Why Moms Are Weird Read online

  It makes you go crazy. Waiting for someone to love you, to come to you and only you, to choose you like you’ve already chosen, is the most degrading, debasing, demoralizing…and yet, sweet, sweet pain there is. It’s as humbling as it is humiliating. But yes, there is a sweet side. You know what’ll happen when the choice is made and you’re finally together. You know that’s when your heart starts beating for real. That’s what you think, anyway. That’s what you keep telling yourself.

  But listen to me. It doesn’t happen. You wait, and eventually you realize you’ve been wasting your time. You lost time making yourself available to something that was never going to happen. You’re a sucker and you’re the one who did it to yourself.

  So. No waiting. I used to be the girl who would wait. When my mom’s done talking about her chlamydia, I’ll tell you exactly when I realized that not only is love not worth waiting on, about 99 percent of the time, it’s probably not really love anyway.

  Back to the C Word.

  “No, I never had chlamydia,” I say to Mom, trying to remain calm and patient. At least, in voice.

  “When the doctor told me I had this before, I called you. You said you had it, too.”

  “What do you mean, you had this before?”

  “Remember when I was going out with Ward, the one who worked with computers? We came back from that trip to Atlantic City and I told you how my hips were sore from—”

  Here’s what my brain does right now to deal with this situation. In order to let her finish this sentence, my head fills with this sound:

  BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  But when I listen again, she’s saying, “Maybe it’s herpes. The rash is starting at my knees, but it’s getting closer to…other parts. It’s moving up. Toward my—

  BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

  After my small blackout, Mom finishes with, “…and the rash is a bunch of little blisters.”

  “You have blisters on your thighs, but they started at your knees?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why do you think this is a sexually transmitted disease?”

  “Well, what else could it be?” Her voice gets really high here, indignant, like I’m insinuating she doesn’t have a fantastic sex life.

  “Seeing as how most people don’t have sex with their knees, I’d say the chances of it being an STD are pretty slim.”

  “What did you tell me I had last time? Wasn’t it an STD?”

  “Are you talking about the UTI?”

  I don’t want to bring this particular horrible memory up again, but it is still preferable to the one we’re creating right now. About a year ago Mom called at eight in the morning to mumble something about peeing blood, and if I’d know anything about that. I said, “Drink some cranberry juice, go to the doctor, and pee after sex.” And then I hung up. The damage had been done, though. I didn’t have sex for three weeks after that. I just kept imagining Mom with her cranberry juice and my spine would curl in agony.

  Not that I’d be having lots of sex, anyway. Since Mom’s busy discussing thigh pustules, I’ll use this blackout to tell you that I don’t have a steady boyfriend now, and I haven’t had one in a little while. They don’t stick. And by that I mean they don’t stick around. Or I don’t stick around. Really, the entire dating thing has been exhausting. I’m just going to go ahead and blame my mom for this one, too. I’ve got a dead dad and a germy mother. Who wants to take on this hottie?

  “I guess it’s not a UTI,” Mom says, sounding a little too disappointed.

  “Have you gone to a doctor yet?”

  She makes this scoffing sound, as if I’ve asked if she’s planning on shooting porn this weekend. “Now, how am I going to talk to a doctor about this?” she asks.

  “Preferably in a voice low enough so that I don’t have to hear it anymore.”

  “Benny, you’re smart. Get on the Internet and tell me what’s going on with my Aunt Doris.”

  “Jesus, Ma. If you’re old enough to get it sick, you’re old enough to call it by its real name.”

  “I’m not saying that V word.”

  “You said ‘chlamydia’ just fine.”

  This is officially the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had with my mother.

  “Don’t start, Benny.”

  “Ma, did you have sex with someone who has chlamydia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s not like I’m going to ask him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Girls don’t ask boys questions like this.”

  My mother is fifty-three.

  “I want you to get off the phone, call the doctor, and go see him today. You tell him what you’ve told me, because he went to school for a very long time to accurately tell you what he thinks about weird bumps.”

  Mom sighs. “Fine. I thought you’d be mffwffwa.”

  “I’d be what?”

  “HELPFUL.”

  It’s possible Mom mumbles on purpose so when I make her repeat herself she can yell the word she’s pissed about.

  “I love you, Ma.”

  “I love you, too, Boobs.”

  “Now go get your skanky ass to a doctor.”

  A Disclaimer.

  I don’t really have fantasies of killing my mother. I love her more than anyone in the world. She is a fantastic woman.

  Here’s how fantastic: she has saved no fewer than four lives in this world. Four different people would not be alive if it weren’t for my mother’s bravery and skill.

  A man once had a heart attack on the highway, and his truck swerved across three lanes of traffic before smashing through a fence and rolling to a stop in the parking lot where my mother was loading groceries into her car. She ran over to the truck, crawled into the driver’s seat, and performed CPR until the paramedics arrived. He would have died if she hadn’t been standing there. If she’d been standing three feet to the left, he would have killed her.

