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.

Try as you might, you just can’t outsmart evolution. You know, that thing that dictates how people came about, and continue to grow? Call it fate, for our sort of shorter-winded purposes here.

You see it all around you — even in this episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” The coevolution of old age and marriage have made a distinct set of behaviors practically inevitable, which I have witnessed from my own matriarchs, and which I fully expect to realize at the end of my own rope.

…And which, most importantly for our post, are demonstrated in the relationship between old-time couple Adele and Bill (below): Woman grows into a crabby ol’ prune from years of thankless service, directing her resentment toward her old man because, well, he’s closest, and the people who inevitably feel sorry for the ol’ happy-go-lucky-bastard don’t know all the shit he pulled when he was younger. Behold: Destiny. *

And what does Poor Bill have to say?

*Special thanks to my beloved, long-suffering Bigchap for his brilliant editing of those copyrighted clips. There’s nothing that engineer with an actual personality can’t do.

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?