I'm sick of humoring my woo-woo mother [View All]

[Orrex]

My wife and I are expecting our second son in the next week or so. Every phone call with my mother now begins "I asked the pendulum" about whatever divination she's performed since we last spoke, and I can't take it anymore.

My mother is a grown woman who has believed in Reiki and spirit guides and reincarnation and pendulum divination and the importance of baptism for at least as long as I can remember, and she's firmly in the "what's the harm" cult whenever I try to discuss the absurdity of it with her. I see her maybe once or twice a year, and if she wants to believe that her $20 copper bracelet really helps her sciatica, I don't care. But I have no desire to smile and humor her in her idiotic new age musings. I've done it long enough.

The most infuriating thing is that she knows what I think of it, but she trudges merrily on without regard to my views. In fact, I know from countless prior conversations that she thinks of my atheism (and my skepticism in general) as a phase that will pass once I've opened my eyes, and she's taken it upon herself to open them for me.

Frankly, I just want to say "You're a crazy old woman, and your clear lack of respect for me has offended me for more than twenty years," but I realize that this might be over the top. I can even force myself to deal with it during our weekly phone conversations because, after all, she's 400 miles away. But when she visits in the next few weeks, and as my sons grow up, I am strongly confident that she plans to impart her new age wisdom to my sons, and I refuse to tolerate that.

I work with a woman who chose not to baptize her daughter and who actually had to take steps to make sure that at least one grandmother wouldn't kidnap the child to perform a clandestine baptism. My mother, for all of her lifelong insanity, isn't quite that bad, but I have no doubt that she would try to undermine my efforts to show my children the value of reason and critical thinking.

You may infer from this that I have unresolved anger issues, and far from denying that, I embrace it. But this strikes me as an entirely different matter; her conscious and endlessly demonstrated lack of respect is a deliberate insult and a gross imposition every time it comes up.

I can't put up with her woo-woo bullshit anymore, and I intend to make damn sure that my children never have to.

So what the hell do I do?