The Oregon Trail
Next week Matt and I are going to Oregon for a few days. Ryan will be staying behind in hot-as-hell Mesa while we spend 4 days of total bliss in temperatures under 100. I’m a little sad about leaving our little guy behind, but we sooooo need this trip!
We are flying out on Friday morning with my cousin, Jason, and will be driving from Portland to Bend to stay with our other cousin, Derek, who is a local semi-celebrity. He owns a tattoo shop and art gallery in Bend. Saturday night he’s having a huge party at his home. There will be a dj, tons of booze and god knows what else and more than 100 people in attendance. It should be interesting to see how the Oregon tattoo crowd rolls–and if I’ll come back with some random new skin ink as a result of passing out too early.
The real purpose of our trip, however, is to check out Oregon. You see, for quite some time now Matt and I have been obsessing about moving there. Although I’ve lived in Arizona for 33 years now, I’ve never really felt like this is the place where I want to spend the rest of my life. It’s brown, it’s hot, and the worst part? All of my family lives here.
Yeah, you may not think that sounds too bad–especially if you’re someone who has no family nearby and feel a bit homesick at times. However, I can tell you that it’s not all puppies, popsicles and rainbows having an overbearing mother 5 minutes away and an equally opinionated aunt living within 10 minutes of my home. These two women drive me bonkers!!!
My mom is a real piece of work. I like to think of her as “The Queen of Me”. Everything is about her. You would think that she is the literal center of the universe after spending two minutes listening to her babble. Everything is about The Deb. I could call her and say that I had a horrible kitchen accident and nearly cut my toe off and need medical treatment and she’d respond with, “Oh, I can’t talk right now. I’m on the other line making a nails appointment.” (True story) Or, I could tell her that my son is sick and that we can’t meet her for dinner and she’d respond with, “Well how am I going to show off to everyone that I’m a grandma?” (Yes, another true story). She makes it very clear that the only person who really matters to her is, well, her.
My aunt is another story. Although she isn’t the perpetual narcissist like my mother, she is a professional at making me feel inferior. She comes over to my house on a 112 degree summer day to replace the dead plants in my front yard and chastises me for not being able to keep the last batch that she planted alive (”Oh, maybe these ones can survive your brown thumb”). She brags to me about how her daughter is a working mom AND keeps her house white-glove test worthy while doing yoga and cooking a gourmet meal. Before I went back to work, she would constantly interrogate me about when I planned on going back to work so I could be “a complete person”. Kind of strange, considering that I never felt as complete as I did once my son was born. It’s shitty comments like those that make me want to pack up all of our belongings and move in the middle of the night.
So, every day Matt and I scour real estate online and send each other links to homes that we like in other states. We have basically determined that the only way to find inner peace and sanity is to get the hell out of Dodge. We’ll never be free from their mental blackmail unless we move far, far away. Even though they will still be able to contact us by phone, at least they won’t be able to drop in without any warning and it will be easier to screen our calls. And if we live in the forest, we could always claim that our power or phone was out of service. Sounds reasonable to me.