Saturday morning

I set myself up for failure this morning, but it ended up being okay. Unlike dad, I believe in identifying and minimizing triggering events. One way for me to do that is to get up much earlier than mom and get my morning routine out of the way before she gets out of bed. Otherwise, she talks to me throughout my morning routine--whatever combination of exercise and paper-reading that is--and demands that I drop everything to go listen to the birds. Every time. Yesterday I engaged with her as long as I could (which was up until she started gossiping about the neighbors) and she still snapped, first because my phone rang and I dared try to answer it, and then when I asked her to give me a minute. Mom has never, ever been responsive to "give me a minute," in any way. She takes any form of "not now," no matter how politely communicated or justified, as a challenge to get her two cents in. So I knew that if I wanted to do yoga in peace this morning, I'd have to get my @$$ out of bed long before she did.

Except I didn't. I stayed up watching the first Hobbit movie. Mom's need to talk through and/or narrate movies is one of the things that has not gotten less annoying because she now has a medical excuse, but it was nonetheless mostly okay. But last night fit into the typical adventure in watching TV with my parents:

Dad: Why is it still muted, are we still on commercials?
A.: No, the hobbit and his dwarf companions are making commercial mac 'n' cheese.

Mom: It's too quiet, I can't hear anything.
A.: Because you're talking.
Mom: The screen is too small.
A.: You have a massive TV.

Anyway, I woke up early but couldn't bring myself to get out of bed. Mom talked to me as I finished reading the paper--mostly to tell me that she wouldn't miss me when I left and that I didn't mean anything to her--and continued as I started to do yoga, but then she quieted down. She didn't critique my poses or stand behind my downward-dog to note that my ass was huge.

Over breakfast, she pointed out that my stomach was huge a few times, and as I vacuumed she told me to visit more.