Cammy and I each have a brother. Oh, what brothers they are too. In the food chain they are each moms favorite. The mom gleans, smiles, perks up, and nearly parades the food and comforts of home for their sons. We daughters on the other hand, sit back and watch this fountain of youth bubble. We daughters don’t’ achieve that treatment, moreover, more than often we are closer to dirt than the ground once our brothers come around.
Yet ask that brother to help you with mom, her infirmities, insanities and suddenly our brothers, our male siblings are dumber than dirt – if they have been trained well by their girlfriends or wives. How they can pull it off? With the look – the deer in the headlights stare, the incapable incapacitated dullard dunce with the “I dunno know” rapier displayed. Therefore, easy to shoot dead between the eyes, it’s sinful.
The Brother will either take the mom and decide it’s best if she’s just down the street from him, living in an apartment sized box, with no civil concerns about what she will do with her time. The Brother will extract the mother from her life, her sewing machine, her garden, her automobile, her familiar driving neighborhood, her doctors, her surviving friends and basic life to leave her down the street in other state, a strange city but it is close to him. Yes, just down the street from his life and his friends and leave it all up to his wife to take care of HIS mother.
When the wife disagrees with her husband’s (the Brother) plans watch out! Hell hath no furry like a woman stuck with another woman. When the wife is forced into hand maiden services such as driving, shopping and more because her mother-in-law, truly doesn’t know this new location where she will be living. See the wife rationalize why the mother-in-law would be put out by her son (the Brother) to live out her life where she currently is. Oh, yes but they will visit often.
Why does only another woman recognize this? Like the daughter or female friends of the family? Or are the Brothers or sons just afraid to speak up on their idea of calling “a park job” – that of planting their mothers where it’s close but not comfortable or familiar to relive their guilt.
Brothers will show up on the home turf for traumas and tragedies but not for the day-to-day duties. It’s pretty much a fact. In addition, if the Brother is doing it, odds are his own wife is doing more.
Ask the brother to give up his job to move? Nope. Ask the daughter to relocate, oh especially if she is single or childless. It is her duty and we are crucified if we don’t. The Christmas gifts no longer come from the siblings, if the single, the childless female sibling, and we do not attend to the duties as THEE caregiver for the parent.
Ask only the youngest daughter of the tribe – because it is in the genetic pool that only the baby should tend the elder. Moreover, it will not be the baby boy; it will only be the baby girl.
Big Brother is off the hook – for both of us. We girls do have that added chromosome, right?
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