Mrguy asked me to find my post about getting rid of my mom's car. Found it in my drafts and am finishing it for him a few years in arrears. Flash back to 2020!
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Today is a beautiful day. It's my birthday. To mark the day, I am sending my mom's car into the void, and benefitting my favorite public radio station.
That car has been a pain in the butt. It's been our responsibility for most of the last five years. If it needed service, or smogging or the check engine light was on (frequently) and everybody was freaking out, that was our job.
Here's how we came to own this albatross of a car:
Mom lost her parking space a year ago, and my sister wasn't ready to get rid of the car. Mom's obsessed with having the car, and my sister wanted to be able to drive mom around in mom's car when she was visiting. Her car needed a place to stay, so I had to take it home and keep an eye on it.
In order to have the car ready for my sister to drive every three weeks, as she was doing, I had to transfer ownership, register the car, insure it, smog it and drive it regularly so the battery didn't die. And deliver it to her in another city (which would take two people to do) and then pick it up when she was done with it (also requiring two people). Then there's the matter of getting it to pass smog. Smogging the car is never straightforward. You take it to the smog guy, it fails, he tells you to do "an Italian Tuneup" (which is what he calls driving it for 30 miles two days in a row) and bring it back. Then it passes smog.
It's a fucking ordeal that we are going through so that other people can have the car they sometimes want.
When it was time to renew registration the second year we owned the car, we had to smog it again. When it didn't pass smog this time, the guy said the "tuneup" would not work and we would need to take it to the dealership. They said that it needed $1000+ vintage parts plus labor to make it pass smog. I told them to go ahead. Then I came to my senses and decided to take it off the street. Why am I doing this absurd thing? It's not like keeping this car alive makes people happy. It just makes them (maybe) not unhappy on the occasions when they think about it. How often do they think about it? As much as I do when I'm doing all the things?
I sucked it up and wrote my sister and told her that the car was dead and I was donating it to charity. I had hoped that it would outlive Mom and it simply didn't. If she wanted to borrow a car on a future trip, she could borrow mine. I really put a lot of thought into how I expressed myself, and hoped that maybe I'd get a say. But no. Gotta keep the car. She asked me not to get rid of the car. She was "over it" but she couldn't handle Mom's reaction to the loss of the car.
In the meantime, mrguy and I started noticing how much the mama doesn't know that my car isn't hers. Both silver Toyotas of the 2000s. "That's my car, right?" "Yep!" "Good. Take good care of my car". I tried this out for a few weeks. Another time, when she was visiting our house she said "Is that my car?" and I said "Your car didn't pass smog, so it's in the shop" and she said "OK. The REAL question is: 'where do you think your father is?'" Like that.
At one point in the summer, my sister came to visit. She wanted the car. I forgot that I had taken some picnic gear out of the trunk that she expressly forbade me to take out of the trunk (I needed the trunk space for something, probably mom-related and forgot to replace the picnic stuff). I delivered the car to her. She reamed me out when she saw the empty trunk. I made an hour-long drive to give her some paper towels and plastic forks.
At that point I briefly considered killing myself. And I think that this part of the story is the reason that I never finished this post -- because parts of the story are so painful. The situation with my sister and mom made me want to leave this world because that was the only way I could imagine freeing myself from their arbitrary needs and endless desire for control. I ended up suggesting family therapy instead, which was one of my best ideas ever.
I found a therapist, with the intention of my sister and I talking to her together. We did, once, but it was pretty much a monologue. I continued talking to the therapist alone, however, and my understanding of my family situation grew. I decided to go ahead with my plan to get rid of the car, because the car had absolutely no purpose. My sister couldn't travel during Covid, and didn't need a car. She said she was "over it". My mom thought my car was hers, and just to reinforce that idea my therapist suggested that I take a few identifiable items from Mom's car and add them to my car. It all worked.
I made an appointment to donate the car to my favorite public radio station ON MY BIRTHDAY. Best present ever.
Here's the car in the driveway bushes. And leaving the scene!
Mom never knew the difference. Not long after the car went away. I heard that my sister was plotting to drive my mom's unregistered car to a relative's house for Christmas. The car that was supposedly in my driveway. Christmas fell through that year, due to ongoing Covid restrictions. When they eased up months later, she asked about the car. I told her I'd given it away. She asked to borrow my car, and I suggested she rent one. By now so much ill will had accumulated between us that it was crazy to accommodate the car-related requests.
I kinda can't believe that I complied with any of this, but I'm the youngest and I'm used to saying yes.
There you go. Probably filled with grammatical errors, but I was telling this story to friends the other evening and mrguy wanted to read the post I must have written.
Whew.
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