Opinions

Next weekend, two of Highflyer's sisters are coming to visit and I jokingly said I was already looking forward to their gift of good advice. They share a trait with my mother: they have A LOT of opinions and are not shy when it comes to sharing them, inevitably followed by something along the lines of "I'm just saying, this is how I would do it, but you do you...". Unsolicited advice really makes me bristle and brings out my most stubborn side, but it's also funny when you have come to expect it and sometimes have heard these well-meant opinionated comments before and inwardly do a count-down until it is "launched".

I have become a lot more lenient about it recently, when I realised that once my mother will have gone, there won't be anybody else to mildly annoy me this way. All around me, friends are worried about aging parents (many of which also live hundreds of kilometres away) and some of them have recently lost one. Nobody is without fault and I know for a fact that I also know only too well how to annoy my mother with well-meant advice when I identify a safety-hazard in the house or comment her driving. She has told me that sometimes she commiserates with her friends about their know-it-all daughters and all agree that they mostly ignore their advice. Fair enough, I guess.