I actually managed to shut Nmom down for once.

My Nmom had surgery on her right hand (she is right handed) early last week and then my GCbrother (he lives with her) had an emergency appendectomy on Thursday night so, being the awesome SG I am, I packed up my daughter and we went over to Nmom's house to help out. Nmom has a small horse farm and wasn't able to feed her horses or really take care of the house properly since she was one handed and my brother was in pain so I wanted to help out.

Yesterday, I'd just gotten back inside from feeding the horses and fixing her fence (an ice storm knocked parts of the horses' fencing down) and I began to prepare supper for the family. Breaded steaks with lemon and baked potatoes. We were supposed to have "harvard beets" as well but I didn't know how to make those and I was exhausted from caring for Nmom's house, horses, plus keep an eye on my toddler. I'm 7 months pregnant, by the way.

So, I'm cooking and Nmom is nonstop with the criticizing everything I was doing, "you should have made the potatoes after the steaks," "there isn't enough oil in the pan, you are going to have to add more oil," "you should email the hospital and tell them you need lactose milk from WIC. You're going to call them on Monday? Well, you procrastinate too much." "How much grain did you give the horses? Did you turn the fence back on? You should have given them a half scoop [of grain] when you took [my daughter] down there to see them." To this I replied, 'she didn't have any gloves on,' and Nmom answered, 'why didn't she have gloves on? She should have had gloves on.' And I answered, 'Seeing as it's raining ice, I wasn't planning on taking her down to the barn at all. That's why she didn't have gloves on.'

So, after this barrage of criticism, I'm between chores/things I needed to do and I sit down at my computer to browse Reddit. I tune Nmom out. Finally, after about 5 minutes, I stand up and go back to the stove to flip the steaks and Nmom says, "why are you being so quiet?"

"You've done nothing but criticize me since I walked in the door." I answered.

She instantly looked apologetic, she wouldn't actually apologize, ever, but I knew she felt bad. After that she didn't say much to me about anything, not even when I'd accidentally undercooked one of the steaks.

Submitted December 18, 2016 at 06:19PM by MyDamnCoffee http://ift.tt/2h06leo