If you’re new to the saga of me and my mom, well, you can’t possibly catch up. Our backstory stretches across galaxies, so I’m not even going to bother with a pertinent link.
Mom asks questions, lots, and I don’t like answering. There are so many questions, always the same questions, and she keeps my answers in some astounding internal database that allows her instant access to everything I’ve ever said if it can be used to pry further into my life, or to jab at me with painful memories.
Among Mom’s many questions, she’s lately been asking repeatedly about where I’m working. And of course, that’s a perfectly ordinary question, and my response is stupid and childish, but I’ve answered with lies.
About a month after I’d quit a job at the Post Office, I told Mom that’s where I was working. Then I made up stories about places I’d worked years ago, and places I’ve never worked, all to avoid telling her about Haugen & Dahl, where I’ve been working for almost three months.
A few weeks ago, I told her that I’m temping at a series of jobs for a few days or a week at a time — trying on jobs, basically, like you’d try on pants in a store. It wasn’t true, but every time Mom asked where I was working, I made up a new temp assignment.
Of course, she demanded deep information about each of these untrue day-or-two jobs, so I made stuff up. The last fictional job I told her about, I said I was temping as a file clerk at the law firm of Shyster, Shyster, Shyster, & Fong.
And yes, I know ‘Shyster’ has anti-Semitic undertones, but I was using it as a slur against lawyers, not Jews, and besides it struck me as funny, so that’s what I said to Mom.
After that, every time we spoke or texted, she wanted to know how my day with the shysters had gone, and what it was like working for shysters, and how long will you be working for the shysters, and have the shysters offered you a permanent job, and would you work for the shysters if they did?
Oy. The word had seemed funny to me because I hadn’t heard it in years; my punishment was hearing it from my mother a hundred times in a week.
That’s the way it goes, when I tell my mother anything, true or untrue. That’s why I don’t tell her much.
After she’d asked me a hundred times about working with the shysters, I told her I’d quit the law firm and started temping elsewhere. But I wanted to tell less complicated lies, so I also texted, “All office jobs are the same, and I’d rather not talk about every new temp assignment. Let’s talk about something else, please.”
And same as with the shyster wisecrack, that was Mom’s invitation to never let go. Since then, she’s texted over and over, “Tell me where you worked today,” and “Why won’t you tell me where you worked today?” and “Won’t you pleeze tell me where you worked today?” (These are direct quotes from her Tuesday text messages.)
It’s frustrating, sure, but from decades of dealing with Mom, I didn’t give it much thought. This is how she is, how she’s always been.
She probably knows I’m lying — she’s my mother, after all — and she probably knows that I know that she knows I’m lying. Is there even a psychiatric term, for a complex this complex?
Eventually I became curious about the numbers. Mom and I communicate almost entirely by texts, so I scrolled up and re-read a week’s worth. 56 is the answer. That’s how many times she’s asked in various ways where I was working, after I’d asked her not to ask. 47 times I’d ignored it, but nine times I’d responded with variants of “I’d rather not talk about it.”
I ran the tally while riding home from Haugen & Dahl, then clicked my phone off and gazed out the bus’s window to ponder what it means. What it means is, I’m even more pathetic than I’d thought I was.
And yet…
There’s a moment in Star Trek: First Contact, where Picard is more than moderately annoyed with the Borg, and he shouts, “The line must be drawn, here!”
I understand that frustration. My mother is the Borg, and the line I’ve drawn is: I don’t want to tell her where I work. I’m not sure the job at Haugen & Dahl will last, and when it ends I don’t want 56 questions about why I quit or why they fired me, followed by 56 questions about looking for the next job.
I have, for all my life, put up with Mom’s prying questions on every topic, but I want this one thing for myself. I want to not talk about work, and especially I want to not talk about work with my mother.
It’s not much of a stand, of course. I’m no man, all mouse. It’s pitiful, really, but my mom & I have been playing this game since I was two years old and said “no” to her for the first time. She doesn’t like “no” almost as much as I don’t like her questions.
In the past, she’s harangued me about Jesus, and high school, and girls, and church, and where I was for all those years I was gone. Now it’s about where I work. But if I tell her where I’m working, she’ll want to know more and more and everything about it. She might as well tag along with me to the office. We can ride the bus together, she’ll say. We can have lunch together.
