Yesterday I was faced with an interesting question. It flitted about in the back of my mind as I went about my daily activities. It popped up like an exasperating round of Whack-a-Mole for the better part of an afternoon, bouncing about Arsenic Treatment Vessels in glorious 3D and slithering in and around what seemed like miles and miles of virtually virtual piping.
“If she was a real mother and not some fairy tale mock up of an evil pain-in-the-world’s-collective-patootey (I still love, love, LOVE that word!), how much would I be happily willing to spend on a birthday pressie?”
I thought and thought and thought and took a break for a cookie and thought some more. It wasn’t until I was well on my way home that I settled on a nice round number, the kind of number that makes even the humblest of giftees utter a resounding “Holy Shite!”
Finally equipped with a value but before I could begin the narrowing down of wonderful shiny things that could be purchased with just such a fabulous and oh, so generous number, the reality of it all hit me. I remembered (as if 8 years of witnessing it all first hand could be easily set aside) that she wasn’t some lovely, caring Mom or even a halfway decent Mother. I balk at even referring to someone who would spend a lifetime belittling and tearing to shreds every single person around her (even tho her own sad excuse for an existence is pathetic at best, parasitic at worst) as “That Thing that had you Removed.”
So faced with the unsettling fact that the old adage of the evil mother of the groom can be a reverberating, disturbingly, and empathically True, I took that deliciously zoftig number and found an enormously more therapeutic and much more fulfilling use for it – I bought myself some shoes and a pair of Happy Bunny socks that say “It’s not my fault you’re icky.”… in Blue.
