What is it about family that we put up with so much crap but we love them enough to always come back for more? No matter what we think of them personally or how well we get along with them they are the people that will be a part of our lives until the end. I’ve seen people that have not spoken to family members for years, but their family member’s presence on earth still has an effect on their own motivations in life…good or bad.

I remember my Mom called me one time. She was getting a new bed for her guest room and she needed to get rid of the old bed. It was a very nice bed with a brand new mattress, but she wanted a new one. She had already called my oldest brother to see if he wanted it…he didn’t, and she had called some of my next to the oldest brother’s family to see if they wanted it…they didn’t. My Mom knew I had an extra room that would accommodate the bed and I also had a truck that would hall it. I was the logical choice. The trouble was, I didn’t really need or want the bed. I had plans of making that room a computer room or a place to play video games or something useful along those lines. I already had a bedroom for visitors so I declined the offer.

Mom repeated her dilemma to me and did her sales pitch about how nice the bed was and finally I gave in. “Okay, I will take the bed,” I said like a defeated consumer at the hands of an aggressive telemarketer. We made plans as to when I could pick the bed up.

In the meantime, my sister got wind of the bed and decided she would like to have the new mattress off of it. Since I wasn’t actually sleeping on the bed, she argued to my Mom, I could have the old mattress off of her bed and that way she would be sleeping on a new mattress. It made since to my Mom, so my sister traded out the mattresses.

When the older brother closest to my age and his wife heard from my sister that she had gotten the new mattress and that there was also a nice bed involved, he went to my mother and told her that their bed frame had been broken and they had been sleeping on just their mattress for quite some time. Since I wasn’t really sleeping on the bed, I wouldn’t need it anyway, so my brother packed up the bed frame and took off with it.

If you have been following the story and you are half way decent at math, you would realize that what I was about to go pick up at my parent’s house was simply an old mattress. When I headed over there I thought I was getting a nice bed and mattress that I didn’t really want, but when I got there all I was getting was the old mattress and a story to go with it.

At the time, I thought, okay where’s the mattress? It didn’t dawn on me to just say, “Look I don’t need an old mattress, just throw it away.” I was just doing my usual duty for the family. I loaded the old mattress into my truck and drove it to my place. I had to wrestle that mattress out of the truck, in the door, and up the stairs. About midway up the stairs the mattress got stuck and I actually broke into a sweat trying to get it free so I could make it the rest of the way up. At the moment a bead of sweat dripped off of my nose…it hit me.

“What am I doing?”

“Why am I dragging this piece of crap mattress into my house and up my stairs?”

“I didn’t even want the full bed and it was nice…what the hell am I doing with this old mattress?”

I just sat on the stairs holding the mattress between my legs and shaking my head in disbelieve at my family…at myself. All I could do was laugh. It wasn’t my family’s fault that I was doing something I didn’t want to do…it was mine.

It’s hard to change the image our families have of us if we keep reinforcing that image over and over.