Sometimes It's Nice to Have a Blog to Rant to

On the whole, my parents are lovely people, who worship the ground the Metropolitoddler walks on and treat me fairly well to boot. But every once in a while I would happily toss them out a window. Of a very tall building, preferably.

Today's defenestration candidate: my mother.

Today I had the first real shouting match with my mother that I've had in quite a long time. The background: yesterday she asked if she and my father could come over today, as they hadn't seen my daughter in a couple of weeks and wouldn't otherwise see her for a couple more. I said sure. So they came up and hung out -- took her to the candy store (fine), played here in the apartment (fine), took her out to dinner (at the diner, after I vetoed McDonald's), and then brought her home to me, where we all hung out until bedtime.

In the 90 minutes we were together, my mother managed to (1) give me grief because I didn't love a couple of the outfits she'd brought for my daughter, (2) tell me that I had no fashion sense because the outfit I'd bought for my daughter wasn't all made of the same coordinated fabric and thus couldn't really be an "outfit," (3) while we were reading our quiet bedtime books, try to talk to me -- really loudly -- about some entirely unrelated topic, (4) literally take my daughter out of my arms when I was changing her clothes and diaper because she could do it better (never you mind that I've been putting my daughter into her pajamas all by myself for her entire two years of life), and (5) loudly insist on goodnight kisses even though my daughter was demanding "no kisses! no kisses!"

So then I finally get my kid into bed, and adjourn to the living room to try to have a pleasant adult chat with my parents before they hit the road for home. The conversation turns to the country house we've rented for the end of the summer. (Mr. Metropolitan and I will go for long weekends, and the Metropolitoddler will spend two weeks in the country with her grandparents.) The house has a pool and lots of land, and the theory has always been to let my daughter have some quality outdoorsy time.

So my mother starts talking about how she doesn't want to spend much time in the pool, and how they'll take the Metropolitoddler to restaurants and shops and walk around in the town. I comment that I'd really like them to try to spend as much time outdoors as they can, because the point of this endeavor is some outdoorsiness. My mother then says "well, but if the weather isn't nice, we can take her to the movies." I say yes, if it's raining, then by all means go to the movies. My mother then says "but what if it's hot out?" "Then go in the pool." (The problem here is that my mother is only comfortable in a narrow band of temperatures, between about 68 and 72 degrees.) So I'm getting these visions of my parents and my daughter sitting in the house while the pool and the trees and the grass lurk about outside the walls. We can sit in air-conditioned splendor in New York-- I don't need to have rented three acres for that.

I then get a whole lecture about how I'm too bossy, and I give too many instructions about how to handle my daughter, and how they raised me their way and I turned out just fine. (I neglected to point out that the way they raised me is precisely why I do certain things differently than they did.) At this point I announce that their visit is over, and that I'm pleased to have enabled them to see their granddaughter, and walk out of the room. Visit over.

Obviously, this is not a Mommy Dearest scenario. My mother isn't evil, or rotten, or even a particularly bad mother. She's a lovely grandmother (most of the time), and my daughter adores her (most of the time). But it just drives me apeshit when she insists that she knows better than I do on -- well, anything, but especially on matters relating to my kid. Because you know what? She's my kid. And thus I get to make the decisions.

This ought to be the one area in my entire thirty-something years for which my word is the final authority and if she disagrees, tough noogies. But she doesn't see it that way, naturally. And if I try to explain that this is my kid and these are my choices, I get the lecture about how we all turned out just fine back in the 70s and thus her choices are equally valid and entitled to equal weight. At which point I'm shouting in my head, "MY KID! MINE! MY DECISIONS ARE THE FINAL WORD! YOUR VIEWS ARE NOT RELEVANT!"

(It's probably worth noting here that I didn't announce my pregnancy to anyone until I was 18 weeks along, so that I could put off having to deal with my mother for as long as possible. We've gotten along much better since my daughter was born, but clearly I have some issues.)

It is of only small comfort that I'm confident that her own mother drove her crazy in precisely the same way back thirty-something years ago. It is of greater comfort, however, that I know that I, for the first time in my life, hold an all-powerful trump card: I don't have to let her see my daughter if I don't want to.

At least not until we all convene in the great woodsy outdoors so that my mother can take my daughter to the movies.