It’s So My Mom.

My good friend Tamre is pregnant. I can say that now. I couldn’t before when I first found out: We were about to go on the Good Beer Show together and she called at the last minute to “bail.” Her excuse? “We think I’m pregnant. …Don’t tell anyone yet.” (You can only use that one once every nine months or so … hers turned out to be true.)

Luckily, there’s still something in this for me: I get the benefit of seeing a specimen change right before my eyes. Not just the part about a woman becoming A mom from her previously barren self, but also her becoming a little more like HER mom, specifically, in the process.

I’ll have to ask my mom how she felt when she was pregnant. I can’t help but rail against the natural institution. Especially after seeing movies like Slither, where a pretty young girl is being alternately sucked dry and grossly inflated as the breeding grounds for parasitic, nasty eels. Is the real thing that different?

But the baby isn’t what annoys Tamre about pregnancy. Nope, it’s the dumb, meddling people:

“Five months is a weird month in pregnancy. It’s the middle of my second trimester and the gravity of bringing a child into the world is starting to hit home. I’m big enough that people realize I’m preggo and didn’t just go on a bender at Chipotle. The flood of questions from everyone and anyone is overwhelming. And I mean overwhelming in the lack of common sense department. The contradictions make me want to roll my eyes and since I’m already a hormonal mess, sometimes it’s hard to handle. We’ll start with the easy and most obvious and see how ridiculous thse exchanges go.

Pikachu is my parents’ overfed, 9-year-old Chihuahua. I like to say that if he were a real man, he’d be a 300 pound Mexican. The kind that walks around with his stomach poking out of the bottom of his white t-shirt. (Disclaimer: I’m part Mexican, so I can say that.)

Needless to say, this is not a dog who has been particularly active. Now the plumbing’s not quite working, and the poor dear is incontinent. My mother’s solution? Slap a diaper on him.

Except that he never actually pees in the diaper. Instead, they’re dropped like poorly hidden Easter eggs around the house: two near his doggie bed in my brother’s room; one at the door where he pines for my father; one in the kitchen, where he managed to wriggle out of the thing in record time.

My boyfriend laughed so hard at the spectacle that he started to cry. But he sobered up in the car to insist: “That’s just not normal.”

I’ve decided that I don’t completely disagree with my mom on this issue. “Not normal” is my mom swaddling our months-old Chihuahua, Lady, in doggie diapies. She’s not totally potty trained yet, and in the interim, what should be looked at as inconvenient carpet piddles are considered an unallowable horror in my parents’ house.

But what else are you going to do with an incontinent dog than slap a diaper on him?

Image by La Ignorancia Mata via Flickr

I’m back from the dead. I let this site go for way too long (totally not cool, especially because I’ve started a new gig building blogs for businesses. Does not speak well for my ability to update content regularly!).

But my work life finally intersected back with my hobby/soon-be-be-author life (that’s this blog) after I went on the Good Beer Show last night to talk about beer myths and chicks. I was trying to wear my food writer hat, but I had met the host, Jeff Meyer, via Twitter, where my profile has a link back to this site. He didn’t mind helping me plug the book a bit, which was great, seeing as how I need, oh, 500 more interviews with women to finish the book.

Plenty of women are sympathizing with the topic–both of women becoming their mothers, and that chicks do drink good beer. I’ll post the podcast when it’s live.

But the whole chicks and beer thing got me thinking … it’s so not my mom. But it also points to the differences between my mother’s specific time in history and mine. I’m young and hip when craft breweries are growing like flowers in sidewalk cracks, finding ways to rise above a crappy economy. (Of course I’ve set the argument up this way to soon examine circumstances when my mother was young and hip, which assumes that she was, in fact, ever young and hip. Not sure. Had a daydream the other day about what it would be like to be back in time and in her body when she was my age. And then I realized that was probably the logic behind the movie “Freaky Friday.” But I digress.)

Plenty of women revel in craft beer culture today–even if some Bud Light-drinking idiot chides us for it, or a misanthrope on Beer Advocate decides to sully a female BA’s rating notes with patronizing comments.

Yes, we do demand clean bathrooms in our breweries, and we’re starved for some cute, form-fitting swag (watch for a possible Short Change offshoot on these topics). But we also edit the top beer magazines and win brewing awards.

In my mother’s time, female beer appreciation probably wasn’t appreciated. She was left stone sober to do nothing but … chores. No wonder we’re so different.

… Into their horrificly opportunist mother Nadya with a sense of entitlement that’s probably large as the cow herself.

That’s the big hoopla here, right? The precedent set by Sulemen’s ravenous sucking on the public teet?

What about the more immediate impact she’s going to have on her children’s outlooks? Anyone want to project how much money her brood of 14 will burn through if they continue her communistic lifestyle (she gets $490 a month in federal food stamps and support for her three kids with disabilities)?

Check out her family Web site erected about a day ago. You can send a donation here, or leave a nasty comment here. Comments don’t show up anywhere on the site–wonder why?

You can also harass the Los Angeles-based Killeen Furtney Group for building the wretched Web site, no doubt pro-bono (I’ve sent an e-mail inquiring). I’d like to see how much they’ll make in the way of donations. Unfortunately they’re not compelled to disclose since they aren’t government engineered or forcibly publicly funded.

I can see the book from one of those fourteen kids, in 30 years: “It Takes a Village: How I discovered the joys of having ten-plus kids in a civilized society.”

