Mom and friends

Shortly after arriving, I asked my dad whether he’d met my roommate.

“Has Kevin been in? Have you met Kevin?”

“We saw her—she is quite the hippopotamus!”

“Kevin is my roommate; the cat’s name is Gracie.”

“Oh, yeah, he came down and introduced himself.”

***
“The cat’s asking for food.”

“I realize that.”

“Why don’t you feed her?”

“She’s on a diet.”

“I’m sure she knows how much she needs to eat.”

“LOOK AT HER! DOES SHE LOOK LIKE SHE KNOWS HOW MUCH SHE NEEDS TO EAT?”

I mean, several times a day, from both parents, I get, “wow, she’s fat.” “she’s really fat.” “why is she so fat?” Which is fine. All good observations/questions. The above conversation—not good observations/questions.

***

I could have handled the cheese incident better; by trying to convince my mother to buy or not by something based on my perception of her needs, I become my mother. We were at Trader Joe’s; she wanted to buy some blue cheese, and I tried to talk her out of it because I had cheese in the house and didn’t need more. She offered to take it home with her afterward but I thought she would forget it so I didn’t cave. Instead, I said, “look, I’m not going to argue with you,” which wasn’t fair, I mean, I should have let her get her cheese, but she had a fit and refused to talk to me, so when I tried to get the cheese she wanted, she wouldn’t tell me which one it was, so I didn’t get any: if you’re not going to even talk to me, I can’t help you. Not talking doesn’t work.

The night before my parents left, my mother tried to stick me with more stuff she’d brought, including two items that I’d tried on last time I was at her house and to which I’d said, “no, thank you.” Those were a pair of pleated wool pants and a pair of padded biking shorts. She’d bought two pairs of the latter and I took one to appease her, but deliberately left the second. She’d asked me about both items over the phone and I told her I didn’t like pleated pants and that one pair of biking shorts was plenty. She said “what if those get dirty? What if you lose them?” and I said, “mom, I don’t need nor have room for two pairs of biking shorts.” Nonetheless, she brought them and didn’t take my first refusal, which was polite, at all, and didn’t take my subsequent less polite refusals graciously. “I won’t buy you anything at all anymore, even if it’s amazing!” This is similar to the threat I get when I ask her not to spam me—she says, “fine! I won’t send you anything at all!” to which I usually reply “thank you!” Mind you, 99% of the e-mail she sends me is trash, whereas she often does pick out some very nice clothing. Nonetheless, I reserve the right to say no, and I’d rather get nothing at all then clothing that will only clutter my closet. Similarly, I appreciate it when someone offers me food, but reserve the right to refuse it when eating anything more would make me at most sick and at best very uncomfortable. Sharing is not an all-or-nothing experience. I am not a human garbage disposal (although one friend had at one point dubbed me the garbage disposal of the masses for my ability to shrug and say ‘fine I’ll take it if you’re going to throw it away.’ That’s just what I’m trying to move away from.

The socks saga, the insistence that I take the bicycle shorts, her argument that I don’t need more suits—all indicators that she deep-down believes that she understands my needs better than I do and that even at my age, she feels the need to dictate what I keep in my house and what I wear.

This took a particularly ridiculous turn with the bicycle shorts.

“They’re so comfortable!”
“Mom, you don’t cycle!”
“So? I tried them on and they were really comfortable.”
[Dad is trying to suppress a smile].
“How do you know that they’ll be comfortable on a bike? To be honest, I have a pretty comfortable bike seat, I don’t need two pairs of padded shorts.”
“Maybe you will—you never know. Besides, what am I going to do with them?”
“I don’t know—why did you buy two pairs??”
“Because I thought you would take them.”
“No, thank you.”

The irony, for lack of a better word, is that my mother is equally insistent when she believes I don’t need something. She couldn’t understand why I needed a new bike (other than the old, rusty, squeaky one-speed I’d ridden since I was a child). I heard many iterations of “I don’t understand what’s wrong with your old bike” and “I really don’t see why you need a new bike.” For some reason or other, the fact that I’m the one riding the bike (or wearing the shorts), and therefore have a better appreciation of my needs, doesn’t register.

***
When my mother narrates my plate and asks me to justify what I’m not eating, I ask her to kindly back off. I didn’t ask E., the friend of my mom’s with whom I stayed in Sydney, to back off, but toward the end it was a challenge. Staying with her, being (force-)fed by her, indicated that my mom’s behavior was somewhat culture-based, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating.

E., like my father, survived the blockade of Leningrad. Food is not something anyone from St. Petersburg takes lightly, a fact reflected in my upbringing. I’ve certainly been raised to finish my plate, but I manage that by not putting more than I can eat on my plate. For a long time I felt obligated to eat even if I was full, and I’ve only recently gotten over that and come to believe that eating when you shouldn’t is, effectively, throwing away food, only worse. I appreciate that food is more than food, and appreciate the sharing of food, which is why I was intrigued when a friend of mine who had returned from a trip to India in which, on the last day, he and his wife had visited several of her relatives, described those relatives as “downright rude” for not taking no for an answer when they said “no, thank you” to food (having eaten at the houses of the previously visited relatives). They were grateful to her mom’s best friend for not making them eat.

I am grateful to E. for putting me up, as well as the friend of mine who came along, although she’d never met him before, and for taking the time to show us around the city, etc. I am grateful for all the time she spent preparing food and for making sure ahead of time that it would be food that I liked. Nonetheless, I know fully understand what my friend had meant, because guilt-tripping someone into eating is just not fair.

