My Other Mother is a Porsche

A lot of us can relate to dealing with the hot-tempered mother who is very opinionated, extremely nosy and puts her 2 cents into every conversation or life situation. These types of mothers are not necessarily European, but most will be. Here are a few tips to smooth over the most volatile of relationships and ensure that most of your visits with her will not end in tears.

1. Define the type of woman your mother is, what are her passions? Pet peeves? What kind of shape is her marriage in (if there’s still a man around)? What kinds of things did/does she want for her kids? Mothers are real people with real problems and dreams and disappointments – just like us. If you can step outside the “offspring” role, you will be able to see this.

Once you’ve picked out a couple of major hot button issues - you will be able to easily navigate your time spent with her to avoid flare ups, arguments, embarrassing public displays and on a more serious note, creating rifts that might be regretful and harder to patch up.

2. Don’t take it personally. Even if it is. She is fighting her own mortality and questioning her usefulness as a human now. Trust me, thinking of this after she says something abrasive will help you.

The Chef:
Does she love to cook and feed her entire family as often as possible? (my mother does).
This mother wants to continue to believe that your health and well being depend greatly on her and this act of feeding you is just another way to say: “I have no other way of taking care of you now, you’re all grown up and I feel useless”.

Problem: There will be occasions when you’ll come over and not have time to, or be too full to, eat what she’s serving up. If you flat out refuse to eat without defining why, this will result in hurt feelings and a bombardment of questions from her on where you’ve come from, where you’re going, and what you will eat there or have just eaten. If you’ve eaten out or spent money to ingest this food, watch out! This is a trap. After asking you how much you spent on said food, she will then lecture you on how poorly you manage your finances and ask you for the ten millionth time, why haven’t you bought a house yet!? But know that she’s really just miffed that you didn’t eat her lasagne.

Suggestion:
1. Taste her food.
2. Better yet, bring a friend over and get them to taste it too.
3. Ask her how she made it.
All she wants is your admiration and the confirmation that she still makes the best pasta sauce this side of the Atlantic. Even though at first you’ll feel like this is giving in to her, it will show that you can be flexible even while in the face of her epic unbending-ness.

The Wannabe Grandmother: (this is also my mother)
Most of her friends are having grandchildren and she wants to know when hers are coming and where from. This is not uncommon. They’re bored and need some confirmation that they did not make a huge mistake by giving up their youth, their bodies and their aspirations in order to join the procreation parade. So, by seeing you do the same thing, they feel validated.

Warning: Do not inadvertently belittle their contribution to the human race by saying or hinting that you do not want kids to get in the way of your fantastic life.

Suggestion: let her know that:
1. You’re trying to meet that right person but it’s just not happening –you weren’t as lucky as she was to have someone fall in live with her…or
2. You and your significant other are really trying but it’s just not happening – the doctors just keep telling you that it’ll happen or not. You’re not as lucky as she was to have such good genes…or
3. You don’t think you’d make as good a parent as her and don’t want to raise kids if you have doubts about abandoning your … great career/ …dreams to travel the world/ …research to cure cancer. Note: Only attempt this one if she is a little more advanced in her ability to control her emotions. Also point out that you’re just not as lucky as she was.

But some mothers might be an 11 out of 10 on this subject and will not let up – accusing you of perhaps doing this non-childbearing thing on purpose, to embarrass her, or other crazy notions.
Other suggestions:
1. Avoid mall trips with her for a while; malls are bound to have a hoard of mothers pushing strollers, baby clothes stores, and pregnant women shopping.
2. Try not to divulge news of a brand new relationship too quickly. She will expect to know whether he/she wants kids and when the wedding is. Wait 3-6 months.
3. Talk about your baby years with her; she’ll love reliving some stories about her time as a new mother. This way you can seem (a) baby-having-compliant and (b) like you need her for something – mothers can’t resist this.


Advice Givers and Guilt Trippers: (you guessed it, also…my mother)
This needn’t be a separate category because it seems that it has a place in every aspect of “the mother” persona. But some extra tips on this topic might be helpful.

1. Always remember that, at the heart of any unsolicited advice or guilt trip* (*there are various types of these – see list below so you can identify them when they start), lies genuine care and concern. This may help you stop the rush of blood that goes directly to the anger part of the brain, thereby saying something hurtful or dismissive.
2. **Listen and nod – sometimes not saying anything at all will let them fulfill the need to just say something…motherly.
3. Ask your mother for help with something from time to time – a recipe, a button, a hem, company while shopping – whatever it is should be genuine and not contrived as they can smell pity a mile away.
4. Use the other sibling decoy: as a last resort you may want to throw one or more of your siblings under the proverbial bus in order to save yourself from the moment – divulge a bit of juicy gossip or rat on them about a recent indiscretion – this will successfully get your mother into full rant mode about just what the hell “X” thinks he’s/ she’s doing and why can’t they just grow up? When done successfully, follow up by doing #2 –above **

*Guilt Trips: detail
1. The round-about-trip: this is also passive aggression but that sounds so bad when you say it about your mother! This one will usually take the form of her letting you know she needed to go somewhere and then later saying that “it’s ok, my friend Joyce will take me”. This is meant to tell you that she didn’t have to ask, for crying out loud, you should have just offered.