To lighten the mood a little, here’s a brilliant, self-explanatory interlude from the Huffington post: “Top Ten Suggested Names for the Nadya Suleman Babies A to H.”

A perfect example of how I will never, ever turn completely into my mom (I mean, really, these interludes offer me a shiny beacon of sanity and salvation).

Los Angeles-based writer Seth Grahame-Smith will release new book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” on April 15. The succinct publisher summary: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.” (Jane Austen must be turning in her grave; she’s actually co-billed with Grahame-Smith on the cover, like she consented to this.)

My mom would have reacted like most of these women on Trashionista. I just recently learned of her love of Victorian, Elizabethan period pieces. That fits. But I honestly haven’t seen my mom read anything but the Bible and fashion magazines since, well, ever.

Conversely, I have a deep-rooted dread for the original chick-lit.

Whenever I’m dragged to Anne Hathaway’s latest silver screen period piece, I interject my own Mystery Science Theatre 3000-type dialogue to help bring the storyline into the 21st century (and cure my boredom). The last one she was in also featured a lad with an unfortunately stereotypical English face–that sort of retarded, drooling look–so I took to exclaiming, “Cousin Gooba [Goober]!” at every one of his cameos.

My friend Shanel was not happy. But at least I distinguished my singular and autonomous identity.

Image by egg on stilts via Flickr

My mother usually found something to dish disparagingly about most people—except, of course, for her perfect, God-fearing [read: holier-than-thou] friends. MY friends, however, always had foibles.

Take, for instance, a middle school friend that we’ll call Beronique. My mother was actually friends with hers and did a little work for her family, during which time I’d commiserate with Bero. I didn’t see her much after high school; we attended different institutions.

I had thought my mother’s association with hers would have been enough to cull a relatively benign impression. But that still didn’t stop my mother from referring to Bero as “that little slut” years later.

“Mom!” I said, not even knowing, firsthand, if this friend was a bed hopper—but sure that I never mentioned the subject to my mom. (Come to think of it, she was kind of kinky. Rumor had it she “practiced” fellatio on a male friend. Not sure if that counts. Maybe mom did know best.)

Yes, my mother was great at snap judgments and villainizations. I thought I always saw the best in people. Until now.

Strange things leave a lasting impression on my nerves these days: The omnipresent condo maintenance man that always offers a friendly “hello” (I know what he’s doing. He interrupted my workout once to say “hi”! The sex-crazed beast!). The “harmless” old lady beer columnist whose articles sometimes supplant my food reviews in the Indy alt-weekly (How can she not be allergic to alcohol at her age? And what does she need money for, anyway?). Random, really obese people that get in my way.

This is scary. Someone get the Prozac.

The handful of people who read this blog semi-quasi regularly (and I’m not talking about the people who pop in trolling the Web for “mom sex” [damn sickos]) know that my mom does not appreciate my disclosing personal details about her and my family. My boyfriend gets sensitive about things I write, too.

I think this great video on Momversation.com about “Censoring Your Blog” with high-profile bloggers Heather Armstrong and Rebecca Woolf from Dooce and Girl’s Gone Child brings up a lot of good points.

Image by John A. Debay via Flickr

Women have been sharing their original experiences about becoming their moms via interviews I’m doing for my book on that topic. I’m really digging these anecdotes. Here is one funny passage from a woman in Mill Valley, California:

“I promised that when I was a grown up I would just serve chips and beer if I had parties and wouldn’t waste so much time and effort preparing tons of yummy special dishes for everyone–this is my true downfall, as I’ve been known to cook the same multi-course meal in 2 different versions (traditional Jewish, including all the schmaltz, chopped liver, matzoh balls and chicken soup, etc.–and then doing the whole thing in a VEGAN version!).”

Many currents of similarity are emerging from my research on women becoming their mothers for my upcoming book. Among them: When you start to do things your mother would, your boyfriend will call you on it–and by your mother’s name.

Don’t do this, men. You wouldn’t shock your girlfriend/wife/baby momma with a Tazer, would you? Then don’t do the verbal equivalent.

My boyfriend calls me “Little Lonia,” a derivitive of my mom’s name, which also alliterates nicely with “loony,” “loonbag” and “loonbaggery.”

Image by vectorlyme via Flickr

In doing research for my upcoming book on women becoming their mothers, I’ve come across a dilemma.

Some of our turning into our mothers is nature, some is nurture. But how much is scapegoating?

I ask this because a lot of the traits that we criticize as coming from our moms are things that are, for lack of a better term, “bad.” I can relate to this: I think my own obsessive compulsions–which have manifested in everything from my weight to preoccupying myself with my boyfriend’s masturbation schedule–stem from my mother’s OCD (hers manifested in the myriad rules and regulations surrounding her home, children and husband).

But then, I could also say it’s just me: I have a history of fixations and phobias that extend back to grade school. So am I turning into my mom, or just blaming her?

This observation is echoed in another girl I interviewed, who said she was amazed that she condemned her 16-year-old stepdaughter’s scant clothing as “inappropriate,” a word her mother would have used, though the 30-year-old, tattooed mother of 2 led a wild life and certainly doesn’t think of herself as uptight.

On further reflection, she thinks this reaction might actually have to do with her own sexual abuse. When she was 14, her 50-something uncle molested her. So, she reasons, is she just afraid that she’ll lose her older husband to her stepdaughter’s friends? Or just passing on the judgement her mother subliminally passed down to her?

Can you relate to this? Is there an element of blame or escapism here? How can we tell the difference? I can’t decide for myself.