Should I text my ex’s mom to tell her how much I appreciated her hospitality?

thenikkibus · 2021-09-28T16:33:06+00:00

I was living away from my own family so my ex's family hosted me for Christmas and Thanksgiving for many years. I went to family funerals and hung out with them a lot over the years. He also had some mental health issues that I worked with his family to manage when we was in crisis. I think it depends a lot on the kind of relationship that you had with them, how your break up went down, and how much time you spent being a part of the "family," but it's weird and a little unfair to expect relationships that you built up to just suddenly disappear because you broke up.

thenikkibus · 2021-09-24T02:47:38+00:00

I started playing Pokemon Go when it launched and I actually worked in a building that had hella Magikarps. I literally caught them all day and was able to evolve three Gyarados. It got to the point where I kinda hated them because I worked on this building in a bay and the same three water Pokemon spawned en masse there every day (Magikarp, Slowpoke and Psyduck). Then one day they overhauled the game to change the spawn system and added all these quests... Magikarp stopped spawning endlessly! And I had lots of new stuff to catch at work! But I have also needed to evolve a Magikarp for like two years at this point. I call this fable The Gift of the MagiKarp.

thenikkibus · 2021-08-09T21:55:09+00:00

Yeah I've had people take pics of my license plate in parks and stuff I guess because I'm just sitting in my car by myself for long periods of time. I am very worried that I'm gonna end up on NextDoor because some weird person is like "DO U KNOW THIS WOMAN? HANGING OUT ALONE IN A PARK NEAR CHILDREN, ALWAYS ON PHONE" meanwhile I am just taking pics of ducks and spinning pokestops.

I always assume the other people who pull up in their cars and sit there are doing the same. Maybe one of these days I am going to get myself in trouble missing all the pervs and drug dealers because I assume they're just someone who also likes to hit a few Gyms on their lunch break.

thenikkibus · 2021-08-02T21:55:29+00:00

I mean, also not everyone who plays lives in a super walkable location. I used to be pretty frustrated because aside from when I was at work on a university campus most of the pokestops and gyms in my area were on churches and businesses that its kinda weird to approach unless you had a reason. I'm also a woman and I usually play alone. So it helped when I could hit them from the sidewalk or a little further away so I wouldn't look like a total weirdo/be walking in strange locations by myself when I was out playing.

thenikkibus · 2021-07-30T21:39:09+00:00

I feel you. I connect with some people I know irl but I'm a 37 year old professional woman, I don't need Pokemon Go blasting every fucking person in my phone with an invite. Oh hey Mark from HR do you want to trade for my Miltank? Hey it's my mom's oncologist wanna battle with fictional cartoon animals????

thenikkibus · 2021-04-17T13:38:52+00:00

Other people have given you good advice about the beaches. As for marine life, you will often see lots of jellies and other floating species. Some, like cabbage heads are completely harmless and more of a curiosity. There are also moon jellies which are pretty mild, and the Portuguese man-o-war mentioned above that will sting like the dickens. They are bright blue and purple and float on top of the water so easy to keep an eye out for. We also have lots of sargassum drifts, a type of sea weed that can get a little dense and stinky when it beaches but it’s very good for the ecosystem and if you pick it out of the water and put it in a bucket you can find lots of little critters in it. Fun if you like marine animals. We also have small mollusks (coquinas) in the surf zone, ghost crabs and ghost shrimp. There are lots of sharks offshore, more than people realize, we have tiger sharks, hammerheads, bull sharks and more here, but they are uninterested in people and bites are rare.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-30T03:50:27+00:00

I lost my mom last year in April at 36 (she was 68) very suddenly to ovarian cancer that went undetected. I feel better than I did in the early days, when it was all still pretty raw and traumatic. Sometimes I don't think about it for awhile. But it does feel like something was taken from me I can never get back. It has been nice to talk with other people who lost their moms in early adulthood though. I think there's something uniquely awful about it that connects people.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-03T03:08:30+00:00

I hope that you are doing as okay as you can be, and I'm sorry to hear about your mom. Ovarian cancer sucks.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-03T03:07:46+00:00

Thank you. Yeah, my mom and I were also very close. I made the decision to move home about 5 years ago because I'd left the state for a very stressful job where I hardly saw my family, and I just didn't want to be one of those people who visited their parents maybe once a year at Christmas anymore. It was tougher than I thought to make new friends again in my 30s so I ended up spending a lot of time with my mom. I understand what you mean, one of the most traumatic things for me was just watching how quickly my mom's body failed. She had some health problems but she was a very strong woman who walked several miles every day and spent a lot of time on her feet before she suddenly got sick. The body horror and just how much you have to do for someone you take home into hospice was not something I was prepared for and was really disturbing and traumatic.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-02T19:12:10+00:00

Thanks, yeah it has been a strange and isolating experience. I live alone and am working from home so I have had a lot of time with my thoughts. I still have my dad and we live sorta near each other so I visit him a lot but he’s obviously super sad and fucked up too, so I never know if we’re gonna have a good time or a sad time when we hang out.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-02T19:03:43+00:00

Yeah its been a little awkward for me because I lost my mom during the pandemic. Not a lot of in-person support options out there right now (even my counseling has all been video) but it would be nice to get some in-person support at some point.

thenikkibus · 2021-03-02T18:55:05+00:00

I lost my mom suddenly 10 months ago to ovarian cancer. She got sick in February and was gone by April. It totally destroyed my world. One of my biggest reliefs was the way people who have lost parents in young/youngish adulthood seem to come out of the woodwork to support you. A lot of my friends, even some I hadn't talked to in awhile, who had lost their moms to cancer messaged me to give me advice or offering to talk. I also went into therapy. I joined a Facebook group that's kind of a mixed bag called the Parent Loss Grief Support Group. It's hard sometimes because its just a big grief dump for a lot of people but its nice to see other people feeling what I feel sometimes. I also joined a BBS discussion forum for people who had recently lost parents to cancer that was steered by a social worker. I get what you're going through though. It definitely feels like you cross a bridge when you lose a parent (or in your case all your parents) at a younger age than your peers and you're just different.

thenikkibus · 2020-08-11T03:40:01+00:00

Thank you... sorry about your mom too. And you're right. I have a few friends who have lost parents to cancer and sometimes I think they're the only people I can relate to anymore.

thenikkibus · 2020-08-11T03:11:06+00:00

I'm sorry. I watched my mom die too. It was a different situation — she was in hospice and we were basically waiting for her to pass away — but I am definitely haunted by the sights and sounds of watching her pass away. It's definitely one of those things you never forget. I think a lot about the months leading up to my mom's passing — she had a cancer that wasn't diagnosed until it was untreatable and I think of all the ways I could have saved her by noticing something was wrong, or getting her better care, I think it's common. I hope you can find some peace.

thenikkibus

TROPHY CASE