When Bonnie and I married, her mom told me to call her mom. I flatly refused. I told her that I already had more mothers than I could handle and I wasn’t auditioning any more. I have never and will never call her anything but “Bonnie’s mom”. Her name is Karen, but we know four other Karens, so whenever I refer to her to anyone, I call her Bonnie’s mom.

My biological mother put me up for adoption at birth. My adopted parents divorced when I was ten, and they each remarried women. So, like everyone else on planet Earth, I have a mom, but then I also have a second mom and two step-moms. I’m lousy with moms.

I only call one of them mom, though, and there isn’t another person in the world who can get under my skin and drive me as crazy as fast as her. A five-minute phone call is enough to ruin my whole day, and yet, I still feel an obligation, twice a year, to make the call.

So, I called her for Mother’s Day, and immediately regretted it. I tried to keep the conversation about her, but I couldn’t hold her off. She started grilling me about what’s going on in my life and with my family, but I really didn’t want to talk to her about it. The simple fact is that life sucks right now, but she’ll never get it.

She’s from the Silent Generation, and I’m on the cusp of Generations X and Y. That puts almost three generations between us, and besides the age gap, there is a vast socioeconomic gap as well. She comes from money, and because she outlived all of her siblings, she won the grand prize. Money is no longer an issue, despite her pretense that it is.

I don’t think she’s ever really had to worry about money. When I was a kid, after my parents’ divorce, she had me in a constant state of panic that we were going to lose our house and be forced onto the street, but I don’t really think her financial situation was ever that dire.

For one thing, she got a check from my dad every month. On top of that, she got a check from her trust every month. She also worked one or two part-time jobs at any given time, and she refinanced her house every few years and took cash out, so it’s not like she didn’t have resources.

During the Great Recession, I was so broke at one point that I had no money. I mean, nothing. I had no money in the bank, no cash in my pocket, no change in my sofa, even. Nothing. I also didn’t have any credit at all.

One day, I had a carpet cleaning job scheduled for Monday morning. It was the only job I had on the books for the whole week, and the phone wasn’t ringing. The only problem was that I was out of gas. I had enough gas in my tank to get to the job, but once I was there, I wouldn’t be able to start my carpet extractor.

You see, the way a truck-mounted carpet cleaning machine gets fuel is by running the machine’s fuel line into the van’s gas tank until it hits the bottom. Then, the installer pulls it back an inch or two to ensure that you can’t run the tank dry while you’re cleaning a customer’s carpet and end up stuck in their driveway.

I didn’t know how I was going to do this job. The worst part was that I knew if I did the job, I would have enough money to fill my tank, but I couldn’t do the job to get the money. So, at 6 a.m., I phoned a friend. I asked him if I could borrow $100 that I would repay at the end of that day. He showed up at my house a few minutes later with $200. I filled my gas tank and went to the job which ended up not happening because the guy was a dick and flaked on me.

That’s the kind of struggle my mom will never understand. She’s from a different time, and because she’s insulated from the current state of the economy for anyone who wasn’t afforded the opportunity to buy a $1.2 million house for $35,000, she doesn’t understand that we’re all out here fighting for scraps.

Of course, she’s had struggles that I’ll never understand, too, but the difference is that I don’t ask her about those struggles and then tell her she’s not doing enough to try to fix her problems. At least I won’t have to make the call again until her birthday in September.