I knew this was going to be hard, but one thing I was completely unprepared for was how much TV my mom watches. I didn't know I would be battling with the box for moments of her attention. The last time I lived here, in high school, we had one weekly show that we would watch together, and she would occasionally watch the evening news. At some point, however, they got DVR service, and now, unrestricted by the boring lull of daytime TV, my mom can watch TV ALL DAY LONG! She records what seems to be every single prime time TV sitcom, drama, and several news programs and watches them the next day and / or evening, and even late into the night. Since I'm sleeping on the fold out couch in the living room, this has caused another fighting point. I'm used to getting up at 5:30 in the morning for work. At the moment I don't have to get up so early, but I'm accustom to it, and in a month I will be starting another job with a 7:30 am start time, so in my mind it's not worth it for me to totally alter my sleep schedule for a month so that my mom can stay up till midnight watching TV every night and sleep in till 10:00 or later every day.
Every time she complains that I'm inconveniencing her, I remind her that there is a simple solution. We can clean the bedroom, which we agreed would be done before my summer job began, allowing me to sleep and her to watch TV in the living room. Or I could just "stop being so stubborn and follow her sleep schedule since I'm in 'her' house" (not her house).
On Sunday I asked her to pause the TV. "When this program is over, could you please take a TV break and have a conversation with me?" I asked. This prompted: "No!, Why do you always focus on how I'm affecting you - you're affecting me! My shows are piling up - I won't talk to you till Tuesday." Fine. On Tuesday, I asked her to pause the TV. "It's Tuesday. When this program is over, I'd like to have the conversation you promised we could have today" I stated. An eye roll, "You still want to talk? I thought you would drop it." Seriously? I'm not an infant; you can't put a blanket over a toy and make me forget about it. Putting off a conversation from Sunday to Tuesday is not going to make me give up on it.
I expressed my concerns that in the week I'd been home for we had made no progress on the bedroom. A week doesn't sound so long, but in the frame of five weeks to get a goal done...a week is a fifth of that time. I explained that I had been inquiring about rooms to rent, since I was unsure we could meet our originally agreed upon goal, and unwilling to work around her TV viewing once I was working, and I needed to know if I should follow up with people, or if she could honestly still promise me that the bedroom would be ready. She explained that she could only focus on one thing at a time and that she had a bill for a bridge toll hanging over her head and she felt really guilty working on anything else until she took care of that, and this is what had stopped her from working on the room.
So, your guilty conscious about the bridge toll you need to take care of is just strong enough that it keeps you from cleaning, but not quite strong enough to keep you from watching hours and hours of television. How convenient.
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