Mother

My Mom makes me crazy. She lives several hours away, but comes to visit OFTEN. I have several brothers and sisters, but she always stays with my family because I have the biggest house. I'm SERIOUSLY thinking about moving to a smaller house.

My Mom does not approve of anything. She doesn't like how I raise my children. She doesn't like that I take an occasional nap. She doesn't like that I bought a new sofa to take a nap on (my old 12 year old sofa was PERFECTLY FINE.) She doesn't like that my kids are happy and loud. She doesn't like it when I throw away moldy bread. That bread is fine, just pick off the moldy parts and eat it anyway. God forbid my Mother sees you throwing anything into the trash. A nice flat piece of cardboard is not trash, it can still be used for something. You know the plastic container you get from the store full of cut-up watermelon? It should be washed out and reused for something when the watermelon is gone. If the kids don't fill up enough of the paper they are drawing on she raises her eyebrows at their wastefulness.

Now, this is the other thing, my Mom does not actually say anything about these things to me. She says them all to my sister. At my house she does this little half raised eyebrows, half eye roll thing which is far more ANNOYING than if she would have just said something. Sometimes she just asks a question to make her point. Example: "Is Max throwing away that perfectly good paper clip?" or "Does Lexie just throw out her used maxi-pads without washing and reusing them?" There is one benefit to my Moms crazy "don't throw anything out" policy. My cereal cupboard has several boxes that contain a few bites of stale Cheerios or Chex rolling around the bottom. My Mom takes care of ALL of this icky staleness. She fills her bowl every morning with those last few bits of stale cereal and flattens down the boxes to save for some important project later.

I blame my Mother for my extra pounds. She has made it nearly impossible to throw away food from someones plate without taking a few more bites so it's not wasted. When I step on the scale, my usual exclamation goes something like; "AAARRRRGGGGHHH! MOM AGAIN!!!!!!!"