The recent "MIL wants me to announce our elopement at someone else's wedding" reminded me of this one.

So this is a story about Empty Ellie (my mom), where she's actually on relatively good behavior. Like, for Empty Ellie, this is as good as it gets.

Her mother died a couple of years ago, after years of telling us that she'd die any day now for decades. Knowing Grandma Kay, I don't know if she's where Empty Ellie got her problems from, but I can see how Grandma Kay was not awesome in the mom department. I hated calling Grandma Kay because literally everything turned into death and how she was going to die soon.

"How are you, Grandma Kay?".

"Well, I haven't died yet, but the day is young".

"What are you up to today, Grandma Kay?"

"I'm watching Wheel of Fortune. What do you like to watch on TV"

"I like Law & Order"

"Oh, I don't watch that because people die on that show and it reminds me that I'm going to die soon"

"What's for dinner, Grandma Kay?"

"I'm having some soup and salad. What are you having?"

"Oh, I'm going to grill some steaks"

"Oh, I don't eat steak, because it causes heart disease, and I don't want to die any sooner than I'm already going to die, which is probably any day"

These are, verbatim, conversations that I had with Grandma Kay. Grandma Kay also repeatedly told me that my mom was a slut and a whore, when I visited her myself. Literally those words. Told in a conversational tone of voice. According to her, before meeting my dad, my mom slutted around with a married man. I honestly have no idea if this was true or not (and no, I never asked Empty Ellie). I'm sharing it mainly to establish that honestly, when Empty Ellie wasn't totally broken up about the death of her mom, I don't actually judge her for that, and for good reason.

Now, how she behaved at the funeral instead of...well, at least being somber and letting it be about her mom...that I do judge her for.

Because what she did at the funeral is walk around reintroducing me to everybody who wasn't an immediate relative as "My Daughter, who had to cut her month long European work trip short to come back for the funeral".

It is true that I went to Europe for work... for two weeks...three months prior.

It got so fucking ridiculous that my first cousins started coming up to me and saying "Hey Celany, guess what? You just cut short your year long rockstar trip to Europe because Grandma died. Did you know that??? You gonna go back to Europe when the funeral's over? Is there a jet waiting for you?"

Because the most important thing about Empty Ellie's mom's funeral was to make herself look good, because her daughter is (by the metric of the family) wildly successful, working for a huge corporation in NYC that flies her all around the world making deals that bring her buckets of money.

Happily for me, I love my job and make enough money to live decently and save for retirement, so I'm successful by my metric. And I do make amazing money by my (very rural) family's standards. But for NYC? I'm probably lower middle class. Which Empty Ellie is fully aware of. As she is also fully aware of the length of my trip, and that I travel for work every 2-3 years, not every other month, the way she was putting it.

Sigh.

This is why I pity her. She no longer abuses me, but she is so very desperate to somehow have importance attached to her that she used her mother's funeral as a brag session about her daughter. It's mostly sad.