If I Make it to 70 They'll Finish Me Off Then

My mother had a stent put into her arm, and was awaiting surgery to shock her heart, when they came in and told her that her surgery was cancelled. As a former soap opera diva she decided to unwind with a little middle school style drama heaped over the phone to my grandmother and my grandmother decided that the high school level drama would be heaped onto me. My grandmother of course reminded me that this was the exact same surgery my father was supposed to have and skipped out on, and probably had a stroke from it. I am 45 years old, my mother is 65 years old, my father is 75 years old and my grandmother is 85 years old. It makes it pretty easy to remember ages, but as you can see the scope of the ladder there, God has cursed my family with longevity.

Why would I say such a thing? Well, my mother really is an over the hill soap opera diva, she managed to run off to have fame when I was very young. She has of course retired from the world of the semi famous (which is far worse than the actual famous because they spend every minute around you trying to convince you they are more famous than they are) and entered the world of the scary to those related to her. Why is this? Again the longevity aspect of things, she will probably live to be 110, and has nothing to live off of other than the sympathies of others. The translation of this would be ME.

Now I still stand a chance in all of this because my father is the first male on both sides of my family to make it to the age of 70. He of course has passed that and his brother has managed to just make it to 70 this year himself. The joke I have perpetrated on anyone that will listen for about a decade of blogging is that all the women live to be 100, none of the men live to be 70, and it’s because the women killed them. The further along the women go I start to consider that what God gave the men in my family is an exit strategy. It was like a line in the JRR Tolkien novel “The Silmarillion” (hey someone had to read it) “And the Gods gave the greatest gift to man, mortality, so that their finite time on this planet is all they have to worry about,” and I am thinking that I finally understand this.

Now of course the entire family can’t stand having my mother around, but they can’t seem to live without having her around to complain about. She rolls into town, complains about the accommodations, complains about how everyone doesn’t kiss her rear end enough. In Korean families the men teach their sons Tae Kwon Do and this is handed down from generation to generation, each never really fulfilling the potential of whet the generation before them had passed along. In my family (Scottish just for the record) the women hand down from generation to generation the art of guilt and emotional abuse. They all have inherited black belts in the craft, and unlike the Koreans the craft is perfected and crafted like a fine wine with age. My grandmother for example can mentally send suicidal guilty conscience to someone over 100 miles away, but fortunately I only have at max another 25 years to go through this, one way or another.