Tuesday, November 17, 2009

How Long Does It Take To Turn Into Your Mother?

All families are full of quirks. I'm sure most people are confident that their own families are so uniquely strange that they are worthy of a sitcom (or a really bad reality show.) Mine is no exception.
My mother is a cross between June Cleaver and Rosie the Riveter. She cooks, she cleans, she makes everyone happy, and she is certainly not afraid of heavy lifting. Most of all though, my mother is an expert at the art of verbal communication. She could talk circles around your mother. I mean this in the most complimentary way....the woman talks. She genuinely loves to hear about (and talk about) how you're feeling, how your day was, what your evening plans are, what you ate for dinner... you get the point.

My father, on the other hand, is little more than mono-syllabic. He (quite rightly, in my opinion) believes that phone calls among family members are to be made when there is specific information to be exchanged. He wastes no time on talks of feelings or hypothetical plans or fluff. He's a loner-type; works alone, reads mystery novels in 24 hours flat... you get the point.

So now I've set the scene for the most comical, most typical events in recent history in my parents' household. My father had driven to Pennsylvania for a long weekend to visit my grandmother. The fact that he was driving instead of flying caused some...discussion... but eventually, away he went.
Fast-forward 72 hours. My father, in true my-father fashion, has decided to leave Pennsylvania at 4am for some logical reason, I'm sure. He is fumbling around my aunt's kitchen to find a light, but instead falls down and destroys his phone. (and his pill box and his elbow.) So there's a trail of blood, and broken plastic and a week of pills all over the scene. He calls my mom, tells her about the broken phone, and off he goes.

Fast-forward another sixteen hours. My family is all cozy at my mom's house and she keeps sending my niece to the window to see if Grandpa is coming. No Grandpa. Is he coming now? No Grandpa.

I get a call at 6am from my sister. Here is the conversation. (Abridged.)
"Emily, Dad still isn't home. Mom has been awake all night. Here are some possible scenarios mom and I have come up with. What if he got road rage and pissed off the wrong Bubba in West Virginia who shot him and put him in a hole somewhere? Or he passed out in a diabetic coma because he left a trail of pills and could possibly be going without? "
I roll my eyes loud enough for her to hear.
"Emily! Are you LISTENING to me?! Dad's not home yet!"
I can hear my mother in the background saying, "He would have Called if he was all right!" (False.)
So I bravely suggest that maybe....just maybe... even Probably... Dad is just fine. We knew he had a broken phone. She had advised him to stop and rest while driving. There was a bad storm which probably had traffic backed up.
This was the wrong thing to say. Extremely annoyed, my sister then explains...
"Mom has contacted the bank and all thirteen credit card providers who have traced his last location to a gas station in Virginia."
This genuinely impresses me.
"And she contacted the police department to file a missing persons report. There is no longer any reasonable explanation to what is taking him so long. Something terrible has happened."
This is where I laugh out loud, which was not appreciated. In their minds, (because my sister has a few years on me and is turning into my mother at an accelerated rate,) he has really been abducted by a crazy WestVirginian on the highway.
At this point, I am the daughter void of soul and sentiment.

My dad then casually, you might even say breezily, gives my mom a call on her cell from a pay phone.
"Hey, honey. I'm at the top of Florida. Had some bad weather. See you soon!"

The poor man still can't quite figure out where his mistake was initiated.... but he's still paying for it. He should have known.... the woman (honest to god) called 911 while (surprise!) talking to me on the cell phone because my reception was shoddy and it sounded like I was gasping for my last dying breath. No joke. The fire truck, the ambulance... for poor cell service.

They say we all turn into our mothers.... eventually. When you start off as I have done-- on the polar opposite end of the spectrum, does it buy us more time?


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