Let the Remote Control
Fate here to have another celebration of mothers in advance of Father’s Day, because I am regularly called a mother (usually with another, less appropriate noun compounded).
Fate,
My mother wasn’t around much when I was a kid. I get it. She was a single parent, working up to three jobs at a time, and my dad wasn’t in the picture at all. It sucks that I spent more time with cousins, neighbors, and after-school care staff than I did with her, but we needed to survive.
I also got why we still didn’t spend much time together when I was legally an adult, even though I lived at home for a few years to save money. She didn’t have to work as much, since I was able to pay for my own groceries, phone bill, and all, but she did have a lot of lost relaxation time to make up for with all the stuff that got sidelined while I was growing up.
Now, though, her investment finally paid off. I’m making great money at my only job, I have plenty of vacation time saved up, and my boss tells me that we’ve got a seasonal slow period coming up, so I should use it.
My mother always dreamed of spending time in France, a little in Paris, to see the museums and visit the Eiffel Tower, and more in the countryside, to relax surrounded by beautiful scenery, fine wine, and exquisite dining.
I booked us two first-class tickets to Paris, a presidential suite at a five-star hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower that’s right smack in the middle of a ton of Michelin-rated restaurants, a luxury car to get us to the countryside (I’ll drive, of course), and a luxury villa in the heart of wine country. It was her birthday last night, and when I brought dinner to her (I wanted to take her out, but she said she didn’t have the time for that), I told her that I could finally make her dreams come true.
She told me to either cancel it or “make a romantic trip out of it with someone my age.” When I asked her why she’d turn down the perfect trip, the perfect opportunity for us to finally spend time together, she said that her favorite TV show, the one she’s watched so many times throughout my life that I know exactly which episode is playing in the first thirty seconds even though I’ve never been a fan, has been taken off the only streaming service she has, so now the only time she can watch is when it plays on the local broadcast station. She says the trip dates overlap with the best season in the whole series, and she doesn’t want to miss it.
I offered to buy her a subscription to the streaming service that does carry the show, because of course there is one. I’ve offered to buy her a DVD player and the whole series on DVD. She just keeps repeating that she can’t go, she’s gotta stay here and watch her show.
Why did you have to pull her show off the one place she could watch it on demand? I don’t like wine or care for art museums (you can see the Mona Lisa online without having to fight the crowds), and now my reason for trying to learn to appreciate them is turning down my efforts so she can make sure she watches Season 4 for the hundredth or whatever time.
If you don’t want the wine, maybe the cheese would be more to your taste?
All these streaming services and DVDs and videocassettes before them sure did make you mortals awfully entitled, thinking you were the masters of time, when even I have only so much control over its progression. Then once you start thinking you can control time, you start thinking you can control how others choose to spend their time…
I’m not saying that I deliberately had your mother’s favorite show pulled off her streaming service just to reassert control over an ungrateful species, of course, or at any rate, my lawyer says not to say that. I am suggesting as kindly as possible that you might want to carefully consider your own priorities, just as your mother has done with her own.