I aint yo mamma!

Every year around this time my hubster's brother calls me asking what he should get for my man. Why?????????? I can't even figure out what Mr. Wonderful would ever need. If he needs something, he goes out and gets it for himself. He was a bachelor for 48 years for crimeny's sake! I have to plead and grovel and threaten to withhold important pleasures from him (dinner you pervs!!!) just to get 2 or 3 ideas out of him. Why would I want to give away the few morsels he's doled out to me to his brother?!

These are grown men I'm talking about. They've been related forever. They probably know each other better than anyone else so it confounds me every year when I get the dreaded call. This is part of what aggravates me so much; the brother is a very well educated person. He's capable of operating multi-million dollar equipment with many lives at stake and yet he can't pay attention to his own brother to pick up clues. He has all year long to pay attention to conversations he has with his brother and yet when Christmas rolls around, he becomes a helpless, quivering, drooling, bug eyed baby. AND, I get to listen to him complain for 10 minutes about how he hates the holidays because he never knows what to get my man and what a pain it is to try and figure it out. Hell, he doesn't figure it out, I do!!! What's he go to bitch about??? Can you tell that this issue really bothers me?

The holidays are supposed to be fun and happy times and for me they are most of the time. It's just this one particular phone call that turns me into a crabby, mean old lady. I guess I could develop a backbone and tell my bro in law that he needs to man up and figure it out himself but I want to keep peace in the fam-damily so I suck it up and throw him a crumb or two. Then he calls me 75,000 times to update me on the status of his search. What the hell?!?!? I'm not his mama! I don't care if he looked at 50 stores! I don't care if he picked the greet item instead of the blue one! But that's another gripe so I'll save it for later. Suffice it to say that one of these years, I'm going to get fed up and tell him, "Boy, I aint yo mama!"