  When I was about ten and my sister was seven we had a big family vacation, staying at a bunch of hotels as we drove along the coast of California. (By the way, Mom claims this trip is one of the reasons I now live three thousand miles away and curses this vacation constantly. “I never should have taken you at such an impressionable age,” she says.) At one particular hotel they had a small pool. Jami and I were bobbing along the deep end, playing Dolphin—a game where we’d try to flip into the air as high as possible, pretending to catch fish and eat them. We were too busy attempting somersaults to notice a blond toddler slip into the water behind us. She had wandered away from her mother, who had turned around to drape her towel over a lawn chair. That’s how quickly the little girl slipped into the water without a splash. But Mom saw. She dove in, got the kid, and brought her to the surface before the little girl had even a moment to realize she was breathing water. My mother is a hero.

  The other two lives she’s responsible for? Mine and Jami’s. We wouldn’t be here without her, and while I never forget it, Mom sometimes acts like it was no big deal at all to create us from inside of her body and unleash us on this world. I think it’s the most amazing, selfless thing anybody has ever done for me. There’s no way I could ever thank her.

  So I really hope I don’t accidentally kill her.

  I don’t know what compels her to call me and ask for this advice, opening up this kind of dialogue. I know this isn’t normal. There aren’t movies where a mother turns to her adult daughter and says, “Can we talk about chlamydia?” Maybe my mother doesn’t have enough friends. I don’t either, so I can’t judge. But I would love to find a way to make her think differently enough about me that she doesn’t try to girl-bond over sex. I don’t ask to have her treat me like a daughter all that often, but I think here I have every right to be creeped out.

  She needs a great girlfriend. I wonder if I can make her a MySpace page for that instead.

  Okay. So Back to Me.

  I move
d to Los Angeles almost four years ago because Brian, my boyfriend at the time, wanted to. We were living in Chapel Hill and I was working at a software company. Marketing. It was my job to set up trade booths for conventions. I ordered giant banners, created pamphlets, sorted name tags. Yeah, it was really smart stuff. Totally using my art history degree to the fullest. Sometimes I’d have to lie down from thinking all those really deep thoughts about PowerPoint presentations.

  I thought it would be incredibly romantic to drop everything and move across the country to be with my struggling actor boyfriend. We were young and full of hope. I could already see his Oscar acceptance speech. I’d be stunning in a tight, red gown designed by someone whose name I couldn’t accurately pronounce. Tears would be streaming down my face as Brian looked at me from the podium, wrap-it-up music fighting for supremacy as he shouted, “But all of this is because my wife, Belinda, never stopped believing in me! She is the greatest lady who has ever lived! I love you, Boobs!”

  It’s true; I never stopped believing in him, even six months after we moved here, when every cell in my body was sure he was cheating on me with a girl from his improv class. I believed every excuse he gave me when he didn’t have enough money to pay the electric bill, when he pawned our CDs to pay for an audition workshop, when he borrowed my cell phone and never returned it. When he cried at night, telling me he wanted so badly to be able to propose, to give me a ring he was proud of and pay for the wedding of our dreams—I wanted to believe him so much my toes would ache from clenching them in hope. But in the end, I couldn’t believe hard enough. In the end, I knew he was just acting.

  Then. Then I got stupid. I waited for someone.

  I met Kevin at a friend’s birthday party. We were both freezing in a courtyard, shuffled off to the side. We started talking, and didn’t leave each other for the next two weeks. We had so much in common it was like I’d found part of my own body, something I didn’t even know I’d been missing. Kevin had a similar background, also had an art history degree, and his CD collection looked exactly like mine.

  The problem was Kevin wasn’t living in Los Angeles. He was just in town from New York for a few months, working on a project. And Kevin really liked his life in New York. Having already moved across the country for one boy, I knew I didn’t want to do it again for another. Instead I thought I’d handle this maturely.

  I threw a small tantrum, and afterward I told Kevin that I’d be here when he was smart enough to realize we belonged together.

  I can’t really tell you how I knew this. But I did. When I looked at Kevin, I saw my future. Every time he made me laugh, part of me clicked into place. But I wasn’t going to give myself up for him. That’s what happened with Brian, and why he walked all over me. With Kevin, I wanted to be equal. I wanted him to come to me like I’d come to him. I could already picture him calling me from New York, telling me he was miserable, that any distance from me was the worst pain he’d ever felt.

  I semistalked him over the Internet, sending him approximately three hundred emails a minute. Or so. I didn’t count. But let’s just say there wasn’t a way he could write back to me as often as I wrote to him. I had a desk job; he had something that resembled a life.

  To his credit, Kevin waited until we were sitting across from each other again to tell me that it wasn’t going to work out. In the end, he didn’t miss me enough. He didn’t say that, not exactly. But that’s what it means. I thought he needed me more than he did. I don’t know where he is now. I don’t even look him up, even in my most depressing moments in the middle of the night when I’m drunk and alone with the Internet. I failed at making someone love me like I loved him, and I don’t need a reminder that life goes on for other people. I don’t want to think of anyone surviving me.

