The only thing this has to do with my mother: A certain mundanity that we all impose upon our juniors when we reach a certain age and start carting them around in mini-vans and private school uniforms. The kind of mundanity (to make up yet another word) that smells like Sunday did: Wet, humid evenings signaling an impending school week, sticky and heavy with chest-crushing fear and foreboding. Of tests, politics, and The Phobia. Same shit, different island.

Sunday was always the worst, ruled by the gut-churning sameness that must be the bane of Purgatory. There were bright spots to my childhood: Cousins in faraway cities with late nights, movies, novel food. But Sundays in San Antonio. Always the same furniture store with the same dark wood loveseats and sleigh bed frames, weighing heavily on my bored chest. (Furniture shopping still feels alien, like playing my parents in a movie. I buy online a lot.) Hours of neighborhood trolling for houses we would never buy. Every Sunday: Poor kids with their faces stuck up toward the opening of a vanilla frozen yogurt spigot at the buffet. Would this be life? Even then, I contemplated the finality of it, on account of the banality, wedged in small spaces with little legs pointed up toward wall-rested feet. If I followed this path, it would go too fast.

And yet, if my parents so much as moved the comforter stand, my life fell apart. Things would never be the same: There was visual, spatial proof of that. I might as well have moved to Mars. We can’t blame our parents for everything.

These days. My mom represents something different. When I shipped out to college, I missed our powwows at La Madeleine intensely. During breaks at school we’d go and order the large Caesar and cups of tomato basil, then grab countless ramekins of jelly and butter and fill endless tiny plates with free bread. Mom would get drunk off Brandy sauce and ask me about school and boys. Or to drive home. Even without a license. Even then, when we’d fight literally tooth and nail, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person.

Months later I’d stand in some public university bathroom on break, thinking: I wish I were there, right now, with mom. Politics, religion, personal interests aside.  Then, back to class. Waiting Always on Tomorrow.

]]> http://somymom.com/2012/01/25/366/feed/ http://somymom.com/2011/09/13/forgot-to-tell-yall-update/ http://somymom.com/2011/09/13/forgot-to-tell-yall-update/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 04:00:23 +0000 admin http://somymom.com/?p=358

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 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 been at 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?”

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.

So I know I’m always complaining about issues my mother has saddled me with, implying that it’s her fault that I sometimes seem unfit for the non-loony world. But sometimes when a prism shifts, you see it in a new light.

I’ve often lamented the paranoia my hypochondriac mom has bequeathed me. And on a business trip last week it was in rare form.

In fact, it started running rampant from my first flight—not surprising, actually, as the fear of flying is something I’ve cultivated on my very own. I also lay claim to my very overactive imagination, which conjures all sorts of Final Destination-worthy scenarios that could bring planes down. Like birds flying at 30,000 feet.

But a much more realistic fear in light of both near and not-so-recent acts of terrorism is crazy plane passengers. And being that I was New York-bound last week, there was a motley cabin crew. And one of them had a turbin.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I am ashamed to cop to the prejudice, being closer to a Democrat that the dreadful alternative and having dated a Syrian boy for four years. I tried to calm myself at the scene, reassuring myself, from my experience with my former Middle Eastern family, that only Indians wore turbins, and Indians aren’t terrorists at all!

But what about Pakistanis? I tried desperately to remember their headgear.

So I scoped the dude out extensively in the terminal. If this is sounding worse and worse, rest assured that I literally did the exact same thing to my own kind, a suspicious looking cholo (Spanish for thug), at the San Antonio airport last month. I intercepted him to ask if he had a brother named Mike, just so I could tell, from his response, tone and texture, whether I was dealing with potential shoebomber material on my connection flight to Dallas. (I swore I had heard someone page “Anthony Padilla,” and wasn’t sure if airport personnel were as up to speed on their terrorists as I.)

Back to the New York trip. I had done my homework in the terminal enough to assure myself that this guy was more Ghandi than Genghis (a stretch, but they both hailed from the eastern hemisphere).

That is, until he started hanging around the bathroom toward the end of the flight, “innocently” plying our stewardess at her station for apple juice. I was sure he was just biding his time so he could step inside the lavatory to mix up whatever he had brought in tiny parcels that had inevitably gone unchecked in our lax security screenings (which, by the way, did earth my suspicious looking box of business cards).

There was nothing I could do. I sat not in my seat at that point, but in the vacant back aisle, breath held, listening for my moment of intervention—tackling, plastic door storming, whatever needed to be done. I was sure that once that swirly-headed man went into the bathroom, he wasn’t coming out until he had everything together for our own little D-Day party.

And then he came out, took his apple juice, and returned to his seat.

Of course.

It’s times like this when I question the very thread of my sanity. Like, what witches brew of my mother’s overzealous caution mixed with my own rampant imagination has rendered me useless to this world? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

But a few days later, everything became crystallized. Like the food allergies that give the otherwise uberimportant immune system a bad name, my fixating on my momentary hyperventilations is missing the forest for the trees. What I’m getting at is that this paranoia is useful.

You know that fictional (or maybe fictionalized) character in Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”? That would never be or have been me. You know why? I’m extremely observant.

Mother always told me to be aware of my surroundings, and by God, it stuck. Like last Thursday, when I had my first taste of New York City crackpots.

I was sitting in Dean & Deluca in the Borders at Columbus Circle mall, the only place besides the overstuffed Starbucks that had a free wireless connection (for a $12 latte and quiche). Over the course of my zealous e-mail answering and article writing, I became vaguely aware of an older man at a table across—but not too close—from me. He was checking me out.

No big deal, right? Until the person at the table to my immediate left left. And Old Man Creepy slid in there to replace her.

Most people probably wouldn’t have bat an eyelash at that, but it struck me as weird. Struck me as weirder when I caught the guy’s gaze looking not toward the book where it was pointed, but sneaking frequently at my face, and mis-matched stockinged-feet.

It was time to go, I decided. I hurried to the bathroom before my departure, then—drat!—realized I had left my scarf at the table.

But I needn’t have gone all the way back there to retrieve it, because Old Man Foot Fetish was waiting patiently outside with it when I reemerged. I thanked him and dashed down one set of parallel down elevators, turning back every second to make sure he wasn’t following me. And goddammit (sorry mom) if the old fart didn’t pass me on the floor below to bid me a forced friendly adieu.

I watched him pretend to go out the glass doors to the outside world, feigning another escalator descent. But I didn’t descend. I waited to watch until he went all the way past my view, into a world with other possible harassees. But right before he would have disappeared from view and into that world, he turned around to come back in—and stopped short when he saw me staring.

Who knows what this guy was up to. A mugging, a serial killing, a raping, or some harmless spank bank material. Thanks to my mom and the screws loose in my brain, I’m never going to find out.

Let’s play one of those crazy stares picture games — you know, the kind where you stare at something and then slowly pull away until your brain realizes heretofore unseen things.

Look under my eye there, where the arrows are pointing, and then slowly pull away from your computer. The din of the screen should reveal the picture’s secret.

See that little blue vein? My mom has the same one in the same place in the same color. So now we’re friggin’ twinkies (twins).

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.