Re-reading our text messages, no matter how many times I’ve said that I don’t want to talk about work, she always asks again where I work, or why I won’t talk about where I work, which is the same question, really.
For the first time in a long time, it started to truly anger me. It infuriated me. I let it eat me alive from Wednesday night until Friday morning, when it finally occurred to me that, yeah, it’s infuriating, but also it’s hilarious. Mom’s nuts, but I’m nuts too, for taking her abuse all these years.
Many times we’ve had the exasperated conversation where I loudly explain that if she needs to know every detail of her son’s life, the son she needs is Dick, my brother who never shuts up about himself. He’s happy to share every detail of everything in his life.
“I’m not Dick,” I’ve sometimes said. “I’m Doug, your introverted son, who doesn’t talk so much.”
“But why don’t you talk much?”
Mom and I had that conversation 40-some years ago, and 30-some years ago, and many, many times since. We had a short version of that conversation only a week and a half ago.
It adds up to, Why are you so you? There’s no satisfactory answer to that question, because the question is ridiculous. I’m me, and she wishes I wasn’t.
Sometimes I lose my temper at her about it, but losing my temper is losing. Mom enjoys it when I get angry. Seriously — whenever I raise my voice and holler at her, she smiles, gives me the scolding look, and it’s another victory for Mom. So I mustn’t lost my cool.
And then, on Friday, I ‘forgot’ my cell phone at home, to take a day off from her questions about where I work. It was refreshing.
When I got home, I laughed in advance, wondering how many times she’d texted and asked where I was working, but it was only twice.
In the morning: “I don’t know where you work because you won’t tell me, but I hope you have a nice day at work.”
And in the afternoon, “I wonder where you are working.”
To be fair, in between were several unrelated texts, about Dick’s recovery from surgery, my sister Hazel’s recovery from COVID, Mom’s walk in a walker to church last weekend, and “Will you be there for our Saturday breakfast tomorrow?”
I’ve never not been there for breakfast. It’s another of Mom’s nonsense questions.
She loves seeing me every Saturday, and tells me often how she looks forward to our breakfasts. And then at breakfast, for an hour at the diner and sometimes longer, she tells the same stories and asks the same questions she always tells and asks — about dead people we have known and dumb things I did when I was a kid and my ex-girlfriends and my father’s death and how I went missing for 11, 13, or 15 years, and lately, “Where are you working?”
Yeah, Mom loves those breakfasts. And it occurs to me, that’s my only leverage.
Today is Saturday, and as usual, my sister Katrina came to breakfast, bringing her best friend, Adelle, and of course, bringing Mom. After the hellos, I waited for Mom to ask where I’m working, and it wasn’t a long wait.
I smiled and changed the subject.
Then Katrina asked where I’m working, which isn’t one of her usual topics, so I’m certain Mom put her up to it. I replied with a short version of the same answer I’d given Mom a week earlier:
“I’m temping, that’s all. It’s boring, every temp assignment is the same, and I’d rather not spend our breakfast talking about it. Let’s talk about other things, please.”
Katrina seemed to think my answer was weird, but she dropped the line of inquiry. Adelle shrugged and changed the subject. Mom changed it back, and said, “I’m just curious about where you’re working and why you won’t talk about it.”
“And you’ll never know,” I said, “but you’ll never stop asking.” I said it with a smile, for an extra point in our lifelong battle.
Over the rest of this morning’s breakfast, Mom asked twice more where I’m working, once directly and once taking the long way ’round. I laughed, because it’s either laugh or shoot her, and so far I’m choosing to laugh.
As we were all leaving, Mom tried yet again: “I sure wish you’d tell me where you work,” and I said nothing but goodbye.
Riding the bus home, again I stared out the window, mulling things over. My next move seemed almost obvious, though.
Just before writing this, I wrote and sent an email to everyone in the family, announcing that from now on, the Saturday breakfasts will be twice-monthly instead of weekly — the first and third Saturdays of every month.
Mom responded instantly, and she’s quite disappointed, but at our next breakfast — in two weeks, not one — my confident prediction is that she’ll ask where I’m working, and ask why I won’t tell her where I’m working.
When she does, the breakfasts will become monthly instead of twice-monthly.
5/20/2023
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