I'm just pissed.

I don't know why this bothers me so dang much. Maybe someone can give me some perspective on it.

So... Mom has this screen door that is set up kinda like a window. There is a fixed piece of glass on at the top, a moveable (up and down) piece of glass in the middle--with a screen for when the "window" is open, and a sheet of metal at the bottom. Y'know how you catch the door with your hip when your hands are full? The screen part is at the exact height to be stressed by your hip when you do that, so the screen was needing to be repaired fairly regularly. A couple of times a year, for as long as she has owned, it needs to be stretched and tucked back into its side frame, from which it has been worked loose by hip action.

Last spring, not long after open-door weather has set in, Mom comes to me with her high pitched I-am-irritated-but-I'm-trying-to-be-nice voice and says, "Carlson has torn the screen." I look at it and it is indeed torn--horizontally along the bottom adjacent to the usual vertical hip-tug looseness. I ask Carlson about it. He does not know. He really does not seem to know what has happened. I don't either. And while he is a pretty rambunctious guy (and, I admit, has been allowed by his mother to grow up a somewhat wild child), and does sometimes break and tear things, he usually knows he has done it, and usually admits to it. But not always. So I tell Mom, "Carlson does not think he tore the screen. How do you think it happened?" She smirks and says she does not know, but who else would do that? I say I don't know.

The next day, the tear is worse, and has obviously been deliberately pulled. I take Carlson aside, and ask him what is going on with the screen. He does not know. No one else knows. And the next day, it is worse. I get angry. "Look, guys, whatever is happening with this screen is not an accident! Someone is DOING this, and you need to STOP!" Blank stares all around.

The next evening, I am sitting on the couch in the living room, and am startled by the cat jumping though the screen door to get into the house! a-HA! Mystery solved! So I go to my mother and say, " I figured out what is happening with the screen door. The cat is using it to come and go. She just jumped through and scared the heck outta me." I am surprised by her response. She smirks again and says, "The cat did NOT tear that screen. She may be using it to come and go, but Carlson tore it in the first place." I really do not know what to say, so I just shrug and walk away. Why would she rather believe that her Grandson tore the screen--with no apparent motivation--and lied about it, than that the cat saw the little verticle hip-hole as an opening and jumped through?

The cat continues to use the hole in the screen to come and go. Someday, when it makes it to the financial priority list--hopefully before next spring--I intend to replace the screen door with one of those sturdy, yet air-flowy, pierced metal "screen" doors.

Fast forward to today. The brother in law is here, and as he is leaving he says, "Do y'all have a dog? The screen looks like a dog's been tearing at it. I reply, "It's the cat. She uses it to come and go." And Mom smirks and pipes in, "She didn't tear it originally, though!" For some reason I can not resist the bait. "Yeah. She did." "Oh! No! She didn't!" she says, wagging her head. I continue what I am doing without response.

What the hell?