This is probably gonna be one of those long, rambling posts and I'm not even sure why I'm posting about it, except that I want to tell someone, and no one is here to tell except Isaac, and he's not particularly interested. He got a new bone today from the farm supply place, which is the only place around here that carries his brand of dog food, and he's busy chowing down on it, making a big mess on my living room floor.
I haven't heard from my mother since November of last year. That's when she got angry at me because I said something on Facebook about how I didn't think my nephew should be left alone with my father, since my father was so abusive while I was growing up. My parents have been divorced for many years now, but for some reason it still upset her a lot that I would announce publicly that he was abusive to me. Apparently in her head, somehow, the abuse itself is not such a bad thing but talking about it is just terrible.
So she hasn't spoken to me since then. Neither has my sister.
A couple years ago, the transmission went out in my car. Transmissions, as you might know, are really, really expensive. Mike and I didn't have the money to get a new transmission at the time. My mother was speaking to me back then, and she loaned us the money to get a new transmission. She didn't actually give us cash, but let us put it on her credit card, and we agreed to make the payments.
Well, before I moved out of Mike's house, he was taking care of paying all our bills. I don't mean he was paying all the bills with his money. I was contributing financially, as well. But he sat down each month and wrote out the checks and made sure they got in the mail on time. He did the bills, he mowed the lawn and shoveled the snow, fixed the leaky roof, etc. And I did the laundry, the dishes, the cooking, and took care of that cats. That's just how we divided up the labor. So he made sure my mother got a check every month.
When I moved out, of course, I had to start writing my own checks and paying my own bills. Only I had forgotten all about the money we owed my mother. That probably sounds stupid, but I just hadn't thought about it in a long time because Mike took care of it. I handed him one check every month and he took care of all the bills. So when I moved out, I started getting my own bills in the mail and I've been paying them... but my mother never sent a bill.
A couple weeks ago, I was talking to a friend that needed to take her cat to the vet and was short on cash and I was trying to brainstorm ways she could get the money. I asked if a family member could loan it to her or if perhaps a family member could let her use their credit card and then she could make the payments. And that triggered my memory and I thought about the money my mother loaned us for my transmission.
So I called Mike and asked him if we'd finished paying for that or not. Of course, we hadn't. Transmissions are expensive. I asked him if he'd been sending her money since I moved out, and of course, he hasn't. He said he thought since it was my mother and my transmission, it should be my responsibility. Well, I think that's reasonable, but I wish he'd said something about it to me when I moved. I had no idea how much he'd been paying each month or how much was still owed or anything. He told me how much he'd been sending her each month, and took a guess at how much we still owed, but he wasn't sure of the remaining balance.
I feel bad about missing a couple of payments, and I immediately sat down and wrote out a check. I also wrote a little note, apologizing for missing a couple of payments and explaining that I hadn't realized Mike wasn't sending them and he hadn't realized that I wasn't sending them, and promising to send them every month from now on. I also asked her if she could please let me know the remaining balance. It was a short note, and I didn't include any personal information or chitchat in it, but I tried to be friendly and polite.
As far as I know, my mother doesn't know I've moved. I haven't talked to her since well before the move. Maybe she reads this blog and then she'd know, but otherwise, I don't think she would. The address on the check I sent her was my old address, because I had just gotten new checks right before I found out I was moving, and I'm still using those checks because I didn't want to pay for new ones when I'd just bought some.
Today I stopped by Mike's for something, and I had a couple pieces of mail there. The post office is supposed to be forwarding my mail, and they usually do, but occasionally they somehow miss a piece and it goes to the old address. One of the things that was there was a letter from my mother. She didn't have my new address, if she even knows I've moved, so she sent it to my old address.
I opened it right away, curious about what she would say. Well, she didn't say anything. It was a typed up statement, listing all the payments Mike and I have made and showing the remaining balance. That's it. No "here is the information you requested" or "thanks for the payment" or even "please make sure you pay on time from now on."
Maybe I should be grateful she didn't say anything hurtful or mean. I guess I am grateful for that. Maybe she was just practicing the whole "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" thing. I guess I'm not surprised she didn't include a note. I guess I'm just disappointed.
It's hard to stop wanting some things, even when you know darn well you're never going to get what you want, you know?
No comments:
Post a Comment