With a side serving of guilt, please

There’s a moment, when every family member becomes a guest and, well, to be honest?

You wish they’d leave.

Oh, you love them, and all their idiosyncratic crap, but truly, enough of hearing them putter around the house at four am because they can’t sleep, making coffee, and ostensibly “helping you” by insisting that you let them undo the dishwasher, when they’ve nothing to do to occupy their time before they get you up. Which, they’ve already done, by banging the sliverware into the drawer, allowing it to echo up the stairs, alerting a small, nearly not-sleeping being into full wakefullnes…before the blasted sun is even up. So, you find yourself, at the mercy of a Serious Morning Person, who’s already five cups of coffee ahead of you.

Think….uptight poodle, on crack.

The best part? It’s now, maybe, (and I stress maybe) five am. I’m sipping my first cup of coffee (and she finished off all the cream) while curled up half dead in a chair in my kitchen, only to find her telling me what I’m going to do today. Empty out this box. Go through that pile of stuff. Look at the items rescued from the backseat (or Hunter’s Domain) of the truck….and then, I’m supposed to thank her for bossing me around, or, in her words, “assisiting me in finally getting organized”. This from a woman who has seven months of mail sorted on her dining room table, and puts it into laundry baskets prior to big holiday meals!

My absolute favorite - so I’m going through all this stuff, simply to keep her quiet, as I’m not up for yet another conversation with her about boundries, and respecting them; or how much like B she is in this moment. Or several of them. As I’m thinking that, she turns to me, sits in the chair opposite, takes my hand (a dreaded signal, mind you) and says to me, she is just shocked, that I ever ended up with a man who bossed me around, was controlling, micrmanaging, among his other really nasty habits.

And I swear, I’m blaming this on the lack of fully creamed coffee in my system: I said, “Hmm. Interesting. You cannot abide a man who steps on your toes, when it comes to telling me what to do”. All this crap she feeds me about helping me out, and I just have such an attitude about it - well, can you blame me? If she’s doing the laundry, it’s just tell me what can go in the dryer - this? this? this? this? this? Wait, I know you just sat down, but really, I need you to move that, and this, go through that pile I erected for you….it was like having two five year olds with ADHD disorder, not medicated, on frosting. Full time.

She never sits still.

At the crux of this, is perhaps some of my issue: when she’s around, I feel as though I’m the laziest human being on the planet, a feeling she adores, and runs with. Oh, she covers it with a thin veneer of I’m Trying To Be Really Helpfull but it’s mostly that she needs to be needed - and then, when she burns people out, she’s all hurt, and dishing out the guilt in giant helpings.

But. It’s Sunday night. The house is blessedly quiet; I’m going upstairs, in a moment, to tuck in the little guy, knit for a bit, and hope that my shoulders come down from their post above my ears. The plane left this evening.

And yeah, I called to make damn sure it got off the ground.

Right before I picked up some cream, so that I can have the good cup of coffee tomorrow morning.