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.

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 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.

“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 …