Daily Nugget

Today, for our Memory Nugget, we only venture to the recent past.
This past Christmas as a matter of fact.

Not surprisingly, it is difficult to shop for my mother. Birthdays, Mothers Day, Chistmas are all a stress nightmare of trying to find the gift she'll hate the least.

A couple months before this most recent Christmas she hinted that she thought a great gift for someone older would be a bunch of home-made meals, all frozen and ready to pop in a microwave.

"Ah HA!" I thought carelessly, "she has just told me what she wants for Christmas -- but she thinks I'll never do it! So I'll get to really surprise her!"

I spent the next 6-8 weeks planning meals for my family that I knew were HER favorites, buying extra ingredients, making the kids suffer through stuff they had never before tried, and carefully freezing them into single-servings in disposable Glad-wear type containers. After I had about a months worth of dinners collected, I made a list of all the meals and labeled them.

She didn't take them home Christmas day, but that was ok. I figured I could take them to her house sometime in the next week or so.
I kept asking when I should bring them over, when she suddenly declared that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to clean out her freezer for her -- cause there was no room for that food.

Experienced with my mother as I am, I could see where this was going (I thought). She had decided that I needed to come over, defrost, and clean out the freezer she surely hadn't bothered to clean out in a decade.
I wasn't going to do it.
So I said I didn't have time for that.
(Note that we aren't just talking about going over and spending 15 minutes tossing out expired containers and then wiping it down. Thinking on it, I recalled what she had let happen in the past, and I knew we were talking about an all-day event of defrosting 6 inches of ice with a blow dryer and trying to keep the floor from flooding.)

Weeks went by with the freezer never getting cleaned, cause she wouldn't do it.
(Although, to be honest, since she had been doing nothing but complaining for months about how she had no food in the house, I would like fo know what -- other than brick-thick ice, was taking up all that space in her never-cleaned appliance.)

Cut to: March of this year.
I have been disowned for nearly three months...but still her meals are waiting for her in my downstairs freezer.
Daring to speak to her on Facebook, I posted as much.
She wrote back -- in a post to my sister (cause she couldn't talk to me) -- that she didn't want any of my leftovers...that they didn't cost me anything and took no effort or time on my part.

Sigh.

My dad always used to say that where mother was concerned, unless a gift/favor "inconveniences you in some way, it doesn't count."

Right again, dad.
You'd think at my age I woulda learned.