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Filial Piety
Apr. 25th, 2011 11:03 pmI went to Omaha for Easter to visit my mom. I was conflicted over this before I went, and am still conflicted over it now. I went down Saturday afternoon and came back Sunday afternoon so with the car rental and gas and all I spent over a hundred dollars to spend 24 hours with my mom and her TV.
I had decided to go due to a sense of--guilt? filial piety? sense of impending mortality? I can't find a phrase for it. Basically, I have begun to notice that when the news reports the death of some famous person, that person is around my parents' age. I find this very disturbing. I have trouble thinking of my parents as being old, and even more trouble thinking about them dying. So I decided that maybe I should make more of an effort to spend holidays with my mom.
The problem with this is, visits with my mom are not very fulfilling because we are not well-connected. I'm not saying we fight, far from it--it's just really hard to have a conversation with her. We just don't seem to overlap in a lot of places. And then there is the TV, which my mom has on All The Time. I am not a TV watcher, and every time I visit my mom I am reminded why. Commercials are loud, stupid, and ever-present. And I am not going to go into sitcoms; I don't have the energy to drag up that much invective. So my visits turn into me trying to find things I can do in the living room, so that I am at least in the same room with my mom, suffering through the Really Loud TV. Yeah.
My mom was happy to see me, however. I have difficulty understanding why, given how little we talked, but whatever. After our lunch on Sunday we went to the Cathedral of St Cecilia, which has an exhibition of an exact duplicate copy of Michaelangelo's Pieta. (I just know I messed up the spelling there. Just roll with it.) It is a pretty amazing sculpture, so I was very glad Mom had suggested it.
So there it is. I am not sure when I'll visit mom next, though it is remotely possible that I could drop in on her when going home from the Sioux City Kotei. Since this would coincide with Mother's Day I am feeling strongly pressured. On the other hand I am feeling a little whiney and put-upon by this--if Mom and Dad thought visiting your parents was so important, why didn't we visit Grandma and Grandpa more often? Yeah, they lived a few hours away but they didn't even make regular phone calls. I hate it when my brain splits like this; it makes it so hard to decide what to do.
I had decided to go due to a sense of--guilt? filial piety? sense of impending mortality? I can't find a phrase for it. Basically, I have begun to notice that when the news reports the death of some famous person, that person is around my parents' age. I find this very disturbing. I have trouble thinking of my parents as being old, and even more trouble thinking about them dying. So I decided that maybe I should make more of an effort to spend holidays with my mom.
The problem with this is, visits with my mom are not very fulfilling because we are not well-connected. I'm not saying we fight, far from it--it's just really hard to have a conversation with her. We just don't seem to overlap in a lot of places. And then there is the TV, which my mom has on All The Time. I am not a TV watcher, and every time I visit my mom I am reminded why. Commercials are loud, stupid, and ever-present. And I am not going to go into sitcoms; I don't have the energy to drag up that much invective. So my visits turn into me trying to find things I can do in the living room, so that I am at least in the same room with my mom, suffering through the Really Loud TV. Yeah.
My mom was happy to see me, however. I have difficulty understanding why, given how little we talked, but whatever. After our lunch on Sunday we went to the Cathedral of St Cecilia, which has an exhibition of an exact duplicate copy of Michaelangelo's Pieta. (I just know I messed up the spelling there. Just roll with it.) It is a pretty amazing sculpture, so I was very glad Mom had suggested it.
So there it is. I am not sure when I'll visit mom next, though it is remotely possible that I could drop in on her when going home from the Sioux City Kotei. Since this would coincide with Mother's Day I am feeling strongly pressured. On the other hand I am feeling a little whiney and put-upon by this--if Mom and Dad thought visiting your parents was so important, why didn't we visit Grandma and Grandpa more often? Yeah, they lived a few hours away but they didn't even make regular phone calls. I hate it when my brain splits like this; it makes it so hard to decide what to do.
