That's always the threat right? When you are a teenager and just raising hell your parents would tell you that they wish someday you have a child just like you.
We didn't.
Katie was such a good kid there were times we wondered who got our hell spawn and how they were coping. If it weren't for the fact that she looks like Brent with my eyes we would have been sure of it. But no, she was just a really good kid. She didn't ditch classes. She got good grades. Even if she didn't really apply herself as is our way, she was just so smart that she didn't need to. She was kind. She didn't get into fights. We never worried about her going out and getting in trouble.
We dodged the curse!
Right until we didn't.
We never told our parents anything. I don't mean when we were in high school and doing things that could have and should have gotten us in trouble, I mean as adults. We didn't tell them anything.
We didn't tell my mother things because she really believed she was a clearing house. Any news she got she disseminated among everyone else. And I do mean everyone. When I got mono in high school I was so incredibly embarrassed that every single person she worked with, and half of the customers she rang out knew about it. Good or bad she spread the news.
So if you didn't want everyone to know all of your business you just kept it to yourself.
Which I did. I would carefully curate which things I told her so that I knew what was being said. Or sort of knew anyway. When she got cancer one of the first signs was what seemed like sudden onset dementia. It was due to a huge amount of calcium leaching into her bloodstream. Made her a bit unreliable as a narrator. She would get mad at me for not calling her when I had just talked to her the day before. She made up an entire feud between me and my niece that was so convincing I had to text Ashley to make sure we weren't fighting and I had just forgotten it.
With Brent's parents if you told them anything they wanted to dissect it. Ask every question. Why did you see that movie? What in your life lead you to buying that particular couch? It was always a lot. So we did the same thing. We carefully fed them the stories we wanted them to pay attention to and didn't mention anything else. If I was looking at a career change we didn't say anything until it was done. Because I changed a lot. And I wasn't up for all of the questions and what felt like judgement. Which it probably wasn't. Maybe. Possibly...yeah, no, it was.
And we do know that part of why they were so deep into wanting every bit of information about whatever we told them was because we told them so little. They were starving people landing on a crumb. So it was kind of a vicious circle.
So imagine my shock the first time I was asking Katie about something and she said, "Well that's really none of your business." What? Excuse me?
Yeah, she's just like us. She doesn't share much and she curates what she does share. During this move I knew the timeline of things happening more from Patty asking me questions about availability to do a few things than I did Katie telling me what she was thinking.
We do talk every week and she does share things with me, I know that, but to find out that she doesn't tell me everything was a shock. Yeah, we did it with our parents but I'm not like other moms, I'm a cool mom!
She is just like us.
And I am just like our parents. I post pictures of the cats so she will like them. I watch TV shows she suggests for me so we can talk about them. I ask too many questions because I want to know everything.
At least now I don't have to worry about that poor family in Idaho who had to raise our hellcat, it just took awhile for the true curse to come out!
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