This is really getting to be a drag. Mom calls, and snail mails me her shopping lists, because she refuses to learn how to use email, even though she has the equipment and wi-fi connection to do so. I can’t keep fetching, then driving over an hour away to a different state to keep delivering the goods to her, every time she realizes she forgot to add something to the list, which would be every other day, if she had her wish. I can’t keep running up a tab for her, which never costs less than $100/per shopping trip, with a promise to pay me back later. She already owes me hundreds, and she’s got a helluva lot more money than I do.
I do not need the grief if I can only find one size of something she wants (a 2 lb. jar of Jif — and it HAS to be Jif — peanut butter isn’t good enough when she demands two 1 lb. jars). If I can’t find her preferred brand of unsalted saltines (there’s an oxymoron for you), no other brand will do, even though they all taste the same unless they’re stale. By the time we get done crossing off the vast majority of the items on one of her lists, we’ve gone to half a dozen stores.
I think she enjoys this. She’s manipulative by nature, and my dad did everything for her but cook dinner while he was still alive. This probably has more to do with keeping up with her neighbor, whose son lives five minutes away. HE drops off shopping for his mother, and mom must demonstrate that she has a willing slave to do the same for her, even though I’m not technically allowed to. She’s the one who laid off her home aide, who used to come in twice a week to do that. I guess I’m a whole lot cheaper, since I don’t get an hourly wage, and so far, she isn’t paying me back for the cost of the goods, let alone the cost of gasoline and tolls.
At some point, I will require that she fork over greenbacks to cover the cost on the receipts I give her, or ask her to send me a check for the previous items, along with her next list. Otherwise, she’ll have to have someone else do it, or rehire the woman she laid off. She spends more in two weeks on groceries and drug store items for herself than the two of us do in a month. I can’t keep fronting her that kind of money. I’m not running a 1930s general store.
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