In addition to the sheer quantity of food that she tried to make us eat, meals were accompanied with plate narration, mine and J.’s.

“Why is he not eating? It’s just breaking my heart that he’s not eating. Tell me what he’ll eat.”
“He is eating.” [He was, literally, as she was going on about his not eating, putting food in his mouth with a fork.]
“No he’s not, he’s not eating!”

“You’re mom said you loved olives, but you’re not having any olives!”
She’d said this as she was coming back from the kitchen. By the time she’d emerged back into the dining room, she could see that I had already put olives on my plate.

Anything left untouched was subject to “oh, you don’t like that?” Which I honestly think is JUST RUDE. You’re basically putting someone in the position of eating something they don’t like or having to admit that they don’t like it.

She had thoroughly interrogated my mom on my food likes and dislikes, and my mom told her, among other things, that I liked fried eggs but that I’d better fry them myself. This was a relief, if only because no eggs were fried, on top of the other mounds of food offered, without my cooperation (read: no eggs were fried). At one point E.’s husband had offered to make fried eggs.

E.: No! She likes to fry them herself.
Husband: Do you like tomatoes in your fried eggs?
E. No! I already asked her that.
Husband: Have you ever tried tomatoes in your fried eggs?
A.: Yes.
Husband: And you don’t like them?
A. No.
Husband: Perhaps the way I make that dish, you’ll like it?
E.: No! Don’t be so insistent! She said she didn’t like tomatoes in her eggs!

They reminded me of the couple in “The Princess Bride.” “Have fun storming the castle!” Apart from or despite the force-feeding and attempted coddling, I actually had a really good time.

As with my mom, the need for repetition was there. I told E. that I’d be traveling with a friend, but she hadn’t told her husband so he was perplexed (not in a bad way) to pick up an additional person from the airport (which is another story, see below). The first thing he said was, “is he a vegetarian, too???” I said no. He turned to J. and said, “vegetarian?”

I won’t go on about the other things that didn’t need to be repeated half as often as they were. “Three days just isn’t enough” was one refrain (yes, we know, that’s the way it turned out this time, we understand).

On Friday, our last full day in Sydney, J. went to the zoo and I went beach hopping. E. was going to stay home and cook but I talked her out of it and asked her to join her husband and me at the beaches. E. tried to convince me to only swim in the pool (a paved, set-apart section of the beach) because she thought the waves were too high (they weren’t). When I got out of the water, slathered myself with sunblock and lay down to dry off, she told her husband to time me so that they’d tell me to flip over after fifteen minutes, so as not to get burned. He said, “what is she, a pancake?” She said, “exactly—like a pancake—she can’t spend more than fifteen minutes on each side.” (I did).

On the way to one beach or another, E. decided to ask me whom I’d vote for. I wanted to avoid political talk of any sort so tried the same tactic I used on my parents: pausing until one of them answered for me and they’d continue to talk to each other. It worked but then sort of misfired.

“She doesn’t care. Why should she care?”
“Of course she cares!”
“She doesn’t care. Do you care whom you vote for?”
“No, but that’s different. Whom I vote for doesn’t change anything. Who will you vote for? [proceeds to list the candidates she’s heard of, at which point I said I hadn’t decided yet, which is true]”
“See, she doesn’t care.”
“I do care. I haven’t decided yet.”

The morning of J.’s trip to the zoo, they kept offering him sandwiches (he’d accepted the offer of granola bars) and he kept saying “no, thank you.” E. turned to me and said, “but, but, he’s going to be walking around all day! He’s bound to get hungry!” and I could say was, “he’s a grown up—that’s his problem.”

***
Before I arrived back in Australia, Emma had told my mother to tell me to wait in the meet and greet area of the airport, not to go outside under any circumstances. Then she called my mother again to tell her that.

I’ve cleared customs twice now at Sydney airport and it was anything but fast both on a Sunday morning and Wednesday night. E. has traveled abroad quite a few times. She has to know that clearing customs at Sydney airport does not tend to be fast.

Nonetheless, she’d arrived at the airport at about 7:20pm (our flight was scheduled to get in at 7:25 but arrived at 7:03) and freaked out because she was afraid she might have missed us.

Have you EVER gotten off a plane and gotten your baggage, much less gotten off a plane, gotten your baggage, and cleared immigration and customs in seventeen minutes?

By the time we emerged from customs (not all that late, considering), she was marching up the “do not enter” ramp into customs because she was panicking that she’d missed us. Thankfully we were exiting just in time, so no one got arrested.
This is the kind of behavior that in Russian invites the description of one’s having nails up one’s ass.

It reminds me of the time I was meeting my parents in Italy. It was the year I was studying in Geneva, and they took a week in the Italian Alps, after which I’d meet them in Verona. I asked that they take some of my stuff home with them, so I was carrying quite a bit. We had agreed that they would meet me on the platform of the train station. As I was getting my stuff and making my way toward the train door, I saw my mom flap her arms and storm off in frustration.

WTF??

I dragged my bags to the center of town where I happened to run into them. She said she didn’t see me so she left. I said, “could you have at least WAITED for everyone to get off the train?” My dad had even said to her, “you know, she’s carrying a few bags, she’s not going to be the first person off the train.” I mean, honestly—would it have been all that much more difficult to just wait until the train had left the tracks? Would she have lost anything by waiting?

***

When I got back I told my parents that E. was wonderful, which was true, but I also said she tried to make me swim in a pool by the sea and time me like a pancake. They laughed and appreciated the absurdity.