TheBanyanTree: High Maintenance

[Margaret R. Kramer]

Why do people use their cars as trash receptacles?  How hard is to just
throw your trash into the garbage can when you get home?  Then the car stays
clean and neat all the time.  If I want to ride in Ray’s car, it becomes a
half hour project for him to clean months’ worth of pop cans, bags, old
mail, and other junk out of it just so I can sit down in the front seat and
have somewhere to put my legs.

It’s the same at work, too.  I’m always the “driver” because my car is clean
and neat.  There are  places to sit, front and back, because I don’t allow
my car to become a moving junkyard.  I’m ashamed of my coworkers’ cars; they
’re “garbage cars” and would be condemned if they were houses.

I feel bad because I said “no” to watching my grandsons today.  I have
nothing really solid planned, and we could have watched them, but we just
had them last weekend, and to be honest, it’s an extremely draining
experience.  The little one is OK, but the older one is high maintenance,
not in a clingy sense, he just wants an audience to watch everything he
does.

In other words, he doesn’t play well on his own and his little brother isn’t
always enough “audience” for him.  Plus, the older one’s brain moves at 100
mph and if we don’t provide structured activities for him to do, then he
spirals out of control and begins to dismantle our house out of boredom.  I
love my new house too much to have it destroyed, so I go to great lengths to
keep him busy just to prevent broken furniture, glassware, and coloring on
the walls (yes, he still does that at the age of seven).  He is considered
“gifted and talented,” and that’s part of the problem, ordinary activities
for ordinary kids aren’t quite enough for him.  We play a lot of chess!

So I said “no.”  I feel bad, because if I was a good grandmother, my
grandchildren would always be welcome here, no questions asked.  But I work
hard all week and really look forward to my weekends, so having them on for
an unplanned rainy and cold Saturday when they can’t get outside, is not
what I call fun.  I guess I’m not the happy and cookie baking grandmother I
wish I could be.

And I also feel bad when I’m not the good friend I wish I could be.  One of
my co-workers moved here from South Dakota last summer.  And I should be a
better friend to her.  I feel bad because her house has been for sale since
that time and no bites.  And I can empathize, because I’ve just been through
that experience.  It’s a nice house, but I’m sure with the recent real
estate market slow down, there just isn’t the traffic she needs to get it
sold.

She is slipping into financial oblivion because she can’t afford a mortgage
and rent on her townhouse here in MN.  She’s been living off her credit
cards the last few months, although I think there are things she could have
done a few months ago that might have prevented her from going into deep
debt, like being aggressive to find a renter, etc.  But she drifts along
letting things happen to her and not taking care of business.  For example,
she just went on a trip to Michigan for no real reason, and her bank account
is overdrawn.  It just doesn’t make sense.

She has no friends here, other than at work, so she gets clingy.  High
maintenance.  I’ve done social things with her, but I can’t do them every
weekend.  And when I say, “no,” I get comments like, “Sure, you spend all
week with me at work, so you don’t want to see me on weekends.”  Yes, that’s
part of it.  But I also don’t like my weekends pre-scheduled, I like the
flow of doing what comes along.  It makes me uncomfortable to feel
responsible for someone else’s social life.  I know I could include her in
more things, but I have asked her to come along with my family on a couple
of occasions, and then she backs out at the last minute, so why bother?

There are ways to make friends, like joining a church or a group, but it
does take time.  Whining and crying about a lack of social life isn’t a good
way to attract people.

I’m a loner.  I don’t mind spending time on my own, so I don’t think I’m
high maintenance.  I try to take care of my own business, and one of my
defects is that I’m probably too reluctant to ask for help.  I don’t need an
“audience” to watch me in my daily activities.  I’m low maintenance or no
maintenance.  I’m like the clean car that doesn’t mind a taking on few
passengers once in a while, but on my own terms.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net

You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so
it's all right.
~Maya Angelou