Same Old Same Auld Lang Syne

My mom was supposed to have a biopsy of her ovary on Thursday, but for some reason no one has bothered to share with me, the procedure was postponed until Monday. She's been very difficult to tolerate. I don't know if her problem is that she's worried about what's going on with her ovary or ovaries, or if she's grouchy because she's in pain or otherwise feeling generally lousy. As usual, in any event, I'm the one paying the heaviest price for whatever it is that is bothering her.

I won't go into specific details of my mom's actions, but when she tried to give me cough syrup yesterday, I started to cough just as she started to put the spoon full of purple sludge in my mouth. This caused the spoon to bump into my chin and spill. Her reaction to the accidental spill was roughly what I would have expected it to be if I had deliberately spat the cough syrup she had just spooned into my mouth right into her face. As it happened, the response that she had intended to be punitive was so unfitting both in terms of its age-inappropriateness and with regard to its rather benign antecedent that it was all my brother and I could do to keep straight faces, but laughing in the face of my mother's outrage would have been practically suicidal.

After my mom left the room, by brother gave me me sympathy, which is something I don't recall ever happeneing after my mother has blamed me for a nonexistent crime. "You know that wasn't really about the cough syrip spilling out out of her hand," he said to me.

I agreed with him that it wasn't really about the cough syrup, but complained that even when her anger isn't about what it seems to be about, it always seems to be directed at me. My brother said that my mom will come to her senses and apologize. I responded that I will forgive her just like I always do, but it would be really nice if for once she would take whatever is bothering her out on someone else other than I. The favorite child agreed with me.

I mentioned that I didn't know if it would be better to tell dad with the hope that I might explain what really happened and avoid getting into more trouble, or if I should leave well enough alone and hope she doesn't say anything to him, either. My brother said he would tell my dad as soon as he got home so I didn't have to risk getting accused of telling on mom on top of everything else.

There was nothing else to do, and I was feeling yucky on top of everything else, so I went to bed and slept the rest of the day. My parents woke me up at about three minutes before midnight so that I would be awake for the start of 2011. Someone checked my temperature with one of those face thermometers that a sales representative gave my dad. My temperature was 104. My dad gave me Tylenol and another shovelful of the purple sludge cough syrup, and injected me with some generic steroid. He and my mom made some sort of a tent over a roll-away bed and aimed a vaporizer so that it was blowing steam or vapor or something moist into the tented area above the bed. My dad helped me into the bed. My mom was saying something to him about how it really wasn't an excuse for my behavior, but that she didn't know I was worse, and that's what probably caused me to make her spill the cough syrup. My dad rolled his eyes when she said that, then patted me on the shoulder a few times, probably to let me know that he sympathized with me. There was nothing more to be done, so I conked out until about noon today. This made for a grand total of twenty-one hours and thirty-five minutes of sleep out of the past twenty-four hours.

I'm trying to keep this all in perspective. If it ends up that something is seriously wrong with my mom's ovary or ovaries, I will wish I could go back to the days when she was mad at me for causing her to spill a spoonful of cough syrup. If nothing is seriously wrong with my mom's ovary or ovaries, we will have reason to celebrate. Either way, all the cough syrup in the world won't matter after Monday.