Canada Must Be A Small Small Country

This story came up recently and I think it speaks volumes of why I am the way that I am.  So here I am sharing...

Most of my father's siblings are strewn across Canada.  When our dad was around, we occasionally took family road trips up to Montreal and Toronto to see our venerable grandparents and the rest of their clan.  By car, of course.  On one of these trips, I remember we all sat in a station wagon for some insane amount of time, like eleven hours or something, and when we entered Toronto, my dad asked my mom for his sister's address.  I'll never forget my mother's reaction: laughter quickly followed by a supremely unhelpful "Why would I have that?  She's your sister."  So he asked for her number.  He got the same response.

I think I just puked a little.  No, wait.  Wrong psychosomatic reaction.  Pardon me while I go rip my hair out.  Yeah, that sounds about right.

THIS?  This right here was status quo in our home.  For fellow book junkies out there, think Jeannette Walls' Glass Castle minus the Freudian crazy of Augusten Burrough's Running With Scissors.  Who the fudge packs up four kids (well, it might have been three at the time, I don't quite remember) and drives hundreds of miles across a country border without the address or phone number of their destination?  

This is why just because two people are physically mature enough to produce offspring, IT DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY SHOULD.  When your kid's the one rummaging through your dressers looking for the passports and birth certificates of her siblings the day you're planning to trek it ten hours in a vehicle --- instead of praising her for being on top of YOUR shit, you might want to consider taking over as, you know, THE PARENT.  It's called Responsibility and Common Sense.

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It's pretty obvious that I've been rubbed the wrong way yet again by my mother.  It's easier to laugh about this Canada incident now, but I can guarantee that if I were to ever remind her of this incident, she'd snicker and call me crazy.  She'd insist that she had no idea what I was talking about and that I made up the story.  The woman is turning sixty this year and hasn't changed.