Snoskred - Life in the Country

How does one tell one’s mother that her cooking is making one ill?

I’ve mentioned before that I am a germophobe, you know this. My mother is *not*. My mother never did year 12 catering at school, where they take a black light and show you how many germs are on your hands, then they tell you to go and wash them, then they show you again with the blacklight and you can see the spots you missed. My mother has no care whether chopping boards are clean, whether things are kept properly in the fridge, and my God, the woman uses tea towels instead of paper towels to wipe her hands. I must be adopted or something.

I ate there Friday evening, and was so ill for the next 24 hours, I do not even want to go into the details. Unfortunately this is not the first time this has occurred. Suffice it to say that the experience has me thinking I have to say something, or else avoid eating there all together. She will be very offended, this I know. She gets pissy at me enough about my germophobia, she says “Well you survived it for the first 20 years of your life”. I don’t like to mention that one of the ways I survived it was sneaking out to the kitchen in the middle of the night and madly cleaning everything I could find.

She’s also mad at me over the whole sister thing. I sent my sister an email, which I thought was actually fairly reasonable, and in fact got Sephy to check it over for me and remove anything potentially nasty. This caused my sister to cancel her visit here last Monday. Because I’m a bitch. I sent her another email telling her that after everything Mum and Dad have done for her, she could at least let them have a Christmas with their grandkids, and the other half and I would stay well out of her way, she would not even have to see me. This did not result in a visit.

Mother thinks I should have said nothing and left well enough alone. Well I’ll be honest, I’m sick of saying nothing. My mother’s main way of dealing with things is saying nothing. I don’t like it. And if my saying something means my sister never speaks to me again, that’s too bad. I’ve been there for her anytime she needs me but I also have been honest with her and I’m not going to stop doing that because she doesn’t like it. She’s put this family through hell since she was 16.

She wasn’t speaking to me after her trip down here, well now it’s me not talking to her, because I cannot believe she would deny Mum and Dad and the kids their Christmas. I think she’s an ungrateful bitch. My first two emails to her have been nice and not called her any names, but the next one will NOT be so nice.

In other more scary news, I may be doing a television interview soon. Yes, this scares the living bejeezus out of me. At the same time it is a big opportunity to get the word out about these scams, and I feel like it is really important to do it. I’m hopeful my identity can be kept secret.. but I may have to consider taking a few steps like removing links to my blog from various places, etc. The other interview brought some unpleasant things my way, and I’m a little worried this will happen again.