Letters from the gulag

Dinner party. Mom told her friends I would be in town, invited them to dinner, made lots of food. I'm glad to see them, glad to talk to them, hear their stories, until it turns from happenings and family to mortgages and other banalities. What I really dread is when it turns to politics. Anyway, somehow this dinner mission crept into a belated birthday party for me, and my mother started telling pregnancy stories, maternity ward stories, stories that I've heard a million times, that many of the guests have, too. Then politics, which begot other stories from the old country, including the only story that doesn't get old, and that the guests, my parents' closest friends, haven't heard. I have, but like I said, it doesn't lose poignancy. My mother talks about reading her father's letters from the gulag. She says she remembers when he was taken away, even though she didn't know that that's what it was until her mother told her later. In his letters he wrote about the cold, the frostbite and gangrene and stomach flus. Mom reads these letters repeatedly.

I don't cut her any slack for how hard it was to carry me to term and give birth to me, but I consider cutting her slack for having watched, as a toddler, her father being taken away by secret police.

I usually think better of it (of cutting her slack). My dad, earlier tonight, in response to one of her antics, said, "just let it go. Don't commit it to memory, don't talk about it, don't analyze it. Just move on." Little does he know I'm about to blog it (and when he comes into the room, I switch to my pictures and pretend I'm naming them).

Family friend, here tonight, brought me a Duke Ellington CD as a gift, said it was for me to have something to listen to on my commute. I said, and meant it, "that's perfect! I have a long commute so this is exactly what I need." I didn't think my mom was capable of attention to detail, but she opted to point out that I did not say "thank you."

"Others would say thank you, but this is apparently how we raised her."

This would not be blogworthy, except that this is the same friend whom my mom chewed out for bringing her a wooden mask from Georgia (the country) that "didn't match her decor."

Let me make sure this is clear. My mother once yelled at this person for bringing her a gift she did not like. Tonight, she criticized me for expressing my gratitue without literally saying thank you.

She gets weird around her friends, or she gets weird around me around her friends. I'm apparently an extension of her, and she doesn't think highly enough of me to not be nervous about how I come across, so she tries to control me even more than she usually does, and things escalate, except they didn't tonight because I just rolled my eyes and let it go (and blogged it).

Sometimes I think documenting, blogging, etc. is therapeutic and others I think it's obsessive and unfair. It's probably both.