It’s So My Mom.

So I kinda hate that @shitmydadsays guy. Cause now he’s got some t.v. show out of being a grown-ass man that lives at home and tweets the shit his dad says. But moreover, I’m  pretty sure my mom has been saying crazier, funnier shit for longer.

I’m not sure if i’ve ever divulged my mom’s infamous “you made that bed like my hairy ass” quote, but if I didn’t, it speaks for itself.

More recently, mom’s had some real gem outbursts. Like the night last Christmas season when she came home stressed and flustered, having just come home from the grocery store with my dad. She came upon my smart-talking brother blithely eating Mcdonald’s at the table and lost it.

GET OUT THERE AND BRING IN THE GROCERIES THAT ARE GONNA FEED YOUR FAT ASS ON CHRISTMAS DAY!

But Santa came last week as well. My brother called me while I was in New York, getting ready for a fancy dinner for one. Only an anecdote like this could have kept me on the phone: this time, Jimmy said, mom had come across some poop debris behind the toilet, and started the inquisition with my little bro (dad was inevitably next).

“DO YOU GUYS STAND ON THE TOILET?”

My brother, perplexed, responded that no, of course not, they didn’t stand on the
toilet.

“I MEAN DO YOU STAND ON THE TOILET, AND THEN TAKE A SHIT?”

Image by Debby A via Flickr

Ever do something weirdly festishy, and wonder where the hell it came from? I don’t wonder. I know. Who else relishes in sniffing their significant others’ ears? I do. I love sticking my schnozz in my boyfriend’s soft ear fuzz, then attacking all the soft, surrounding cartilage afterward.

If this behavior seems strange to people, let me explain: Not only did my mom do this to my brother and me, I remember my aunt doing it, too, while chanting the following incomprehenisble phrase: “Ese mugoso, so sweet, so sweet, daddy, ese mugoso so swayet!”

Lose translation from Spanglish retardese: “This dirty thing is so sweet.”

On a totally random, unrelated note, it’s hilarious how many women I found lamenting the possibility that they’d understand their mothers AS mommies on this recent installment by my friend Rima at Mommybrained. Ha ha, bitches! I’m not alone! (Boo hoo–it’s gonna get worse when I pop one out …)

Remember when your parents admonished you for not taking care of other people’s belongings? I do. My mother used to tell me, after a stained shirt or polish-stained rug incident, that one day I’d take care of my things, when I had bought them with my own money.

Nuh-uh.

Call me careless, immature, or unmaterialistic, to make up a new word. I don’t usually take care good care of my belongings. Bums would rightfully shun the inside of my car in favor of tidier street corners. (In fact, I got so tired of the hub caps popping off my Corolla that the last time someone followed me to let me know I had lost one, I went back just to watch it roll into a ditch.) My kitchen is clean now that I cook regularly—but when I merely dabbled in it years ago, only the flies and vomity smell reminded me of piling dishes.

I’ve always taken some sort of strange pride in this messiness. It placed my priorities in direct contrast with my mother’s: first comes work, which I like to think I’ve always excelled at; then friends and family; then, insert a million things here, including art house movies, which I rarely watch; and finally tidiness. My mother’s life starts and ends with family and a clean house.

This messiness is my last bastion against the transformation into my mom. I might be turning out just as crazy, but at least I have messy. My Alamo.

So Sunday I’m cleaning the dishes in the kitchen, quite relieved to finally have an empty sink (we don’t have a dishwasher in our awesome, new but circa 1920s-built apartment). It felt so good to have a clean sink that I did a little sweeping in the kitchen. And the kitchen is so close to the dining room, that maybe I should have snuck a little sweep in there too. I did.

And why stop there just because it was technically almost Monday morning? The suitcase in my bedroom—the one I had hauled a quarter of my clothes to the new apartment in about a month ago—needed to be emptied. And all the clothes on the floor needed to be sorted and picked up, too. Also, it was probably a good idea to purge my purses of all their 2009 receipts, for tax purposes.

I’m really, really hoping someone snuck some speed into that broccoli cheese soup I’d had for lunch. But I doubt it.

Because while speed could have made me manic, it couldn’t have accounted for my parlance: “Don’t you like having a clean place?” I asked my boyfriend, who would yell when he couldn’t find his dirty boxers or shoes in the random, mid-room spots where they had been left. “No,” he replied with sullen teenage angst from his computer. And I heard my mother’s voice echo through my head with a familiar but previously unappreciated mantra. “Don’t you like having clean sheets?”

Recycling. That my mother never did. And it’s decidedly un-Conservative. Yes, recycling is surely the answer.

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 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.

It’s a silent, interior time bomb, akin to the one that kills one of Tom “Scientology” Cruise’s cohorts in the beginning of MI 3: The Mom bomb. That point in your life where some silent switch is turned on, and you suddenly manifest all the mannerisms, sayings and annoying habits of your mom (or dad). Everyone goes through it, to some degree.

So who’s gonna crack and offer the goods? I wanna know how you’re turning into your moms. I know you’re sick and tired about reading how it’s happening to me, because I know I’m sick of reading every other vanity blog. This one is supposed to be cathartic for everyone involved. Help me help you!

How’s this: I’ll share for others first, and then we can all go in a circle (goddammit).

Some information I extrapolated from my friends over Christmas:

One has just started bending like her mom. Says she used to hate how her mother would bend from the waist instead of the knees when picking something up, and now she catches herself doing the same thing.

