My Mom's Visit

In about 2 weeks my mom arrives for a visit.  She lives in Okinawa, where she is a civilian employed by the military, so we don’t see her very often.  This is a visit I’m not particularly looking forward to because we are overdue for a serious talk.  Mom and I have been planning to live together when she retires, a suggestion I made and was very surprised she accepted.  She likes the idea of living somewhere where her retirement money will go farther, and where the climate is warm.  She has been reading books about retiring overseas and studying Spanish with Rosetta Stone.  She has lived overseas for years, although always in the protective shadow of U.S. military bases, and with luxurious housing and plenty of money.  She has also lived alone for years and we already know we’re going to have some very basic getting-along issues with living together, without all the extra issues I’m going to pile on. 

We can’t agree on a destination.  Based on what she’s read, she likes Panama; I’ve never been there, and I’m trying to keep an open mind, but I have my doubts about the culture, climate, and the prospects for a country so dependent on fossil fuels and on the USA (at least, this is my impression of it).  I love Mexico.  Mom thinks, as most Americans these days do, that Mexico is too dangerous.  I tell her that’s like saying Vermont is too dangerous because of crime you’ve read about in Detroit, but she points out we’ll want to cross the northern border occasionally.  I love the culture of Mexico.  Mind you, I’m no fan of human sacrifice, but what survives in present-day Central Mexico of the Aztec and other cultures is rich, unique, and valuable.  (Unlike the surviving remnants of Mayan culture farther south, which doesn’t seem to do its beneficiaries a great deal of good.)  From what I’ve seen, I don’t find the Afro-Caribbean cultures, which is what I think Panama most closely resembles, appealing or very practical.  I also prefer a slightly cooler, higher altitude climate; mom likes the beach.  Clearly, some traveling together is called for to settle on a destination, at least one trip to each country.  But her vacation time will limit that and there might be a year between trips, which might be enough delay to render the second trip unfeasible, effectively forcing us to choose kind of blindly.

Then there are the issues like transportation and housing: mom is going to want a car and a car-friendly place, while I want a horse and a horse-friendly place; mom is going to want to live close to shopping and other American retirees; I like urban settings but also long for land and livestock.  Mom is going to want to rent an apartment, I’m going to want to buy a homestead.  She’s going to feel like she gets the deciding vote, and she does, because she’s the one with the money.  But when the money is gone or worthless, and mom is old and sickly (never having been of very robust health), she’s going to need us – how do I keep from using that probability to get a little leverage for myself?  Finally, our values are just so different.  I was horrified that after the disaster in Japan, her only concern was when her electricity would come back on.  She has taken trips to volunteer in China before but I haven’t heard a word about making any sacrifices to help the Japanese or even to determine what help they might need.  She doesn’t prepare for disasters herself, but blindly trusts governments and social institutions to keep her safe.  She is generous with her family and friends, but feels no personal, individual responsibility to the greater world. 

So, some not-fun talking is in order.  Communication is difficult for us.  Mom is very sensitive, and one cross word from me inevitably leads to a lot of drama, which leads to eye-rolling from me because I don’t really want to have a long tearful talk about why I said something snappy, I just want to apologize and get on with it.  I could go on – the point is, we get on each others’ nerves, and we have conflicting styles of dealing with that annoyance.   

But I think that somehow we have to learn to live together.  Otherwise I might be stuck with my husband, whose ignorant and increasingly harmful parenting practices are not what I want my son to grow up with.  If I could design the culture I want to live in, it would look something like one I read about somewhere – African, I think? – where women sleep with whoever they want, and raise their children with the help of their brothers and the rest of the maternal family.  (Of course this happens locally too, but I mean for it to be accepted as right, as normal, rather than dysfunctional.)

And as for Mom, neither I nor she knows what she’ll do if she doesn’t live with us.  She hadn’t given the first thought to retirement when I first asked her about it, and she was 51 at the time. 

To me, the fact that this is even a dilemma, that such choices are possible and have to be made, that such distance exists between generations and within pretty typical families, is just another sign that American culture has drifted so far from the normal human condition.

Oh, and on top of all this, we have a lot of work to do.  We have to make decisions about all the excessive stuff we have - what to store for shipment and what to get rid of.  What to do with the house.  Not looking forward to it.