I know she is my mom and she's done a lot for me, but she does annoy the crap out of me at times.
Some people are independent, by which they can and like doing stuff themselves. Some are not, and my mum falls into that category. Problem is she until very recently lived at home without a job and just lived off my dads income doing what she wanted most days with a good amount of disposable money to spend dolling around drinking tea with her middle class friends on a Monday afternoon.
But then they divorced, and suddenly she was thrust into this world of not having a husband to do stuff for her, while also having to work full time. We clash quite a lot because I am someone who likes to do stuff myself, and it frustrates me when other people need help with everything.
For example, 6 months ago the heater in my moms car broke. No surprise, cars break. That was fine because it was warm and in the summer. Now, if that were me, i'd have gone "well I need to fix this before winter because otherwise it's going to be ****ing cold on the way to work in Dec/Jan". So i'd take it to the garage whenever I was next off work for a few days, because I need a car during the working week. My mom does none of this. She suddenly realises in the middle of December that it's getting cold and she needs her car fixing. She has a few days left in her holiday allowance she could use, but instead she books this off to do her own stuff and see her boyfriend. And then she goes back to work, and makes it everyone elses problem. She books it in for the Christmas week, which is when her work is most busy. So now between me, my sister, and her boyfriend, we are having to juggle taking her and collecting her from work, and picking up and dropping off her car. She does this kind of thing quite a bit and it really winds me up the wrong way, she would rather inconvenience everyone else than take it out of her own time. I'd say 80% of the time if I book a week off work, she'll get some big job going so I have to sort it out. Never in her own time off, hell no. She uses that to go down and see her BF in London for the week.
I know I am probably quite harsh and most people wouldn't mind helping out. But that is just me, I like to do everything myself if I can, I don't think it's healthy to rely on people that may not be around one day soon. When my car needs a service it certainly doesn't invole three other people. I organize it myself and get it done myself without inconveniencing anyone else. She seems to think she has the hardest job in the world, because she has to stand on her feet selling jewellery from 9am til 6pm and therefor doesn't get home til 7pm. Not great hours, but hardly terrible. For example, Trotter here recently did a 17 hour day as per above, my cousin has a newborn baby and a wife working full time, and he does manual labour carpentry from 6am til 6pm six days per week. There are single moms with 2 young kids working worse hours than this, and they cope. But my mom really seems to struggle working 9am til 6pm with no-one to look after but herself. Kind of concerns me because I am saving up pretty fast now and hope to be moving out in 12 months or so. I've no idea what she will do when she can't just ask me to do stuff all the time.
