When you're young(and by young I mean until you've graduated high school) your parents are like your heroes. They provide for you, they seemingly have all the answers, and even when they don't, they are skillfully adept at telling you to look it up, research it, and bring it back to them. They take you to practice, discipline you, help with homework, and they just do an all around bang up job at being parents. Yes I am aware of the exceptions, but I'm going to stay positive for the purposes of this blog. By the time you leave for college (or the military, or trade school or Wal-Mart) you are equipped with the necessary skills for you to be an adult.

Then once you're in college, you pretty much shun your parents. Sure you accept their care packages, take their phone calls, visit them during holidays, and humor them with the occasional out-of-the-blue-just-thinking-of-you (aka I need money) calls, but for the most part you are living an autonomous existence. Why? Because that's part of what your parents were trying to teach you to be all those years. College is where you test your lessons, and its where parents admire their work..again, this is ideally.

Then after college, you start to become friends with your parents. The lessons are gone, you are ideally knee deep into whatever profession you've chosen, and the calls are light, easy and breezy. This is when you say to yourself, "hey my parents really aren't mean ass tyrants with no heart..", and good relationships develop. And then if you get married and have kids, they become your mentors, your confidantes, and all that good stuff. And then something happens..

Your parents start to get a bit more advanced in age, and then they get this trait that causes them to get on your f**king nerves. You don't want to be mean to them, and you don't love them any less, but when your phone rings and its them, you wonder whether you should pick up the phone now or call them later..you wonder if they'll say something to ruin your evening, and then you wonder if you're being a bad son or daughter..The thoughts and feelings run the gamut, and you end up picking up the damn phone, having a GREAT conversation for 10 minutes, and then it takes a turn for the worse, and you want to hang up in their faces. But you don't, you say I love you, you hang up the phone, then you bitch and moan to your significant other or your best friend about what just happened. Then someone who has lost one of their parents gets in your face talking about, "I wish I still had MY parents around.." and they try to intercept your perfectly valid anger, and it works..and it sucks..ok now I'm rambling

The point is my mother got on my nerves last night, and it seems to be happening more often, and I feel badly about it. My dad never gets on my nerves like this (except when he keeps asking me "So what else is going on?" instead of realizing there's nothing left to talk about and hanging up the phone). But my mother has a knack for making me angry or irritated both during the call, and then about 20 minutes afterwards. I have no solution, I just wanted to complain. I do love her though.