself (three hours later, and I still haven’t, and don’t intend to) to hear how dismissive and disdainful my tone was. It’s not funny that I don’t know how to retrieve messages, she said. I know I’m a Luddite, but you don’t have to make fun of me for it.
I could tell that the outgoing voicemail message wasn’t what was really bothering her, but I couldn’t get Ur-Momma to tell me what was. We hung up on bad terms, and I looked for a wireless retailer where I could re-activate her old phone. I called her back to tell her I would walk down to her apartment, take the old phone and the new phone, walk the two blocks to the wireless retailer, and get her the old phone back so she wouldn’t feel like such a technoklutz. No answer. This happens sometimes when Ur-Momma is feeling “down” — she just ignores the phone. I called her back half an hour later. I made my phone-switching offer, and then I asked her what was really going on. I’m down, she said. Why, I asked. And suddenly we were yelling at each other about what was really bugging her — that my brother (let’s call him Avuncular) had called me last night, and I had told him that I was in the middle of a meeting and we’d have to talk another time. When Ur-Momma called me this morning to see if I had talked to Avuncular, I told her that he had called but that we hadn’t spoken because I was in the middle of a meeting.
Turns out she was upset because I didn’t follow that up with “and I called him back when the meeting was over.” Did she really need
to know that it didn’t end till 11, and that I sent him an email early this morning suggesting that we talk later tonight? Is it any business of hers? I’m 56 years old — am I not allowed to deal with my relationship with my 53-year-old brother on my own, without one of us calling the other “because Mommy says”?
Apparently she thinks it is her business. (And in another post I’ll say wonderful things about how smart and funny and involved and generous Ur-Momma is; just give me this one, about how annoying and intrusive she can be.) After we stopped yelling, Ur-Momma went on and on about her favorite topic — my brother and me. “The only thing that matters to me in my life is that my children are there for each other,” she said for the gazillionth time. Avuncular and I grew up with the sing-song in our ears of “Brothers and sisters are the closest thing in the world.” Ur-Momma is the oldest of three sisters and they are extraordinarily close, so even without the relentless sloganeering, Avuncular and I would have gotten the message from their loving example that siblings are a lifelong commitment. AND I HAD ALREADY EMAILED HIM.
I get it, sort of. I want Nutmeg and Meta to be friends and to rely on each other; in fact, before Ur-Momma ruined my day, I was still smiling after a lovely lunch with Nutmeg in which she had told me in hilarious detail about an endless Twitter and g-chat exchange between her and Meta regarding live yogurt cultures. (Meta had even included me in the discussion by g-chatting me, “your other child doesn’t know what YOGURT IS MADE OF.”) Like my own mother, I’ve always wanted my kids to be friends, to love each other, to know they could depend on each other. Sometimes their relationship is good, sometimes less good — like any relationship. But I’ve learned that the worst thing I can do when it’s not going so well is to insert myself into it to try to make it better.
That’s what Ur-Momma has been doing between Avuncular and me our whole lives, taking the temperature of our relationship to make sure it meets her exacting standards — and if for some reason it doesn’t, to try to fix it. That’s what she was doing today. Amazingly, my brother and I love each other anyway. I love my mother, too, but at the moment she’s pissing me off, and reminding me that with even the best of intentions, the parent of an adult child can sometimes make mistakes.
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