Thursday was spent working on yet even more Azure ad revisions for Rennie.  They are too much with that gazillion ad versions and endless revisions.  But, I am going to charge them for all the different options, so let them keep it up – I need more receivables anyway! lol

Tracey came over after work and we ended up going to bed early.  Then, in a strange twist of events, the phone rang at midnight (two hours after we went to bed, at which time I said, “I hope I don’t wake up in a couple of hours…”) and it was – *GASP!* – my mom.  I phoned her back and the first thing she said when she answered the phone was, “Carly, I thought I told you not to call Dennis and be telling him all my business.”  Nice.  Haven’t talked in a month and her first comment to me is to start bitching.  Surprised?  Nope.  Disappointed?  Naturally.  It’s an unfortunate side-effect of my seemingly endless well of hope.

So commenceth the half-hour-long bitchfest, with me trying to inject some logic and reasonable viewpoints into the conversation of her completely irrational “You didn’t even invite me for Christmas” in spite of the fact that I told her I didn’t have money to pay for a plane ticket for her to come up here.  As a rebuttal, she says that I seem to have money to buy snow boots and to go to Whistler and I started to justify myself and then I said, “You know what? I’m the one working for a living and I don’t have to justify what I buy to you or anyone.”  Were it only that easy to “win” an argument with her.  She proceeded to attempt to make me feel guilty because she was home by herself on Christmas.  I asked her if she had a good Christmas and New Year’s and she snorted and said “No.” and I said, “Well, you should’ve answered the damned phone then.”  She said something snarky about all the “partying” I probably did and then said that she had just gotten the postcard I sent a couple of days after New Year’s and, again, was apparently disgusted by my “Hope you had a good Christmas and New Year’s” which I wrote on the back of the card.  While I did actually mean that I hoped she did have good holidays, I guess I knew it’d come across somewhat snarky when I wrote it.  Too fucking bad!

It never ceases to amaze me how she never forgets anything.  I told her that I really didn’t understand why she would go out of her way to hurt me and not talk to me for a month. And, she said “Well, you didn’t talk to me for six months one time.” which is true…but, she also deserved that consequence, considering that she came over to my and Bonnie’s apartment and, to prove a point about how we supposedly went through every room in her house while she was in the psych hospital, proceeded to open every cabinet door in the kitchen and go in all the closets.  Bonnie got pissed off at her and my mom picked up a candle in a glass holder and threw it at Bonnie.  Not long after that, we moved into the place off O’Neal and I didn’t give my mom my new phone number and she didn’t know where I lived.   I think it’s sad that, even like 15 years after that happened, my mom still cannot accept responsibility for her role in the situation, nor in anything else, apparently.  She also told me she’s not been taking her meds for a while which, I’m convinced, has a lot to do with her aggressive and belligerent behaviour.  But, what can I do about it?  Nothing.  And, though I wish things were better for her – and I’ve suggested options I think would help her head in that direction – in the end, it’s not my place to be responsible for her life, choices and happiness.  God, that’s so much easier to say than put into practice.

I asked what made her finally call and she said that she had been giving me a month to “start acting better”.  I said, “So, do you need more than a month, then?”. At one point, she said, “One day you’re going to know what it’s like to be all alone.” and I told her that pushing people away is not the way to avoid being alone and that she turns everyone into an enemy if they fail to meet her unreasonable expectations of them – people have their own lives and obligations and sometimes they just don’t want to talk on the phone.  Later, she was saying that “One day, you’ll see….” in that suggestive way that insinuates some major regret yet to befall me for my horrible (yeah right) treatment of her.  I said, “What am I going to see?  What I already know?  That my mother is so bitter about her own life that she only wants to hurt me?” and she just said, “You’ll see…”.  Why do mothers always put that out there?  That whole “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone” thing that they say without saying it in so many words. 

I said something about that I wish things were better for her but that I’m doing the best I can given our respective locations at which point she said, “Well, I didn’t tell you to move 4000 miles away” and I said that I have much better opportunities here than I would have had there.  She then said something about the guy that owns Christian Street Furniture in Baton Rouge now having three locations. I had even forgotten about it until she mentioned his name, but I had a meeting with him about a web site project in probably 2000 or something.  And, I said, “Oh, I guess he got someone to do a cheap web site for him”, because he was apparently pretty cheap or something.  My mom says, “Well, Carly, what do you expect?  The first thing you talked to the guy about when you sat down was money…..hmmmph.”  Now, keep in mind, this was when I had NO clue about business, marketing, NOTHING.  I just knew how to build web sites at this point.  I was just stunned that she would even bring up a “mistake” I had made like 8 years ago when it was completely irrelevant to anything we were talking about.  I said, “Well, I’m sure that everyone makes mistakes when they first get into business”.  But, my God, how deep does she have to dig for this shit?  Unfuckingreal.  I told her that I really don’t understand why, rather than wanting to build me up, she just wants to tear me down.

I think she really dealt herself a serious blow by behaving that way after having not talked to me for a month, even on Christmas, New Year’s AND her birthday.  You know that saying “You get more bees with honey than with vinegar”?  Well, she’s poured a huge pool of vinaigrette, spiced with just the right blend of insult and injury, right at my feet and I just feel like walking away.

I have other stuff to write about, but I’m not going to let it drown in the shit that was this conversation, so I’m going to make a separate entry for the good for a change.