I think there is some kind of algorithm to determine precisely how long I can avoid going to church before my mom starts breaking out the guilt trips. So far I think I'm standing at about a month and a half, and the Significant Glances and Not-So-Subtle Statements about We Missed You At Church and Christians Need To Attend Church Regularly Lest They Start Down The Non-Straight-And-Narrow-Path started about two Sundays ago.

She is no longer accepting "hey, this is my sleep schedule now, and I don't want to throw it off" as a valid excuse. Apparently I can somehow magically not have DSPS on Sundays. Which is not to say I didn't sort-of-on-purpose finesse my sleep schedule to make going to either morning OR evening services a legitimate hardship.

To top it off, my mom has again started asking that damn "what DO you do all night?" question, so familiar to me from the pre-Outing #1 days. I have discovered she asks this when she suspects I'm up all night visiting those icky "gay" "Christian" "websites" so I can be further warped into a perverted sodomitical apostate, and this whole "sleep disorder" thing is just a sneaky cover for inching out from under her constant supervisory thumb. Fortunately, I have a very convenient excuse in the pounds of jewelry I make at night hanging on the wall.

On the upside, on the rare occasions I reset the guilt clock by going to a service, she doesn't complain about me wearing pants anymore.

In a related vein, we also disagree on what constitutes "dressy," re: my cousin's impending nuptial celebration. Apparently "dressy" does not currently exist in my closet, requiring me to go buy clothing that one of us will inevitably hate. It also precludes pants and requires pantyhose and leg-shaving. Personally, I consider pantyhose both ugly AND uncomfortable, which offends the two core doctrines of my stylistic philosophy-- it must look good, and it must not make me want to kill the person who invented the article. I'm not sure if she really believes I don't know what she's doing, or not, because it's pretty damn obvious that she's reduced to using the most feeble pretext to get me to femme it up.

Fortunately, I have my dad on my side on this one, because requiring me to buy "dressy" clothing requires him to spend money, and he is firmly on the side of not spending money if he doesn't have to.

I think what irritates me most about the War of Passive-Aggression is that it essentially requires us both to treat the other like an idiot. Not only do I have to accept that my mom still thinks I have the reasoning skills and emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old, I have to treat her like she's incapable of processing honest logic to get her to treat me any differently, and every aspect of our relationship ends up being a bargaining chip. God forbid we respect each other as adults.

Labels: family