Usually it’s just me and Mom and my sister Katrina, at our Saturday morning breakfasts. Sometimes Katrina brings her friend Adelle. Other than the presence of Adelle, all the breakfasts are basically the same, so it’s been a while since I’ve written about the breakfasts. I don’t want to be as repetitive as my mom is.
She always orders poached eggs on toast, asks too many too personal questions, and brings up several uncomfortable topics. She never fails to remind me that I vanished for X years — “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead!”Less annoying but still annoying, she always passes around a few photos, usually the same photos she shared the previous Saturday, and she recites cute things I said or did when I was five, which was the last time I was cute.
♦ ♦ ♦ Usually I’m on time, everywhere I go. I’m a stickler about it. Keeping other people waiting is rude, so when I say breakfast is at 9:15 on Saturdays, I’m always there by about five after nine. A couple of times my sister and mom have been on time, but we’ve been doing breakfast on Saturdays for almost a year, and almost always they’re 10-20 minutes late. Mom and sis live together, and I know the lateness is my mom’s fault. She’s a dawdler and always has been — never on time for anything but church, because she doesn’t want to miss a moment of the service. Being on time for me, though? Nah.But what do I care? I bring a copy of the AVA and read it at the table until they arrive, enjoying the quiet more than some of the noise when Mom gets there. ♦ ♦ ♦ The diner is cash only, and a few Saturdays ago I had only enough cash for a light breakfast, but I wanted to overeat. My bank opens at 9AM on Saturdays, so I decided to bus to the bank first, get some cash, and then bus to the restaurant.The side trip would get me there about ten minutes late if I had good bus luck, or 20 minutes late if my luck wasn’t so good. This would mesh nicely with Mom’s reliable lateness, I figured. We’d probably all arrive at about the same time.Or just this once, maybe they’d get there ahead of me and have to wait. Ha!But I hate being late to anything, so I gave all of this an inordinate amount of thought and planning, and felt kinda bad about it. I stopped at the bank, and just barely missed the next bus. It was 9:35 when I got to the restaurant.And just like every Saturday, I looked around for anyone from the family, found nobody, so I picked a big table alone, and told the waitress, “Sorry, but there’ll be three or four of us when everyone gets here.” It was another ten minutes.♦ ♦ ♦ Mom’s been asking questions, in person and via text, about my job at the Post Office, the same questions in every text and every Saturday. Her baseline curiosity is about what time the work starts each day, and what time I’m off. Me being a real shit, I don’t want to give her even that, so I always say that they don’t give us a schedule, they just tell us each day what time we’re supposed to be there for our next shift.Which is what USPS actually did, and was the main reason I quit after three days, a month ago.But in the story as told to my mom, I haven’t quit yet. It’ll be this week, probably. After that, I’m not sure what I’ll tell her. Anything but the truth.
♦ ♦ ♦ Whatever I do tell my mom about my life, it’s treated like a press release,
and she’s the press. She’s not good with technology, so once or twice a
month she sends me a text message meant for someone else, and often it’s
about me, summarizing what little I’ve told her.
Like,
a few days ago she texted me, “Doug isn’t much liking his Post Office job.
He says he still hasn’t met his boss, or been given a work schedule,
and he says the training isn’t much more than ‘Here, work at this
machine tonight.’”Then a few minutes later, Mom texted me, “Oops, sorry, that text was supposed to go to Myrna.”Who’s Myrna? I don’t know, and didn’t ask.
♦ ♦ ♦ I sidestep most of Mom’s questions about my job, which isn’t my job, and she’s noticed the sidestepping. Heck, maybe she knows I’m lying about working at the Post Office.”Why are you so secretive?” she finally asked me at the table a few Saturdays ago.”I don’t like talking about me,” I said, which is true. I love writing about me — hello, there — but hate talking to almost anyone about almost anything, including me.”It’s like pulling teeth to get a straight answer from you about this job,” she said, and I laughed.”Well, Mom, do you remember all the times you used to call me at work, despite me saying over and over again, please don’t do that? And all the times you surprised me by showing up to see me at work, despite me saying I wish you’d stop?””I remember it,” she said, “but I haven’t done that in thirty years!””Because you haven’t known where I work, for thirty years,” I said, and Mom laughed, and I laughed, and Katrina laughed. Ha ha.♦ ♦ ♦ Should I forgive and forget? What are you, nuts? I remember the slings and arrows, because they’re always in flight.
Like, a couple of months ago I ordered a cheeseburger at breakfast, and before I knew it Mom swiped several of my fries. Since that morning, I’ve ordered the cheeseburger and fries a few more times, but always with an announcement: “These fries are not for sampling.”♦ ♦ ♦
I complain about my mom, but one week at breakfast, me and Katrina
got her talking about something other than things that hurt — her childhood on a farm
in eastern Washington.She told us she’d had a pet goat when she was a
child, and told us all about the goat — its name, and that once it had
tried following her to school. At the table in the diner, she sang a
song she’d sung to the goat 90 years ago.The goat story and song were terrific, genuinely charming. And I told Mom, “I wish you’d talk more about stuff like that, and less about what a disappointment I am.”You’re
thinking we should steer the conversation that way every week at
breakfast? We try, Katrina and me. It’s precarious, though, like tap-dancing across mine fields. Mom is always looking to change the subject back to something annoying.
But jeez… All these years, and I’d never known that Mom had a pet goat. She’d never mentioned it, but she never stops mentioning things I don’t want to hear about.
♦ ♦ ♦ When I moved back to Seattle and started these breakfasts, I was expecting weekly battles over my godlessness, but in the past year Mom’s only invited me to church a few times — until the last week couple of weeks, that is.Easter is important to her, so she started sending wall-of-text messages asking me to her church for Easter services. I replied politely ‘no’ and ‘no’ again and ‘no’ a third time, then added, “It becomes less and less likely every time you ask.”That’s mathematically impossible, though. I’m never doing another church service, so there’s zero chance of a ‘yes’.Mom gave it her best shot in my gut, though, using “I’m old and this might be my last Easter,” and “You ought to want to make your mother happy,” and then the ultimate, and I knew it was coming: “After all you put me through, disappearing for 15 years, coming to church on Easter is the very least you could do.”But it’s not, actually. The very least I could do was continue answering her texts, and I didn’t.♦ ♦ ♦ When she showed up at the diner this last Saturday, late of course, the very first thing she said was that I should come to Easter services with her the next day. Having said no several times already, I ignored her, and talked to Katrina. I’m typing this on Easter morning instead of being in church with Mom, which is marvelous, and I’m hoping when Easter’s passed that breakfast with Mom on Saturdays will be a bit more bearable again.Back to the stuff I said when I was five, please, and the jabs about being gone all those years… “and do you ever hear from April? She was such a nice girl.””No, mom. April dumped me forty years ago, and we don’t keep in touch.”4/11/2023
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