You Think You've Got Problems? (Part Two)

     "You think you've got problems?" Maloney asked me, although it really wasn't a question he expected an answer to. It was the kind of question that told you to sit back and listen. (And, by the way, I'm paraphrasing what he said here.) "Saturday morning my wife has to pick up her mother at 6:30 in the morning from a sleep study to determine if she snores or not. Hey, I don't need to give her a sleep study to tell her that. She snores! I don't hear her myself, but my little girl is always telling me, 'Daddy, Grandma keeps waking me up.'

     "So she picks her up, they go to Valentine's bakery to buy some menudo for breakfast, and when they get home, my wife has to go right back out to take Boswell--our 23-year-old! son--to one of those 24-hour medical clinics. He had been sick the day before, coughing all over everybody, but it didn't occur to him to go to the clinic after he got off work. No, he thought he'd bring it home for the rest of us to enjoy. Anyway, about a half hour after they left, my little girl got up. She's twelve. We had made plans the night before to go for an early morning walk, but the morning was too cold, too wet, and too windy. The unholy trinity of morning walks. For me, at least. So we sat on the couch in the living room, she put her feet up on my lap so I could massage them, and we just talked.

     " 'Are you hungry?' I asked her.

     " 'No,' she told me.

     "Her Grandma, meanwhile, stayed in her room, probably taking a nap after all that hard sleep-studying.

     "The menudo, it stayed on the stove. I wasn't hungry either.

     "About an hour and a half after that, my wife and Boswell come home. It's a sinus infection. I keep telling him to wash his hands before he picks his nose, but he doesn't listen.

     "Well, bonding time with my daughter is over. She gets up and goes to her room. I get up and go take a shower. A few minutes after that, my wife walks in, a bit ticked off.

     " 'Didn't you ask my mom if she wanted breakfast?'

     "Now, remember, her mother was with my wife when my wife bought the menudo. It was on the stove. It was ready to be served for anybody willing to serve themselves.

     " 'What?' I asked my wife.

     "I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly. Maybe I had water in my ears.

     " 'I said, didn't you ask my mom if she wanted breakfast?

     "It didn't even take me a second to reply.

     " 'Your mother is a grown woman. She's taken care of herself for 70 years. She can serve herself menudo if she's hungry.'

     "All of a sudden, I've become her mother's morning butler? 

     " 'No, she won't,' my wife told me. 'She's not like that. She doesn't feel comfortable yet.'

     "She sure was comfortable eating that pastry of mine a few weeks back.

     " 'If I'm hungry, I eat,' I told her. 'I expect the same of everybody else.'

     " 'But my mother won't serve herself,' she tried to tell me.

     " 'Then she's not hungry enough,' I told her back. 'You know, when I get home from work and you're out for some reason, your mother has no problem getting herself something to eat. Maybe if you wouldn't keep serving her like you're her servant, she'd learn to do things for herself.'

     "My mother-in-law's mother died when she was still a little girl. An aunt took her in, because she had nowhere else to go. That aunt treated her like a servant. Before she was 12-years-old she was cooking, cleaning, and taking care of her aunt's worthless children. And my wife is trying to tell me she can't serve herself a bowl of menudo?

     "But I shouldn't be surprised. All the dog experts say to leave your dog's food out no more than 15 minutes. It trains them to eat. Our dogs don't know how to eat like a dog, because my wife leaves their food out for hours. All day, even. They'll eat a kibble here, they'll eat a bit there, and, when it's time to go to bed, they still haven't eaten properly.

     " 'Their food is going to get stale,' I'll tell her.

     Doesn't matter.

     " 'There's contanimants in the air that are landing in the dog's food.'

     "Still doesn't matter.
     "Experts from all over the world say one thing, but my wife knows better. Well, it isn't actually that. What it is, is that she and Boswell would rather do things their own way and get bad results, than to be told how to do things properly. They hate being told what to do.

     "So why am I surprised?"

 

 

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