Does anyone have any experience with mattress toppers, and if so, brand recommendations? The mattress at my parents’ place is hard as a rock, and we’re looking at toppers online, but I’ve never bought one before. I like a soft surface to sleep on (side/stomach sleeper). I don’t want to spend a fortune, but would prefer not to buy something that is not going to last very long either (so, mid range?) Anyone have any recommendations or personal experience?
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Is she always very sensitive to these sorts of comments? Also, does she typically respond with the guilt / drama / pass-agg response (crying for 9 hours).
Trying to dissect how much is current stress and how much is modus operandi for her.
It is a crappy time for sure, and I have been thinking that it must be hard on extroverts to have to do the social distancing.
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Wirecutter has a detailed writeup but no personal experience
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I think it’s a choice between being true to yourself/ your values and being protective of her feelings. Sometimes you just can’t have both. My choice has been to be totally fake with my mum - if you ask her I’m a conservative Christian. We have no real relationship whatsoever and every time we interact I feel like a traitor to myself and my beliefs. But the fallout of upsetting her - and it takes almost nothing to upset her- is extreme and I don’t want it.
There is no good option that I’m aware of.
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My read - without any additional context about your communication styles and relationship history - is that:
(1) Text is a shitty medium for these types of conversations/issues. You can’t gently call someone out in text the way you could in person or even on the phone. You can’t easily “take back” an attempted joke or effort to connect that thuds and lands poorly (even if you do want to recognize that you didn’t actually MEAN to offend someone with casual sexism).
(2) She is reacting with far more than she likely would under “normal” circumstances. COVID is really stressful. Things that make people cry right now include you tube videos, commercials, and random shit that are triggering the overarching sense of trauma that we’re collectively experiencing. Would you rather know or not know what she is experiencing right now? Does telling you that she was really upset fall into a pattern of trying to guilt or manipulate you, and that’s what you’re worried about/reacting to?
(3) She told you about COVID testing and made a not-funny, sexist “joke.” Your immediate response does read as harsh to me, given the context. It might have been softer to first acknowledge the test “Oh, I hope you get [whatever you consider good news to be] result. I’ve heard some people don’t hear back, so if that happens, feel free to call them.” Then, if you still wanted to address the not-funny, sexist comment in real time, you could have said something. Doing it in text probably made it come off harsher than you intended, even if you stand by the statement (that’s how that it reads to me). I’m going to add - you also deserve all the COVID extra understanding too! None of us are operating at optimal or even regular thinking and talking or texting.
Given all that, my instinct would be to call to apologize and address the giant COVID elephant in the room behind everyone’s nerves being frayed. You can suggest teletherapy or other mental health stuff too, if it naturally flows in your relationship or discussions about how helpful it can be during “this difficult time.” Move on and set up time for your call with kiddo for mother’s day.
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Firstly, sorry you’re having a tough time with your mom
Messages like this are my MIL’s standard operating procedure. She will blow things wayyyy out of proportion when H sets any kind of boundary with her.
For MIL we just ignore it (the “I’ve been crying for hours” part) because we can’t control how she reacts to our boundary setting. She can cry or rage or whatever if she wants. We will only engage in calm conversation about it if she’s capable of that. Otherwise it’s straight nope because it isn’t our job to teach her emotional regulation. She’s an adult with a therapist who knows this is an issue for her though, and H has formally laid that out and told her very precisely that when she says these things she will get no reaction. I call it kindergarten rules: when you can be calm about it we can talk, otherwise go throw your tantrum by yourself.
I have a somewhat similar issue with my dad because he says terrible regurgitated conservative talking points and worse things sometimes and I just cannot ignore them. I have a hard time reigning in my temper with this so I’m still working on it but what I do is say things like what you did. For me it’s usually like “wow that seemed unnecessary, what does gender have to do with it?” and also the more firm “you will not use that word to describe a human being around me, thanks.” << might have screamed that one in his face in front of ~8 extended family members…
With Dad I’m getting better at taking the emotion out of it and letting him peter himself out. When we talk on the phone and he says stuff like this I have my usual response (above) and then if he keeps going I just stop talking or end the call with a “ok Dad gotta go, bye!”. I’ve also had a point blank conversation of “when you go on conservative/racist/sexist rants I’m not gonna engage because we clearly disagree and have talked about it at length. So if you want to talk to me don’t do that or I’ll end the conversation”. Periodically I have to reset with him where we’ll have a few one sided conversations and then he realizes if he doesn’t want that he needs to stop.
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Thank you all for your help, I appreciate the sanity check.
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I bought a memory foam one years ago from Walmart in the US. sorry I don’t know the brand, and it made a world of difference on my road trip with the super hard bed (I was even sleeping on the floor instead of the bed in the rental). it still gets used for the futon mattress as an extra layer.
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I’m glad you had the call and it’s time to move along. Contacting her more often sounds reasonable (but I don’t know all the demands on your time). The “all” statement sounds like something my mom would say (here’s your guilt with a side order of disapproval).
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IKEA memory foam toppers are my love. Also they add warmth
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@meerkat as someone who takes the exact same picture of my dog every day and likes looking at them I am 100% confident your mom would love the exact same photo of meerkid every day 
@CalBal for temporaryish use I’d also get a cheapish memory foam topper. If budget weren’t an issue (ha ha ha) and you were looking more permanently, the best sleep I’ve ever had on a bed was with a wool topper. Major investment and the company that made it would send additional filling and tell you how to refill if needed over time. So comfy and was amazing in the summer - no sweaty sheets! And of course super cozy in the winter. It was a friend’s that they let me use while they were traveling and I’ve always wanted one since.
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Not her words but “If all the other daughters can do it why can yooooou??” Because I find minutiae boring? Same reason I never posted on Facebook that much. Or checked Facebook that much, for that matter.
True, but he’s at the stage where all pictures come out blurry or they’re of the back of his head. 
Or he’s sleeping, I got a good one of him asleep the other day.
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Received three emails within minutes of each other from Flipkart this morning around 4:30 am with account activation codes. Flipkart is apparently a legit online retail service out of India.
From what I can tell, this means someone is trying to use my email address to create an account. I’ve received no additional emails confirming an account creation or anything along those lines, no strange charges to to my credit or debit cards.
Is it time to change my email address’s password? Ignore it?
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Time to change the password, methinks
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Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but if they’re just trying to create an account somewhere (accidentally? no idea how unique your email address is and presumably if someone wants to create an account they’d like to be able to receive emails from that account, especially if it’s a retail or delivery service), your email password is kind of irrelevant. You don’t enter the password to an email account when you’re creating an account on a website, that website gets a password of its own. Or it should. Not that it’s not a good idea to rotate passwords, but ‘someone used my email address’ seems like an odd trigger.
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That was what I was thinking, too. Don’t most sign-ups require verifying your email nowadays, which means logging in to said email and clicking a link?
I could be very wrong, but I did think my email address was fairly unique, I’ve never had an issue with using the username on other platforms. My assumptions is that someone may have obtained it with a list of other email addresses in the hopes that the password would be easily guessed.
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Makes sense…that or they mistakenly think they typed their address and you got three because there’s an irate person in India looking for a confirmation email 
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I think I’ll need to change the password anyway since there’s a small chance my email address was swept up - I think the one I currently have is not very high security because I use it to log in to my Chromebook and wanted something easy to remember.
I have got to stop being lazy about these things.
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