It’s So My Mom.

Oh yeah guys, forgot to tell you. My fiancé and I broke up. He was, as I hope has been conveyed in the blog, a great, bright, innovative guy and a wonderful friend, and I wish him all the best, not that he needs any luck.

But. It was the right thing. In the almost-year since breaking the engagement I have been significantly less crazy and more, you know, me. The downside is that I haven’t had much to write about here.

Surveying the archives after some distance (the blog is like, almost four years old!) I was a little harsh on poor ol’ mom, levying judgment on her cray-cray town as though it came from some sort of objective place. I should be more diplomatic. I’m sure in some societies, like the ones where you only wipe your ass with a certain hand (for real), that things like relegating one of two household bathrooms entirely for show could also be a completely cultural norm. And to be fair, clearly anyone who airs her dirty laundry to Joe Interwebs as I do is at least slightly crazy. I’ve also developed a fear of going to the bathroom since the breakup, for fear that I will wake up mid-stream, or worse. Because now that matters.

Point is: Justified or not, my crazy is not my mom’s anymore. And the following is funny, so I’ll share. In the interim, in case the other crazy comes back.

Last week I was in my parents’ kitchen, eating oatmeal amid the permanent morning ambiance: Dad in his loosie whities and black socks, filling a flowered coffee mug with mounds of instant coffee and Sweet’N Low. The Jumbotron preacher droning on from mom’s portable radio, blessing her with access, in the 21^st Century, to the non-denominational word of Christ in the kitchen, shower or den, between Real Housewives of XYZ commercials. Mom asking intermittent questions I couldn’t possibly answer (once: “Did you accidentally throw away the salad tongs without knowing?”) while I readied for work mode in Facebook.

Suddenly there was a suspended break amid the banter, like Wile E. Coyote sobering up over a chasm. PreacherMan demanded our attention, having increased his pitch and tempo for some undoubtedly pending revelation. And the payoff, what he says is—you can hear him walking around the stage in his three-piece Preachersuit, ready to bring it home—”You know what? The next time your friends wanna go shopping, you tell them (arm doubtless hurtled away from Jumbotron and toward crowd), ‘I have a better idea. Why don’t we go to the park and read our Bibles instead?’”

At which point dad and I lost our shit, which sent mom stomping angrily to another room, tin box preacherman in tow.

But she got me back later that day. My precious wild Alaskan canned salmon, part of the Perricone diet I’ve been following half-assedly in the way I conduct the rest of my life, was too many ounces to eat in one sitting, especially with the bones they leave in the big-ass-can version. So I left half of it, covered, in the fridge. Except that apparently my foil’s drapey dimensions didn’t meet Lonia’s standards for vacuum-sealing, and the “whole fridge smelled like fish.” It didn’t. But damn if she didn’t wrap that shit six times to hell, in aluminum and then plastic foil, as though Jesus’ libido was inside and fighting to get out. Of course, we know Jesus’ libido doesn’t exist. Like the stench.

So my mom is upset about the Ice Queen post too, my dad informed me.

Not that I should feel embarrassed that she see the site. I thought that if she did, she’d see the post “I Really Do Love My Mommy,” where I spell out the universal, innate fear of morphing into the woman who raised you. But I thought I expressed my unending love and admiration for her selflessness in that post, first and foremost.

Maybe it’s the fear of getting older, more responsibility, or the inevitable hard knocks along the way. Bottom line is, many women are scared of becoming their moms.

Mine probably didn’t scroll far down enough to see that post. She saw the site on the off-chance that my dad was on (who knew he read it?), saw the “Ice Queen” entry, and apparently got upset. Hurt, probably. ☹

This is troubling for many obvious reasons. But I can’t help but think how much of a dampener it’s gonna put on our holiday shopping bonding sessions next week when I arrive in San Antonio (my hometown).

For I can’t really talk to her about the site concept without her dismissing it as just another shot at her for being a “bad mother.” Even though that’s not at all what this is about.

I’ve never been able to speak to my mom as woman. As a daughter, yes. A shopping partner, definitely. But as an equal? As an adult who has experienced a few things of her own? No.

I’m sure we’ll still go shopping. I just have to go through the painful process of trying to broach this subject with her, and making lightening strike by getting a computer in front of her again, at least long enough to show her the nice posts.

One way I’ve definitely become more like my mom in the last year–instead of eating when I’m upset, I can’t touch a thing.

This must be why my mom is so skinny.

…Or however you spell it! The gibberish below (my mom with “Charlty,” a really stinky boy whom you all may recognize from hits like “Planets of the Apes” and, well, the grave) represents my newfound ability to post pictures!

Too bad I didn’t get her legs.

Image by apostolia4 via Flickr

I created this blog in the midst of a sea of them to document a particularly pressing social phenomenon: Modern women turning into the mothers they swore they’d be “smarter,” “cooler” and “more laid back” than. How does this happen?

Case in point: I come from a long line of man-haters. My grandmother’s tagline for everything was “Es tu PAPA” (It’s your FATHER) for everything that had gone wrong in the house. On one memorable occasion, my adult mother fessed culpability for a strange scent emanating from the microwave, but my grandmother reverted to her mantra as if in wifely duty. “Es tu Papa,” she corrected. He made that micro stink, dammit. She had nothing if not conviction.

My grandmother is senile now, but my mother carries on her torch. “Your FATHER … ” starts her explanation for everything less-than-praiseworthy in the world. She also likes light less and less, another latently inherited trait from my grandmother.

I grew up siding with my father for all sorts of things. My mother didn’t really work much outside the house after I was born, so she was the eternal money drain. I, being a daddy’s girl and product of a college prep, all-girl and all-overachieving high school, invested a lot of time sympathizing with my father’s criticisms of my mother’s housewife status, and vowing I’d never tread the same path. (Note: My mom didn’t spend her days eating Bon Bons … but our mother-daughter time did consist of watching late-night “Married with Children” episodes while eating Doritos for a while.)

I’d stayed true to all the dating implications a self-sufficient life approach entailed. I had always been perfectly ready to pay for a first date if my compatriot saw fit. It would be a death knell to subsequent outings, of course, but I would pick up that tab if they fell for the bait. (I don’t think this every actually happened, though.)

It took a while, but I now refuse to pay for outings with my boyfriend. My domain is buying groceries and cooking. My call.

To be fair, my mom doesn’t cook. But get this. Now my daily discourse at the coffee shop at which I work goes something like this:

“Hi Jenny.” (William the coffee shop owner.) “How’s the husband?” (Gay code for ‘boyfriend.’)

“Hey Willy.” (Me.) “I made him take me out last night—it’s about time that boy spent some time and money on ME.” My boyfriend, by the way, is a really great guy. (He is a little obsessed with golf and Apple [and I hope that’s all].)

My mother, mind you, is OCD to the point of running to the bathroom to corroborate a first-hand report that you (I) didn’t use her show soap, leave a ring of water in the bottom of the bathtub or rest a heated hair styling tool directly on the bathroom counter.

I’m not that bad … yet. When I do clean, I fight the urge to yell at my boyfriend for the perfectly normal practice of shaving in the sink or showering in the bathtub. Goddammit, though, if I didn’t just remove 1,000 strands and stubs of hair from them.

And I already send text rants when my boyfriend takes significantly longer than me to answer a text.

Whoa. How did I get here? Is it laid out in my gene plan?

Or is it feminism’s backlash? See this article from Alice Walker’s (”The Color Purple”) daughter, wherein Rebecca Walker (yep, she kept the last name) second-guesses her mother’s neglectful, cold feminism.

We pay for the sins of our mothers, it seems. By swinging the other way … or becoming them.