2. The Sunday-morning-trip: you’ve had your fun all weekend and now I want to know why you haven’t called me or come by and, are you hungry? This of course is not what your mother will say but it’s implied in the “so. What are you doing TODAY?” question she’ll ask you.

3. Laundry-trip: BE WARNED – this is a gateway “favour” – she will use this opportunity to check your pockets, examine stains and also turn you into a “user” so that you’ll be back for more once you realize how awesome it is that your laundry is neatly folded and smells like love. This will also be used as trade for things she’ll want or need, thus turning your relationship into a trade-for-trade scenario, rather than one of mutual respect and love.

4. The baby-trip: This consists of her telling you that anyone she may know or she’s heard of, has had a baby boy or girl recently or will be having one, and she’ll take this opportunity to (a) tell you how happy they are, (b) tell you how cute the baby is, (c) prove how little money it costs to actually have a baby, or (d) point out that if a loser like that can a have a kid, so can you.
Suggested response: See #2 in previous paragraph **

Recipe for a Bad Day

Ingredients:
1 late night bedtime
2 unshaven legs
a dozen clothes on your chair not put away and thus too wrinkled to wear to work
2 ½ annoying sounds coming from someone’s 7am construction outside your window.
garbage day on the calendar
1 boss with an early meeting
1 full streetcar or bus that drives past your stop
3 smelly fellow subway passengers
½ a glance in a mirror in the concourse to let you know, you’re fooling no one!

Prep:
Wake up on a work day and press the snooze button until you have about 20 minutes remaining until you have to leave your home. Depending on how realistic you are, this may require as many as 8 snooze pressings – but be determined, keep the faith – you will in time beat the clock. Not in a good way.

Next, (and this is key) after the usual stumbling around and bathroom visit, find something that you didn’t see as a problem the night before that will lead to a huge amount of time wasting on your part. A stray chin hair, a chipped toe nail, even a cup of coffee left out and not rinsed. This will most assuredly lead you to try and fix similar problems - check your eyebrows, repaint your toenails or do the dishes left in your sink.

Soak (in):
When enough time has passed, hurry to your closet and pick out anything not worn the previous day, smell it and shake it out. After washing face and armpits, shake head and hair several times, and apply deodorant to armpits. Hurriedly get dressed and leave approximately 15 minutes later than you should.

Optional:
While walking to the bus or streetcar stop – smell as much of your surroundings as you possibly can. This will put you in a fowl mood if you aren’t already in one and at the same time, get you angry at your neighbours for being such smelly human beings who have even smellier garbage and put too much junk out on the curb. If you live near a subway station you might be able to skip this step, but you’ll have more work to do on the back end of this recipe.

Important:
If you time your departure perfectly, you will have walked out at the exact time to miss as many buses, streetcars and green lights as possible. This will take practice. But trust your instincts, they’ve already gotten you this far.

Cooking time:
Finally you are on your way to the subway station and the ride there should be relatively problem- free - until you enter the subway car. This environment will be ripe with potential for confrontations and misunderstandings, and odd odours. If seats are available, choose one carefully. Be sure to pick one that sandwiches you in between 2 larger people. If you cannot find one like that, locate the nearest baby carriage, person trying to read a large section of a newspaper that will probably lead to a hand or paper hitting you in the face, or at the very least – someone using the seat next to them as a bag or purse holder. This will give you the chance to confront someone to ask them to move their stuff so you can sit down or better yet, you will be able to seethe in anger while you stand in front of them and their oblivious existence. For added angst: subway operator is new on the job and comes to a screeching halt at each and every stop or encounter a delay on the same line as yours.

When you emerge from the subway car at your stop – be sure to find the “UP” escalator as this will contain the highest percentage of rudeness in one crowd of people. As you ascend to concourse level, expect to be side-swiped and pushed, coughed and stepped on – if you have to go up to street level, you may even be lucky enough to be brushed by someone’s lit cigarette that they are holding down at the side of their body, facing outward, as they rush past you.

Tips:
After safely making it inside your destination, do not stop for a second to take a breath. Relaxing and shaking off the last half hour’s stress will only make your morning more bearable. Take the path of most resistance and bob and weave your way through a crowd that is obviously unaware of manners and decorum. Lack of eye contact in this task can really add to the randomness of the slight you will experience, physical or emotional. Eye contact can open up a whole new level of a secular Dante’s inferno – and you’ll see this as you get back nothing, or an icy cold stare or a weird creepy look that follows you long after you’ve walked away. Do not turn around unless you want to add a pinch of futility to the moment.

At this point you should have a pretty solid foundation for your bad day. You will notice floaty bits in your concoction, and you’ll begin to wonder whether you want to continue in this vain. The doubt will be heart-sinking, a weight on your chest - and you’ll do anything to be able to pour it down the sink – perhaps even on to someone else. Completing the recipe will only give you indigestion and, possibly, nausea. Your forgot to check the nutritional analysis.

Take some time to think about the power of your own thoughts and attitude, then proceed carefully. You’ve painted your world before you with each step you took this morning, and with each utterance and with each reaction to a thing or your perception of a thing.

Stir once. Let simmer.