What a liberty !!! 😂
I would never expect my AC to do anything like that. As a matter of fact , I never ask them to do any jobs. They have very busy lives - and weekends are the only family time they have.
I pay people to do the heavy jobs around my house .
DotScot - if you were a friend of DotScot 30 years ago how sympathetic would you have been to busy, busy mum, working full-time DotScot? I would have given her lots of tlc, but maybe been cheeky and advised an Assertiveness Awareness class!
If that’s your biggest regret, come try one of my ‘if only I hadn’t’ Sessions at 3am!
And , I can’t recall the proper quote but it’s something like … “at each and every moment we are all doing the very best we can when all circumstances are taken into account”
I hope you can forgive yourself and enjoy tomorrow.
I think as you get older you have much more time to beat yourself up about these things, I know I do. You should be pleased that you and your brother did the job, even reluctantly. Imagine how you would have felt if you'd said no.
I have terrible guilt about not helping my mum with the ironing, claiming I had a sore leg. She died suddenly a few days later and I have always blamed myself for not helping her.
You and your brother did it that's the important part. You didn't grumble to your mother but kept it between the two of you. Let it go, you were the better person, you helped despite it not being easy or convenient. Life isn't perfect and neither are we, but you did a good deed just remember that.
Yes you probably should have been but you can’t alter it o no ping in dwelling on it now
I m sure most of can think of things we could and should have done differently but no point you can’t change it now
I don’t think I would have been pleased having to shift 15 tonnes of soil. I would have been frosty faced too.
I just wonder why it’s going through your head now?
Like poppyseed says it was thirty years ago.
Yes, you could have been more gracious about it, but you were a busy person and could have done without having to undertake such a big task. By the time you finished you would have been hot, tired and in need of a bath/shower. It's not surprising that you were disgruntled (to say the least)!
You could have been kinder, your mother could have been more grateful. Nobody is perfect.
It was 30 years ago….why worry about it now? You can’t change the past can you? Just maybe feel guilty about the way you acted at the time… we live and learn.
About 30 years ago, my mother (then in her 60s) saw an offer of topsoil. She ordered 15 tons of it as she was a keen gardener and was displeased with the quality of the soil she had in her garden.
The soil was delivered in a huge heap to the pavement and road at the end of the drive to their house in a cul-de-sac. She then called my brother and me, at the time both working full-time, with small children, and asked us to come the next day, a Saturday, and move it for her. To be honest, I don’t think she’d had any idea what 15 tons of soil would look like. Not that she admitted that.
We both turned up and worked for several hours to shovel and barrow it to the back garden, and to the beds in the front garden. It was difficult to distribute it all because the gardens were not that large.
We both thoroughly resented that we were asked to do this job. Our mother didn’t really give us any room to say no. Our two (younger) siblings were either not asked or did say no - we never discovered. We were thin-lipped when we arrived, and the whole time we were doing it, we grumbled and made sarcastic jokes with each other, although our mother did not hear any of that because she stayed out of the way, inside the house while we worked. It was pretty hard work too, for a civil servant and a teacher, not used to manual labour. We were thanked at the time, but much in the way that you’d thank someone for doing some small thing. The whole thing was never mentioned again (except between my brother and me as a private running joke.)
I think now that my mother was likely embarrassed about having ordered so much, probably in error, and it being so visible to her neighbours. Appearances were always important to her.
My question is this. If I was a better person, having agreed to do the job, should I have done it with ‘a good grace’ and not grumbled about it? Should I have been sympathetic and tactful about my mother’s probable mistake and been pleased to help her out of an awkward situation? Obviously I can’t change the past, and my daughter says I should just forget about it. But it does prey on my conscience that I was not nicer about it at the time. What do you G’netters think?
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