Nuggets

I often worry that someone will stumble upon this blog, read a random post, and -- without knowing context -- wonder why I am such a heartless bitch to my mother.

To remind myself I am not totally crazy for wanting to break away from her.. I offer the following memory nugget:

I shall tell the tale of the day my dad and I spent all morning, afternoon and evening pulling up a tile kitchen floor, scraping and scrubbing at the old adhesive and dirt, and then putting down new, shiney tile.

It was night. We were 98% done, and pretty proud of ourselves.
My dad, not exactly known being a wiz at home projects (in other words, he sucked at them and also tended to end up in the ER), was especially pleased. We looked at the shiney new floor and thought "wow, we did that! And it looks good!"

Cue: My mother walking up the stairs, and making her first appearance at the project site.
Dressed in a caftan, with a cigarette to her lips, she lowered her glance to look at the floor.
My dad said something like "Looks pretty good, eh?!"
Sneeringly, she took a brief pause to puff on her cigarette, exhaled, and said: "Most people wouldn't put a new floor down on top of dirt."

Naturally, we corrected her and explained how we had scraped and scrubbed,
It didn't matter, of course,
Her point had been made.
In her mind what we had done was shit, and we didn't even try to do it right. She would never admit to liking it, and would -- no matter what -- ever, EVER dare to say it looked good.

The biggest surprise about all this, is that we were surprised.
My mother never admitting to ever liking anything...and it was well known that my dad and I were useless losers....so how could we possibly have done a nice job?
Looking back, her response should have been completely expected,