Eye-to-Eye

It's no mystery that Mom and I didn't always see eye-to-eye.  I gave her a really hard time during my teen years and as I grew older, we managed to get much closer.  Once I was married and had children of my own, I would talk to Mom on the phone every day, sometimes more than once a day.  I loved to share with her stories of my day, the kids' days, things that were happening in my life.  I loved to ask for advice, then promptly dismiss it because my way was the right way.  I loved to chat it up with her, giving her all the scoop on my neighbors and gossiping like BFFs.  Yesterday, I so wanted to call her so I could bitch about my neighbor who refuses to shovel his sidewalk.  She would have appreciated that and validated my utter bitchiness about the whole situation.

When I was pregnant with Regan, I was completely neurotic.  I worried about everything - what I ate, how I ate it and how it was cooked.  Mom came to visit us in Chicago and I distinctly remember standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing a grapefruit with hot water and soap.  Mom thought I was nuts - she couldn't understand why I would worry about the pesticides sprayed on the outside of a grapefruit when I had no intention of eating the outside of this grapefruit.  In true Mimi fashion, she made no bones about expressing her opinion of the situation, which only fueled my desire to scrub harder. I'll be damned if she was going to prove me wrong, so I spouted all sorts of empirical data that supported my effort to scrub the crap out of that poor fruit.  I'm not sure if I ever even ate that darn grapefruit.

It's not as though Mom and I argued all the time (well, maybe all the time until I went away to college).  See, I am the female version of my dad in many ways, and I think that drove Mom nuts.  Not that we don't all love Dad but I was pretty anal, not very flexible and very quick to judge (shocking, I know).  As far as my siblings were concerned, I was the "mini mom", always tattling on everyone and trying to enforce the rules.  Bottom line, I was just pissed that Mom had so many kids.  I only got 16 months to relish in the glory of being the only child, so I had a big chip on my shoulder and I think that's one of the reasons why Mom and I didn't always see eye-to-eye.

So, tonight as I perused the cookbook, I decided to make Chicken Divan.  Normally, I would attempt to revise this dish and make it healthier, substituting skinless chicken breasts and low-fat soup for the original ingredients.  Instead, I decided to let Mom be right this time and follow the recipe exactly.  I would give anything to not see eye-to-eye with her these days.  Love you Mom.