  What I’ve figured out after Kevin and Brian is that I’ve never really been in love. Not real love. Not true love. You can be in love with someone, but if it’s not returned, then it can’t be true love. I refuse to think that real love makes you miserable all the time. If love is supposed to be this painful and difficult, why would people get married, choosing to feel this way forever? There must be a different kind of love, one I haven’t felt yet, when someone looks at you just like you’re looking at him and you don’t have to say anything. You just know. It’s got to be rewarding and fun, because the only love I’ve ever known has always ended up kicking me in the ass.

  Does this make me a cynic or a romantic? Both, I guess. I believe in love, I just don’t believe it’s happened to me. And a small confession here: I don’t see it happening for me anytime soon. Not until I’m way older, with some idea of who I am. Lately all I’ve been able to figure out is who I’m not.

  So. Me. I live alone, in an apartment in Hollywood. I’ve just turned twenty-seven, an age that comes with absolutely no pressure or responsibility, which I enjoy. I’m not in “The Business,” or “The Industry,” as so many people around here are. While I enjoy the fact that Los Angeles lets me live in a weird dream world where celebrities are sometimes buying groceries in line with me (Hello, cute concierge from Gilmore Girls ), I don’t want to have anything to do with being rich and/or famous. It makes me, in many ways, the famous one among my group of friends. They think my life is like a blissful vacation, free from the daily rejection and self-doubt their world surrounds them in. It also makes them think I’m small-town, even though I’m in the exact same freaky metropolis they live in. I have to watch what I eat and work out just as often as they do. The only difference is I don’t lose a guest spot on some prime-time soap if I’m a little bloated.

  A typical example of a night out with my friends consists of us meeting at a restaurant walking distance from my house, but I still take my car and park with the valet. We will say we’re meeting at 8:00, but the first person shows up at 8:10. Everybody hugs, and the boys kiss the girls on the cheeks. First we compliment each other’s looks, because it’s really important to some of them to be told how pretty they are. Then we order a bottle of wine, before we’ve even cracked the menu. I listen to my friends—both boys and girls—dissect the menu like they’re reading the paper, discussing both the price and caloric count of each item, cross-referencing each fact with a complaint about either a lack of money or a lack of a job. They then all order the most expensive item on the menu, the one that has the least amount of food. I listen to their stories of auditions and near brushes with fame, or at the very least, a chance at a few hours of employment.

  While I’m happy that I don’t have the slightest desire to do what they do, I can’t get all high and mighty. What I do to pay the bills is just as depressing as a fifteen-second audition for an unattainable role.

  I work at a travel agency, which means my job is very annoying, and not just because seventeen times a week I send someone to Paris. I also send them to Morocco, London, Sydney, and Tokyo. Every day I put someone on a dream trip, to places far away and beautiful, while I sit in the same cramped, leaky, mildew-streaked office on Ventura Boulevard. My dreams do not lie in the travel agency world. My dreams have sort of run dry. I thought by now I’d be working at a gallery, scouring the country for new talent to break into the art world. But when I got out of school, I needed money to live. It would have been easier to learn how to construct a gallery with my own hands than to land a job in one. Then I went to Los Angeles, hoping the atmosphere would be inspiring. Instead, it was overwhelming. Everybody here is supposedly creating something, but usually it’s really crappy. And if everybody I know is creating something crappy, then chances are I’m doing something crappy, too. I’m no genius, and I don’t have the ambition it takes to be mediocre. It’s much easier to stop. Eventually I was disappointing myself enough that my brain decided it’d be best to lay low for a while. Take some time off. Wait this part of my life out. I have put myself on hold.

  I know. Wah. I live in a beautiful city where it’s eighty degrees and sunny every day. I’m completely employed and healthy. I have my own apartment. I own a c
ar. I even have money in savings because Dad had a great life insurance policy and left a very detailed, very balanced will. There is nothing for me to complain about. I know that.

  Then why do I have this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that I’m missing out on something amazing? What’s making me search crowds at movie theaters, wondering if I’m supposed to bump into someone? How come I get anxious when I’m down to the last page of the book I’m reading, upset that I’ll be finished and have to find something new to occupy my time? I get hooked into the strangest things, and obsess over the smallest distractions.

  Here’s my latest, and I can’t stop myself from doing it. I search for personal meaning in the music playing over the loudspeaker at my local supermarket. I’m not even waiting on someone, so I don’t have the excuse, but the practice appears to have stuck.

  I don’t like grocery shopping because it always takes much longer than I think buying food should. My list will have items that seem very logical when I write them down, but in order to fetch the items on the page, from eggs to milk to toilet paper, I have to run a haphazard maze across the store. Inevitably I forget an item or two because I didn’t turn down the cereal aisle, or no longer had the energy to wind all the way back to produce. So to keep myself Zen about the entire shopping experience, I find myself sucked into the music they play over the loudspeaker.

  I don’t know if this is strictly an Albertsons thing, but the music they play—a collection I’d call NOW That’s What I Call Inoffensive! —is a mix of some of the cheesiest, sappiest, most banal songs that seem to all live deep inside my brain, somewhere near my cerebellum. I am convinced that someone’s playing DJ whenever I walk into Albertsons, and all the songs are tiny little messages just for me, like a fortune-teller flipping tarot cards as I push my cart toward the produce section.