Today, in the car, my
mother commented on another person’s yard—how bad it looked. How it had not been
kept up well. I am not making this up. My dad, before he died, did the same
thing every time we passed a particular yard on the way to mom’s rehab center.
When it happened the second time—Mom, that is, today, commenting on other
people’s sloppiness—I actually mentioned the log in her own eye. Me. I need to
get the fuck out of here.
People really are blind to their own flaws and hyprocrisies, aren't they?
ReplyDeleteLog in her eye - I know what you mean I think, but that's a new phrase for me.
I hope you get to go home soon.
I had to look that phrase up. I thought it meant something along the lines of "can't see the forest for the trees" but it is from the Bible. I'd never heard it either.
DeleteYeah, and I know people who do that too.
As in, don't try to remove the splinter from your friend's eye if you have a log in your own.
DeleteThank you, B.
DeleteYou didn't make this and you can't fix it. I'm so sorry it has been such a huge part of your life.
ReplyDeleteSeeing this piece of your life has made me feel better about my own. Not in a superiority way. I had horrible relationships with both sets of my grandparents and was intimately involved with cleaning up their shit when they died. It was hard at 18 when my mother's parents were both dead, and somehow even harder when my father's mother died when I was 42, and I think it was due to her hoarding tendencies and how I had become a stand-in for my distant father and the enormity of the task and the grief present for everyone else while I looked around and thought, "why don't we just burn this shit to the ground?". It made me feel disconnected to both my cousins/sisters/relatives AND my own experiences. And your last line: "I need to get the fuck out of here" was the running panicked line in my brain every time I tried to help my overwhelmed aunt clean the place out. Thank you for putting this out on the table. I think about Brene Brown's studies on vulnerability and connection and even if saying all this didn't help you, it helped me.
ReplyDeletePeople are very strange ducks... actually, they can be stranger than even the strangest duck one might encounter.
ReplyDeleteHere's hoping you do get the fuck out, Indigo. And thank you for sharing/baring.