Smaller doses more frequently

[elfs]

My mother likes to call and angst and anguish at me once in a while, usually when she's been drinking a little too much. She goes and on about how she failed me as a mother (funny, I'm the member of the family that's doing fine) and so forth and so on. She can't really worry about my siblings: Ruth isn't hers to worry about, Steve and Sandy both have their own much more messed up lives than my own.

At least now it's only for half an hour every week or so, rather than a real binge every month. But, still.

This week, however, was special. As I revealed recently, I bought a new phone. That one in the picture to the left. And yes, true to my nature, it is pink.

For some reason, this really freaked my mother out. She sounded very upset, as if it were wrong for me to have a pink phone. She insisted that since Omaha had a black phone I should "trade mine for Omaha's." She went on and on about how a pink phone was just not appropriate for a man and kept asking, "Are you sure? Are you sure?"

I finally had to say, "Mom, I am not an insecure man. And I am keeping my phone."

"Whatever. Whatever makes you happy. If it makes you happy, you go ahead and keep it." Sigh. She converted from Catholicism to Judaism, and she really learned how to manage guilt from both sides. Good grief!

Comments

[fallenpegasus]

From
this story in the New York Times:

When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure.