Story of My Life

Do you remember my Mother's Day post? It was all about how different my mother and I are. I got a great response to it.

Gibby specifically asked if my mother read my blog because she would hate to see her miss that tribute.

Well, my mother does not have a computer - old dog/new tricks and all that.

But I decided, since the response was so overwhelmingly positive, that I'd convert it to a word document and print it out. I printed the comments, too, because - well, she responds well to the opinions of others.

We had planned to celebrate Mother's Day tonight because they were going to be visiting us anyway for my daughter's orchestra concert. I proudly presented her with my letter along with her gift.

She scanned it for the first picture.

"I don't remember this picture. Where did you get this picture?"

"I cropped it - this was the full picture." (Handed her the original because it's still sitting on my desk. Don't judge me. I'm just a weird clumsy bookish forest fairy. What do you want?)

"Oh, my God, would you look at that? That's our old house on Cinema Lane. And look at that chair she's sitting in. (to my Dad) Did you make that chair? Someone made that chair. Oh, would you look at that? That's our old umbrella stand. Remember when we saw that big bug in the umbrella stand? Oh, our good old umbrella stand."

She shook her head and smiled, clearly reminiscing about all the the good memories that picture of her umbrella stand brought back.

She scanned the rest of it, stopping periodically to talk to my father about my children, about her friends, about her old furniture.

Then she got to the comments.

"Who are these people?"

"You don't know them."

"How do you know them?"

"Most of them have blogs too. They read what I have to say. I read what they have to say. We support each other. It's nice."

"People you don't know read what you write?"

"Yes."

"That's very good, Tammy! Look what these people said!"

She actually read all of the comments very carefully, after just scanning the body. The heartfelt sentimental body that I had written for her didn't matter nearly as much as what other people had to say about it.

It has always been this way.

I had to laugh, because it really was in keeping with the post. She will never 'get' me. And that's ok, I guess. Laugh or cry, my friends, laugh or cry. (I've done both, thanks for asking.)

I listened extra hard tonight when my children wanted to tell me about their day. I don't ever want them to feel less endearing than an old umbrella stand.

Sigh.

Good old umbrella stand.