It's a little strange ... you are the same kid your parents said didn't have the sense God gave a flea. However, now you get asked questions about extremely important issues. These include questions about health insurance, long-term care insurance, living wills, medical issues, and even financial issues. The experts call this "role reversal." I call it more than I bargained for at this stage of my life.
Remember when your parents taught you how to count? Then they drilled those addition tables into your head, along with the subtraction, multiplication, and division tables. I can vividly remember my mother bopping me on the back of the head when I screwed up those tables. I can remember her asking "how are you going to get through life if you don't learn this?"
Well, here I am over 50-years old and I still don't know those tables. But I do know how to work both a calculator and use computer programs to handle the math. And now I get asked to look over her credit card bills. Maybe she realizes those tables were not as important as we were led to believe.
Then there were the times when I would sit at the kitchen table struggling to read and comprehend something from some english literature book with my mother pointing to each word. For the reading mistakes, mother would slap the table -- thank God -- instead of me ... maybe she had pity on my poor soul. She was convinced back then I would never learn to read, and absolutely not be able to comprehend.
However, now when I go to her house she is quick to hand over a stack of opened mail for me to read and give her my advice. I must admit that when I read her mail, I make sure not to sit at the kitchen table, and make sure she is another room of the house. Still, there is that rapid heartbeat, and sweat dripping down my back throughout the process. My therapist calls it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Maybe I will outgrow this one day when I realize my mother's reflexes have gotten slower as she has gotten more mature.
Sometimes things come out of left field and surprise me, sort of like an afternoon shower on a hot summer day. Just today my office phone rang with a call from my mother. Bless her heart, she was besides herself. Her credit card company called asking if she had made some purchases on line. My mother tries to understand current trends, but when she hears the words "on line" her first thought goes back to the days of hanging the just cleaned laundry "on the line" to dry ... it does not mean on the web.
I made some phone calls regarding the unauthorized charges. You won't believe what I found. Somebody --- certainly not my 78-year old mother -- tried to download "adult content" from the web. That's adult content as in XXX Hot Porn. Not only did this horny bastard try to download this erotic material and charge it to my mamma ... he tried four times to download this pornography and charge it to my mamma!
It seems the credit card police caught the suspicious charges as soon as they came through, then kicked them out faster than popcorn cooking in a microwave. The credit card company has my mother's "permanent record" --- another one of those fearful things from school days --- which includes her age. Can you imagine the poor guy who placed the call to my mother. He had to ask this mature woman if she had tried four times to make a purchase of sex videos from some place in Cyprus. At least he was discreet -- or a great big chicken -- when he made the call, and didn't mention the pornography ... that became my task.
I called mother, told her my investigative reporting training had lead me to track the charges and crack the case .. all in less than 30-minutes. Needless to say, I was rather proud of myself. However, that really didn't impress her, until I guaranteed her she didn't have to pay the charges, that the card had been cancelled, and a new card would be at her door in less than one week.
It was only then that she asked who had tried to use the card, how I figured it out, and the dreaded question ... what had this "so-and-so" tried to buy. Notice my mother is such a sweet and proper Southern woman that she used the words "so-and-so." That goes along with her other curse words ... "cracker barrel," "cream cheese," and "son of a biscuit eater." Unfortunately, her use of those words did not rub off on me ... I inherited my vocabulary from my father.
In any case, I explained I tracked down the telephone numbers on the web and linked them to the porn sites. Well, you know her next question. Yep, she asked "did you look at that filthy stuff ... please tell me you didn't watch anything."
Here's where I wanted to bop her on the back of the head for not comprehending. The guy had to pay to watch this stuff ... and I wasn't going to pay to watch. Then came the next question ... "What do you think he was looking at ... do they show everything?"
There is no proper answer for this question when the question is asked by one's mother. Any attempt to be truthful would have just brought about other questions ... questions I didn't want to answer. So I changed the subject. I opted to tell her how I had traced the name and email address used by the bozo trying to get my little mamma to pay for his cheap thrill.
And that's when it hit me ... we had really reversed our roles. I finally understood why she changed the subject so many times when I asked what I thought were legitimate questions. Like me, she didn't want to ride down a bumpy road into uncharted territory.
" ... and the buzzards keep circling!"
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