Water Blogged

I'm visiting with my mom for the week, helping her move to a new condo in a retirement community. It's pretty awesome here actually and Mario is counting down the hours until we can buy a condo here also.

There has been lots of driving back and forth to the old house, packing up the trucks and driving back. This leaves lots of time for many conversations. Yesterday mom and I were actually having a serious conversation about my father. We were discussing how dad was raised in a family that didn't discuss problems and serious emotions. One of the things my mother dealt with after they split up was knowing if my father really loved her. He was horrible at showing and saying he loved us. He definitely learned from his mistakes. And he definitely learned to tell my sister and me that he loved us. Although it was a little too late for my mother.

He got better with telling us his emotions. However, when it came to discussing problems, his first instinct was to keep it from us. He wanted to protect us. So when my father's depression kicked in full force, he dealt with it by locking himself away from us. For two girls in high school, this was too much and we didn't know what we had done wrong. It took me crying and yelling at him on the phone one day for him to finally tell me what was going on. The instant he told me he had depression, I became very calm. He realized that a little communication went a long way.

While my mom and I were discussing this, my mom decided to use an analogy. She said, if I invite her to the beach and she says no, I might think that she has a problem with me or doesn't like me. However, if she had told me that she couldn't go to the beach because she has crabs, then I would know that she's the one with the problem. Then I wouldn't have to worry.

Only this analogy did kinda worried me. Why of all things did she come up with this? Maybe this had been something that had happened in the past? Was she trying to tell me she had crabs? The woman really knows how to stop a conversation in it's tracks, because I sure as hell didn't know what to say after that.