It’s So My Mom.

Ah. The holidays. The food. The family. The impending meltdown.

Oh yes. My mom is apparently already buzzing at everything she’ll have to prepare for that day, since she’ll be getting no help from her sisters, who will be coming in the day-of from out of town. That’s unfortunate, because she’s not gonna let me help. Everyone knows that a daughter’s touch will make your oven blow up. At least, my mom knows that.

My boyfriend wants to go on a bender for a boys’ night the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. In Austin. An hour and a half outside of San Antonio, where our families will be celebrating the holidays. Says his friends organized the event. They’re going to the UT game Thursday. Don’t they feel the need to celebrate Turkey Day with their families? White people. I swear.

You won’t find us half-Mexicans skipping out on the requisite face-stuffing with fambly. I’ll certainly be subjected to grandma’s 100-degree, dark-as-the-bat-cave house. And I’ll like it, dammit. ‘Cause I’ll be schnokered.

I just REALLY. HOPE. that my bf gets his butt up and back in town the next morning in time to smile along with the rest of us.

The mom won’t answer the phone to tell me what time the festivities will start so I can plan to be there two hours later, which will be the actual time of commencement.

I also have to figure out how I’m going to cook a green bean casserole for my bf’s sister’s gathering without oven heat. Solar power? With my mind, perhaps? It’s a good thing I read Matilda.

Some people may think this blog is cruel. They might see the pictures of my mom’s head on various and sundry things, and think “My God, what a bitch.” Really though, it’s not mean spirited.

It’s funny. Isn’t it?

Okay. That’s not completely true.

There’s something else at work here. I’m obsessed with my mom.

She’s everything that’s made me who I am. She made me work hard, develop my writing, and get good grades. She taught me humility. (The threats “not to come home” if I lost my school sweater again didn’t really help me become a better steward of my belongings, though. I might have one hubcap left on my car.)

She was a writer, too. But she second-guessed herself too much, and got caught up caring for others. At least, that’s how a self-absorbed twentysomething sees it.

When I graduated college, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I didn’t want to live with my mother’s ironclad rules. I didn’t want to deal with her daily outbursts. I didn’t want to witness her terrorizing my poor, hard-working dad.

And then I got out. And here I am, 1,100 miles away and living in sin, empathizing more and more with her each day, despite the fact that my dad will call desperate for “help! she’s crazier than ever.” I used to rush to his aide. Now my thoughts turn immediately to her

I will never forget the last-few-visits-ago’s farewell. She came to the car to bid me goodbye, straight black hair in a pony, makeup half-worn, in a junior tee that could have been on a teenager. Her skinny little arms hung there and her shoulders slumped as she began to tear up because her crowning achievement, her self-definition, was leaving again, under circumstances of which she couldn’t approve. She wasn’t just my mom anymore. She was my friend. She looked almost like a child. And I was leaving her, again, to a life of the same daily routines, of caring for a terminal Alzheimeric mother, a computer-obsessed husband, and a seventeen-year-old son (enough said). After all she has done for me.

My mother loves me more than anyone else in this world. She represents everything that is nurturing and selfless. She is the flicker of faith left in this body.

She’s everything I could aspire to be, and everything I’m terrified of becoming.

That’s what this is all about. And I’m finding it’s pretty universal.