I went back to work this week after a loooooong time off. Almost 4 months. I wasn’t even there 2 hours and I was already irritated.

 The nice thing was everyone happy to see me. Well, maybe not everyone, but most people.

 The bad thing was I lost my sweet ass real estate. They put someone at my old desk and I have none. I am homeless. =0(  Not that I can take calls anyway because they had taken away all my system access. Hell, I couldn’t even get in the building with my ID badge on the first day. I guess they thought they got rid of me.

HA fuckers.

If you read my interview, you know about my mom, and her recent loss of her leg to Diabetes. She is doing better and getting stronger. She is making good progress with her physical therapy. She has her up and down days emotionally.

She has the hospital staff at her beck and call, and they are all very encouraging. All in all my mother is very likeable. People are always telling me how sweet she is. I want to tell them they don’t knowwwww her!! No, she is sweet, but my mother and I have always had this complicated relationship filled with manipulative guilt. And she is taking this opportunity to milk the situation for all she can.

She insists daily that someone rearrange her nightstand and bed tray because she doesn’t like where they are. Not that its that big a deal since they are both on wheels, but still. She calls me on a Saturday to tell me not to come to the hospital, on a day when I can afford to spend more time with her, only to complain to her friend that I can’t spend more than an hour with her when I come after work. This same friend comes to see her 2-3 times a week and spends hours there, yet she complains to her that nobody cares about her and she has no one to talk to. (This friend told me, “I wanted to ask her, what am I chopped liver???”)

My point is she uses the bad situation as an excuse to hurt the people who are closest to her and who really care about her. Which, when you think about it, seems to be a pretty common behavior in us humble humans, but that doesn’t make it okay in my opinion.

Now before anyone (HA! You like how I pretend that people read this?) gets all up in arms about how I should be sensitive, and have empathy for my poor li’l mama, there is a difference between being supportive and coddling self-pity. I am not going to do that and if that makes me an asshole, so be it. No, I do not know what it is like to have a limb removed. But I DO know what its like to be the “punching bag.” The one who is that person-who-loves-you-no-matter-what type who can withstand the slings and arrows and will still show up every day with a warm smile. I am actually very familiar with the role since I went through it 10 years ago when my husband lost his leg in a motercycle accident.

I wasted alot of energy feeling guilty about not being able to be that punching bag without striking back. (Figuratively speaking, of course.) I would take it and take it and hold it all in because I wanted to be that caretaker from the movies who takes it all in stride. Who never complains. Who never even feels like screaming, “Shut the FUCK UP already! you are not the only person in the world who has ever gone through this!” I would just stuff it all down until it would explode out of me and I would scream those words and even worse.

Well this is not the movies and I am not Florence Nightingale. And being sick doesn’t give anyone an excuse to be an asshole.

 So I have to try to set quiet boundaries this time. Its just hard to find that balance between being supportive and enabling bad behavior. And I am sooo bad at it.