My Mom Sucks

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted because I've been sick. Really sick. Fortunately, I work from home, but even so I had to take a sick day and probably should have taken a couple more. For a solid two weeks I drifted in a cycle of work, sleep, soak in a hot tub, repeat. Occasionally the order was shuffled a bit, but no new activities were introduced.

My parents live close to me, and my father drove my daughter to and from school. My mother dropped off food, books, and rental videos. She called every day to ask whether I needed anything, remind me not to go out, and suggest things that I might not realize I needed. She picked up my prescriptions. And about every third day, she told me what a bad mother she felt like because she didn't dare come to my house and cook and clean for me.

My mother is in her sixties and had a triple bypass a couple of years ago. She still has problems with her heart, and she is, to our knowledge, allergic to every anti-biotic. She can't have (and so hasn't had) the flu shot. Still, she felt pretty bad about being afraid to expose herself to my germs.

Just now, I was sitting here eating lunch: egg salad on bread my mom gratuitously brought over midweek ("You haven't been to the store in so long--you must need bread and milk.") with pretzels my mom gratuitously brought over yesterday (along with some lunch meat, a couple of magazines, printer paper that I needed for work and a few other items) and coke from a 2-liter my mom gratuitously brought over at the beginning of the week ("They delivered it free with our pizza."), so I thought I'd take a moment to complain about her. Don't you think she should be over here doing my dishes?