<Mama's Garden Management Log> 8/1/2023

Recently went back to my hometown in Forest Town for the first time in a while, and had the following conversation with my mom

Honestly, the old lady still worries a lot about my job — compared to before, my income's dropped, my passive income isn't stable, and it probably just looks like I'm perpetually busy.

Honestly she's never really understood gaming, let alone the whole content-creator industry. Even after all the years I've spent in this field, she still can't quite grasp what it is I actually do for a living 🥹

Since she had the time to talk that day and was clearly so worried, I ended up walking her through my whole work history in painstaking detail, again — yes, again — doing my best to explain it in terms she could actually follow, even though I figure she still won't quite grasp what these industries have in common or what makes them competitive 😂

After taking it all in with a somewhat foggy understanding, she pivoted the conversation to "you just always seem so busy."

I really didn't want to admit that part of why I'd been avoiding coming home was the family atmosphere, plus the way her not understanding the current climate led to some hurtful comments between us 😢

In the end I just brushed it off with "I love my job." And I really do love my work — but this conversation only made it clearer to me that I have a real tendency to bury myself in work, even pile more of it on, just to forget or avoid certain things, and end up neglecting rest in the process.

Once I'd made my feelings about work clear, she admitted she'd been wrong to assume the economy was doing just fine. Turns out, at my cousin's wedding banquet, she'd asked our uncles about how their work was going and only then found out just how badly every industry's been struggling lately — even they've been barely scraping by.

Since she's been a homemaker for so long, and my dad's line of work is fairly recession-proof, she genuinely thought it was just us kids lacking resilience. She never came out and apologized for what she'd said before, but honestly, for me, that admission was enough.

Lately my aunt's need to control my mom has eased up a little, giving her some breathing room, and she's softened up a bit too — maybe our family really can go back to being as happy as we used to be