Another other friend has found herself asking people questions without context. A conversation or idea will play through her head, and without any expositional reference, she’ll ask someone involved a question about it. Like: “Well did they?” No context offered.

I have a similar plight. I’ve developed my mom’s unnerving habit of asking questions the recipient could never answer. Questions like, “Well, what was going on inside his/her head?”

Or my favorite transaction, from last time I was in town:

“Jennifer, did you happen to throw away my salad fork last time you were here?”

“Why would I throw away your salad fork?”

“Well, I mean, accidentally.”

Image by Jessica DeWinter via Flickr

That’s the goal of new book “Start Talking: A Girl’s Guide for You and Your Mom about Health, Sex or Whatever.” Read the scant, three-questions-for-the-author writeup in the Detroit Free Press here.

Interestingly, writer and sex and intimacy therapist Mary Jo Rapini (can you tell she’s from Houston?) makes the case that young promiscuity can have a lot to do with bad body image.

Even MORE interestingly on a personal level, I had both a teetering body image and a tacit mom on the issue of sex growing up, and I still lost my virginity later in life than probably 85 percent of my Catholic schoolgirl friends. Moral of the story: Don’t talk to your young girls about the ins and outs of sex, per se. Just drill them with the idea that God has a baby ready to give them at age 15, and the only way to get out of it is to do, like, the reversal of sex. Whatever that is.

Side effects may occur: me and at least one other friend have been convinced in the past that we were pregnant under circumstances others would deem as immaculate conception.

“I need to talk to you, so carve out some time.”

Those were the words that my mom greeted me with back home in Texas last Wednesday morning (my excuse for not blogging the past week).

I knew exactly what she wanted to talk about. I had never expected to hear these words from my mom after I was grown, out of the house, and on my own payroll. But then I had to go and start a damn blog about us.

The tension wouldn’t stop us from shopping. Hours later, we were standing in line at Nordstrom’s Bistro. I was trying to figure out how to broach the subject; she was unnaturally terse.

We ordered. We sat. And then I asked what she wanted to talk to me about.

She started slowly but dismissively, mentioning that she didn’t appreciate the blog. How she thought I was ridiculing her. How she had initially been struck with the thought that I harbored hate for her. How she’s not a public person, and I shouldn’t make her a public person, even if I’m quasi-public.

I assumed she was angered mostly by the very personal family info I put in the “Ice Queen” post. So I started to defend the disclosure of those specific family matters as the lens through which I view my own relationship. Her reaction to the info disclosed made it obvious: She hadn’t read the post. Oops.

None of the blog was meant to be mean-spirited, I told her, maybe a bit too defensively. I wasn’t ridiculing her but trying to recreate her persona. “A caricature,” she retorted. She referenced the “Citgo” and “Palin” posts, which I thought were harmless. She said I was making fun of her. She says I misquoted her about the white hair/kinky hair quote.

At one point I called her selfish. Oops.

Our poor waiter was approaching the table like a stray cat slinks toward a human with food. He skulked to and from our table, and apologized profusely whenever he interrupted our conversations with drinks or food.

In fact, I think the whole restaurant was staring at us.

When it was over, we hadn’t come to an agreement. We had come to a stalemate: my mother looking off with red eyes, me contemplating leaving the bistro. Maybe it would be for the better, I thought.

And then we ate some chocolate cake in silence. And then my dad called. And then there was a little more non-blog conversation. And then we left, went to the bathroom, ran into some old friends, and continued shopping, like nothing had happened.

Just in case my boyfriend wonders how I can go from bawling and chewing him out to professing my love.

Image by sheilaz413 via Flickr

I still haven’t spoken to my mom since she called Saturday morning to tell me I didn’t need to stay at home when I visit San Antonio tomorrow, because if I wasn’t going to actually stay with my parents every night, they’d just be tripping over my suitcase in my absentia. That’s apparently sufficiently annoying to tell me just to stay with my boyfriend, or friend Shanel, etc. My dad called me and told me I was welcome to stay over there. Thanks dad.

I’m sure this has something to do with her discovery of this site. It gives her reason to direct her frustration and anxiety toward me because she feels she has to pull off the holiday at my grandparents’ alone. She won’t let me help. My aunt is coming in the day of, so she won’t be of any help either. Mom is forced to pull together an entire dinner for our family while still facilitating my grandmother’s care.

Neither me nor my dad understand why mom won’t just put grandma in a nursing home. My grandmother is terminal. She cannot speak or walk, only nod and make noises. She sleeps most of the time. So why not put her in a place where she can be taken care of by professionals? My mother and grandfather wouldn’t visit her any less, of course–they just wouldn’t feel the 24/7 pressure of taking care of her all day: changing her; feeding her; doing the work that trained medical professionals should. And yes, my grandparents DO have the money.

I tried to tell my mom this last visit; that it’s well documented that people often fall into depression when taking care of their terminal or Alzheimer’s-stricken parents, and that she should shift the burden a bit to others and make sure her mental health is good. Of course, she turned to me and asked, “Is that what you’re gonna do to me? Stick me in a home?”

Well, yeah. I’ll visit you every day and make sure you’ve got everything you need. But why wouldn’t I sign you up for a nursing home if the task of taking care of you is more than I can handle? Sandra Day O’Connor quit the Supreme Court to take care of her husband with Alzheimer’s. But he was already enjoying a better standard of living–having literally forgotten about her, he found a new love in his nursing home! Not exactly the happiest of endings, but not the worst, either …