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   Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:58 JST Sean Kleefeld

   When I was ~40, my mom got me a dress shirt for Xmas. At the time, I was wearing 100% cotton shirts in solid colors with button-down collars and I had expressly told her that on multiple occasions. This shirt that she got me, though, was 100% polyester, striped, and sported a flared collar. She did acknowledge it hit none of the criteria I had mentioned but she thought "it looked like" me. I disagreed but smiled and said thank you.

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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:56 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     Alvin Toffler first presented the idea of "future shock" back in 1970. The idea that someone can keep acting like time hasn't moved forward at all until they can't and they're suddenly hit with the realization that society seems to have "suddenly" changed. My mom seems bound and determined to push the "until they can't" part of that to her grave.

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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:56 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     Anyway, I'm not looking forward to the semi-obligatory Mother's Day phone call I'll have to make at some point today. Made that much more difficult by my mother also relying on 1970s/80s stereotypes about Black people when thinking about my wife. (Mom's literally said exactly that in trying to "defend" why she has negative opinions about a woman who she's refused to even try to get to know.)

     I hate this holiday.

     Mr. Bill repeated this.
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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:56 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     Call with mom went better than expected. She was mostly going off (justifiably) about how my brother's ex-wife continues to devastate her kids. The older two have (mostly) figured out her BS but the 15 year old is still very desperate for her love & approval. The only cringe part of our conversation was when mom talked about my cousin's daughter, who transitioned 4 years ago. She still deadnames them, uses old pronouns & can't comprehend how the bullying could be so bad she dropped out of school

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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:57 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     It wasn't until a week later it dawned on me why she thought it looked like me: I had owned an almost identical shirt in high school 20+ years earlier. One that she had bought me then. So setting aside that she blatantly ignored my stated preferences, she was also falling back to fashion trends of previous decades. That was when I realized she was still operating as if it were the 1980s. She had her worldview largely set in her 20s and stopped thinking critically about it entirely in her 30s.

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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:57 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     She still operates in her 1980s mindset. Zero recognition of the changing landscape of the world. She still views the President (whoever is in office) as infallible. She still believes all journalists are 100% unbiased. She still thinks computers are mostly used in business for word processing. She still believes in Reagan's "welfare queens" and "trickle down economics." She still thinks of my brother and I as teens.

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     Sean Kleefeld (skleefeld@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-May-2024 06:07:57 JST Sean Kleefeld

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     It makes every conversation with her more difficult than the last as she gets farther and farther out of sync with reality. She's not being brain-washed by Fox News or anything so insidious, she just hasn't recognized that the world continues to move on. Her 'happy place' is sometime in 1983 and she refuses to leave.