Chapter Seven
Setting Boundaries… Or Not
Jessica
“So why don’t you want me to know your name or age?” he writes.
“Just because, and you haven’t told your name or age either.”
My new phone buddy and I have been chatting it up on a daily basis, and I think Kristin is onto me.
“Well I’m just around 30, but my name…I like to keep the suspense.”
“Same here…”
“Why don’t you want to talk about what you do for a living, then?” he writes.
“At this point, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t talk about it without coming across as bitter, and really, there are better things to talk about.”
He writes back, “Yeah, I can understand that. So, what do you want to talk about?”
“What do you do when the thing you love doing gets soiled by someone who can’t help but ruin everything?” I ask.
“I thought we weren’t talking about work,” he writes.
“You’re right, of course,” I respond. “How long was your longest relationship?”
“One year,” he writes. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I really thought she was it. You?”
“I really wouldn’t feel bad about that,” I answer. “My longest relationship was for a couple years with an older guy.”
“What happened?” he asks.
“It turned out that he didn’t really like me, so much as he wanted to make someone else jealous. It kind of sucked figuring that out.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” he writes, “my last relationship ended when I came home to find my girlfriend packing up my things.”
I smile. “Yeah, that might be worse.”
“Oh, what’s worse is that she’d apparently been ‘dating’ someone else for a large portion of our relationship. He was there helping box up my stuff.”
“All right,” I type, “I think you win this round.”
“So, have you ever gotten close to tying the knot?” he writes.
It’s really not a question I want to answer, mainly because it’s one of the few questions to which I really don’t have a good answer.
“Work always seemed more pressing,” I write. I send another, saying, “Of course, I always thought that work was going to be the catalyst for the right kind of life, but apparently that’s not exactly as advertised.”
“Isn’t it great how we’re always told that work is going to make our lives the most livable, but it just seems to get in the way of everything else?” he writes. A few seconds later, I get another message from him, saying, “I know it’s trite by now, but aren’t we supposed to work to live, not the other way around?”
“That’s what I’ve always heard,” I write, and laugh as I continue, “but I have a sneaking suspicion the people telling us that are the ones who are actually benefitting from the work we do.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about work?” he writes. “It seems like that’s what’s really on your mind right now.”
“I’m sure. I’m sorry. I’m just trying, although failing, to think of something else to talk about. Work is really the only thing I do anymore.”
“No sorries,” he writes. “You said ‘anymore;’ what did you do before you worked all the time?”
It takes a minute for me to recall, but my mind finally settles on a vague, hazy memory, “I used to paint. I was never really that good at it, but I really enjoyed doing it all the same.”
“Why don’t you paint now?” he writes.
I’m sitting on my couch, and I look out the window at the night. There are a lot of things I’ve had to push to the side in order to make it work at the store.
This is what it’s like to own a business and not be super rich.
I type, “Sometimes, to fulfill one dream, you have to give up on others.”
It’s the most depressing thing I could think to write, but it’s also the most accurate.
People don’t get ahead by trying to follow all of their dreams at the same time. It’s like multitasking: yeah, you can work on multiple things at once, but it takes longer and nothing gets done nearly as well. It’s all about focus.
The phone beeps.
“I understand that you have to refine your plans, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose who you are and the things you love in the process,” he writes.
Yeah, I kind of do.
Who knows what would happen if I wasn’t there all day, every day? Someone would probably end up breaking in and I’d end up getting a phone call from the security provider on my way home from my cancer-ridden mother’s house.
Wait.
It’s not that I don’t trust my staff—I wouldn’t have hired them if I didn’t. It’s just that they have a way of doing things and I have a way of doing things.
While I’m there, I can oversee them and correct their course, but if I’m not there, they’ll just do things the way they think they should be done, rather than the way I know they should be done.
My phone beeps again.
“Still there?”
I write back, “Yeah. I guess I just don’t trust that things would get done if I wasn’t always there to oversee it.”
I flip on the television, not so much for the entertainment value, more for the fact that it’s just nice to hear another voice than the one through which my thoughts come. Mine.
“Bad staff?” he asks.
“No,” I write, “they’re great. They helped me build this thing. They just don’t have the inside experience to deal with everything that could come through the door.”
The more I’m watching myself explain this, the less convinced I am that it’s the right course of action. The problem is that I don’t know how to do it any other way.
My phone beeps, and I read, “Why not?”
I sit there and stare at the phone.
It’s a simple question that really should have a simple answer, but I’ve got nothing here.
I write back, “What do you mean?” just to buy myself some more time, but I don’t think that’s going to work.
My phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jessica,” it’s my dad. “I don’t want to worry you, but your mother and I are in the hospital. She’s fine, but she’s in a lot of pain. I was wondering if you might be able to come and sit with her a bit tonight.”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Of course, Dad, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“All right,” he says. “They’re going to go ahead and keep her here for a few hours. I guess they’re just going to go ahead and do the bone scans they had planned for her next appointment, so she’s going to be here for a while. I just don’t want to have to leave her here all alone.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I have to get back to the house. A young couple made a late appointment for a walk-through, and if they can’t see it tonight, they’re not going to be able to see it for at least another month,” he answers.
“A walk-through? What are you talking about?” I ask.
The line is silent for a minute.
“We’re selling the house, dear,” he says quietly.
“What?” I ask. “Why?”
“Between my medical bills and your mother’s medical bills, I just don’t think we’re going to be able to keep up with the mortgage payments,” he says. “Don’t worry, though, we’ll be fine.”
