Family sacrifices

What is it about family that makes us so crazy? Why is it that family can make us sacrifice more than any other single being in our lives, and why does it drive us so insane to make those sacrifices?

This weekend, I'm taking Praxis exams. I just finished them, actually. My brain is fried. I dredged stuff back up that I'd happily forgotten for the last 20 or 30 or more years. I wrote pages on ideas that I didn't understand, expostulated on theories that I pulled out of my imagination, made best guesses after ruling out the obviously incorrect choices. In short, I relived high school all over again, in six long and grueling hours.

And I'll be darned - I came back to my mom's, looked up one of the answers that I took a wild stab at answering, and wow! I actually answered it fairly well. Essays, of course, are subjective evaluations, so it remains to be seen if my answers were literate enough and included enough reasoning to get the points I need. But the basic facts were there, amazingly enough, in spite of rather wild guessing. Well, ok, given the US history I do know and the recent cramming to squeeze more facts into my poor tired old brain, perhaps it wasn’t quite wild guessing, but reasoned hypothesizing with a good dose of luck and some decent writing skill thrown in.

Here's where the family stuff comes in. Upon returning to my car, when I could turn my cell phone back on (they are outlawed while testing, understandably so), I found frantic messages from my mom, letting me know that dinner had been changed, it was now two hours later, and one hour further distant. So I could relax and not break all speed barriers trying to get back for dinner. (We're taking my aunt out to dinner.)

Now, instead of dinner at 3, only an hour and a half from home, we're having dinner at 5:30, two and a half hours from my home. We're driving home tonight because we have a friend from Vancouver visiting us for about 18 hours, stopping overnight on her way from Boston to Florida. My mom did know this at one point, because we originally scheduled the dinner for Saturday so my girls and I could attend, squeezing in our time between the testing schedule and the visiting friend schedule.

To further complicate the matter, instead of a restaurant where I know all three of my picky-eater daughters will find at least one dish that they could enjoy, we're now headed to the middle of nowhere to eat in a restaurant where none of us like the food, and probably pay a lot more for the privilege of not enjoying our dinner, on a non-existent income, anticipating being a pathetically poor single mom full-time student.

I’ve been up since 5 am, left the house at 6 am, and spent an intense day testing. My mom knows this, too, because she got up with me this morning to make coffee, and said a prayer this morning for me to have success in testing, since so much of my future rides on the results. I had a two-hour round trip drive to the test, and spent 6 hours at the testing center. She knew all of this, too, because we were calculating whether I’d make it back in time to drive my girls to the original dinner place/time, since my mom can’t fit all three of my girls, my aunt, my sister and herself all in her tiny car.

So what would possess my mom to make her change the dinner to a much later time, adding an hour onto my drive, on top of an exhausting day? I’m not sure.

And the thing is, we’ll go. And I won’t say a word about it, because it’s too late to change back at this point, so what good will it do to complain? It will just make everyone else miserable. I’ll suck up and eat a lousy dinner, spending too much to do so. I’ll endure the whining of my teenaged daughter, who will be upset at how late we’re getting home tonight because she’s tired, too, and needs the weekends to catch up on her sleep and doesn’t have much time to sleep this weekend. And my mom will never know, unless she happens upon this blog, how much chaos she’s added into an already chaotic life. And I’ll never tell her, because what good will it do to tell a 73 year old woman, trying to pacify her 81 year old sister, that she’s made her daughter’s life worse?

It’s funny. It doesn’t feel good to make this self-sacrifice, the way it would make me feel good to help a friend get to the doctor with a broken foot, or to give up Thanksgiving Dinner in order to work in the homeless shelter, or to bypass the chocolate cake for the sake of the dress I want to wear to the conference next month. Is that because I’m equally taking for granted my parent, thinking she should just know that she’s made my life more difficult? Or that she should at least have hesitated before making the change, maybe tried harder to reach me first, or even ask my 15-year-old if she thought I’d care? At least my daughter would have reminded her that we had company coming on Sunday. And had she recognized the restaurant name, she might have remembered that none of us liked it very much when we were there before.

I wouldn’t resent a friend calling me to ask if I’d take her to the ER because she thought she’d broken a bone in her foot. I do resent having to spend all the extra time and money on an already overloaded weekend, without even being asked. Maybe it’s the asking. Or rather, the not asking, the being taken for granted. Perhaps there’s a lesson I can take away from this.

Perhaps, the next time I force my daughters to make a difficult choice between attending the last day of camp and attending their cousin’s birthday party, I can be more sympathetic. And maybe I should remind them, while I’m at it, that at least I’ve allowed them to make their own difficult choice, rather than present them with the ultimatum of a done deal that is all around bad for them, without even thinking of consulting them first.

Nah, probably won’t do any good. After all, I’m their mom …