My mother visited today.

My husband and younger daughter have visited her in the neighbouring town she lives in, but this is the first time she has been to the farm since before any of us had arrived.

I feel like I have been wrung out like a rag.  And she wasn’t even here for an hour.

She was being driven by my older brother, who has been doing so much at this place.  It’s been a couple of years since I have seen her.

My relationship with my mother has never been a good one.  There isn’t much that can be done to fix that.  Suffice to say, nothing I will ever say, do or accomplish will be good enough for her.  And she will try to run our lives for us at every opportunity.  

We knew this, when we decided to accept her request for us to move here. Yet, seeing her today, we were all struck by how much worse she has gotten.

Within minutes of arriving, it started.  She saw a bag with recycling in it, which included some cans of Coke Zero.  So she assumed we were chugging the stuff and she started going on about our “taking chemicals.” Never mind the cans of V8 or the water bottles.  It was all chemicals, and if I don’t stop “taking chemicals” I will die.

Oh, and she made sure to tell me that, while we could live here as long as we wanted, it was not our property, but that it was going to my older brother; etc. Stuff we have already discussed several times.

As I went around with my brother, she went at my daughters. It was like she had a list of things she needed to get through as fast as possible, from how great Canada is, to teen suicides because there is no God in schools anymore, to how my daughters need to stop taking chemicals, because that’s why they are fat (never mind her own body size). Then, on seeing garbage cans with *gasp* garbage in them, she asked, “how can you live like this?”  It all should be in the burn barrel. Never mind that some if it was from before we arrived, or that some if our garbage cannot be safely burned. We have a separate box for burn barrel garbage.

Then we all followed my brother to a storage shed. As we were heading back, we saw her start throwing stuff out the door.  She was “helping.” None of it made sense, and some of it made things worse.  But she did it anyway.

Perhaps the most perplexing thing was something we discovered after she left. We have a covered litter box shoved into a corner until we find a more permanent place for it.  At one point, she had shoved it aside to access a shelf. We later saw that she had taken the tiny bags of used cat litter out of the garbage bag they were in, left them on the floor, along with the now empty garbage bag.

Meanwhile, even though my brother and his wife have taken so much out, the house is still a shambles of almost all her stuff.  We can’t even find space for the few things we brought in the van with us.  We have been here mere days.  Somehow, she did not clue in that when she wonders “how can we live like this”, it is her stuff that is making life more difficult for us.

Since arriving, I’ve found myself wondering if we made a mistake in coming here.

By the time she left, I was sure of it.

My daughter’s have encouraged me and assure me we have not.

I hope they are right.

Oh. I forgot. She also told my daughters they need to get married and have babies.

*sigh*