“Let me help you,” I tell him. “I’ve got money saved up from the store. I can pay your mortgage until you two get back on your feet.”
“We couldn’t let you do that, Jessica,” he says. “You’ve worked hard for that money, and we really don’t need a house that big anymore. I think this is going to be for the best. With my health and your mother’s health, we’re not really going to be able to take care of all the upkeep on it anyway.”
“Dad, I can’t just sit by and watch you and Mom lose the house,” I tell him.
“It’s already done,” he says. “We’ve found a realtor and put it on the market. If this couple likes it as much in person as they did on the website, I think we might just get an offer tonight, maybe tomorrow.”
“Don’t do anything until I’ve had a chance to talk to you about it,” I tell him. “I have money that I was going to put toward finishing off this remodel, but it’s almost done anyway. The only reason I was going to have the workers keep going was for spite—let me help you.”
“We can’t let you do that—hold on, your mother wants to talk to you,” he says, and hands the phone over.
“Jessica?”
“Hey, Mom, how are you feeling?” I ask.
“I’ll be all right. I’m in some pain, but the doctor says that’s normal. If anything, this is a good thing, because his schedule seemed to magically open up when I came in,” she says. “Now, I don’t know exactly what it is that you’ve been saying to your father, but based on what I’ve heard from this end of the conversation, I get the idea that you’re thinking of doing something really stupid.”
“Mom, I can’t just—”
“It’s what has to happen,” she interrupts. “We can’t take your money and we can’t keep caring for that house as it is. Promise me that you’re not going to blow your savings trying to keep us in a house that we can’t afford, and that’s too big for just the two of us anyway.”
“But Mom, I—”
“Promise me,” she interrupts again. “One of the only perks to having cancer is that people start listening to you. Are you really not going to listen to your mother?”
Now there’s the guilt trip from hell.
“We’re not going to let you do it, sweetheart,” she says. “We’ve already found a nice little apartment in town and it’s really going to be much closer to what we need, so I want you to promise me that you’re not going to fight us on this. This is what we want and it’s what we need.”
“What if I buy it?” I ask. “It has more room than my apartment, and I bet it would end up being cheaper anyway, ‘cause it’s outside the city. Everybody wins.”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” she says. “I know rent in the city is horrendous, but do you really think that you’d be up for taking this place on? It’s a big responsibility.”
And that right there, I think, is the root cause of my ambition: to prove to my mom that not only am I not afraid of responsibility, but that I can handle it better than she can. Of course, she’s calling me from the hospital, so I think it’s best that I leave that part out of my response to her.
“It won’t be a problem,” I tell her. “Do you have enough to stay there another month? I can start getting my stuff moved and everything, but I do need to give my landlord 30 days’ notice before I just up and leave.”
“Why don’t we talk about it over dinner tomorrow night?” she asks. “You don’t have to come down here. At this point, I’m just here for some tests. The doctor gave me some medication for the pain, and it’s really starting to kick in, so I should probably let you go.”
“I’m not going to make you go through all that by yourself,” I tell her.
“Hold on a minute,” she says.
I sit and wait.
My mother, when she’s not sick, can be a bit of a handful. Okay, she’s still a handful.
When I was growing up, my dad was always the one telling me I could do anything I want to do. Mom always told me that it would be better for me to manage my expectations.
Their house isn’t huge, but it does have more room than mine. Plus, if I can talk them into selling it to me, I might be able to talk them into staying there.
Not too many people would be so persistent with the idea of moving back in with their parents. In most cases, I wouldn’t be either, but this is a unique situation.
“Are you still there?” my mother’s voice comes back.
“I’m here,” I tell her.
“Your father’s going to stay with me,” she says. “He’s calling the potential buyers right now and he and I are going to discuss the possibility of having you move in there.”
“Sounds great, Mom,” I tell her. “Let’s get together soon and we can go over the details.”
“All right, sweetheart,” she says. “You have a good night, now.”
“You too, Mom,” I respond. “Love you.”
“Love you too, dear.”
I hang up, and a moment later, I realize what just happened.
My mom and dad would never go for just letting me buy their house outright. That comes from the same stupid pride that made my dad refuse my offer to help them with their mortgage for a while.
There’s one major trait that I got from my mom, and that is the profound ability to get people to come around to my way of thinking. It doesn’t always work at first, but if worse comes to worse, we both have unmatched skill in convincing others not only to go along with what we want, but that it was the other person’s idea in the first place.
Mom’s been telling me for years that I should save my money and just move home. I’ve always told her that I wanted to make it on my own, and if I couldn’t even afford an apartment, then I had bigger problems than just money.
She just convinced me to move back home. Not only that, she convinced me to take over their mortgage, all while I was thinking that I was the one coming up with the heroic solution.
I try to tell myself that I’m digging into this too deep, that they’re just in a bad position and that pride can only go so far anymore, but this is exactly something my mom would do. It’s not even out of character that she’d use the looming threat of her cancer to add weight to the plan.
I don’t know if she really believes that I’m incapable of making it on my own, or if that line of tripe is just her way of trying to get me to visit more, be around them more.
Of course, she’s never really been the sentimental type. We get along really well when we don’t talk about anything even remotely personal, but she’s always chided me on every decision I’ve ever made, always telling me that “mother knows best” and various similar versions of the thought.
Regardless of anything, it’s hard to fight the realization: my mom just played me.