Mother, Can You Not? (8 page)

L
oud pounding and a brassy voice singing “Happy Birthday” catapulted me into consciousness and also a raging hangover. “Happy birthday to my tushy gii-iirl! Hap-py birth-day too-oo yoooouuu!” It sounded a lot like my mother.

I groped around for my alarm clock and squinted at its angry red display. Eight a.m. I was lying next to my crush, Jared. Beautiful Jared, with his toned albeit alarmingly short torso, and his tortured pseudo-intellectual angst at peace for a brief moment while he slept. We were in my college dorm room in New Jersey, I was fully clothed from the night before, and it was the morning of my twentieth birthday. And my mother had come twenty-five hundred miles from our home in Los Angeles to sing at my doorstep?

“My God! This lighting! I need Botox just to stand out here!”

Yep, definitely my mother.

SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

Of course I had no business being shocked. My mom is the queen of the birthday surprise. I tried to shake Jared awake as her pounding continued. “Uh, just a second!”

After nineteen years of birthday bombshells, including one where a flower deliveryman handed me a bouquet of tulips before stripping down to a G-string and singing a sexed-up rendition of “Happy Birthday,” I had become conditioned to exercise hypervigilance each year around the anniversary of my birth. When January 20 rolled around, I was on high alert: Is that a
real
mailman, or is he about to deliver a
special package,
courtesy of my mother? Is that bartender humming of her own free will, or is this the start of an elaborate birthday flash mob?

Given my mother’s track record, you would think I could have predicted this visit, but this year she had outdone herself. January 20, 2009, was also Barack
Obama’s inauguration day, and she had me fully convinced that she was in Washington, DC, to witness the historic event.

Hope! Change! Not for my mother. And she wasn’t content to just
tell
me her plans. No, the woman sent me forged travel documents detailing her flight from LA to DC, and she complained about the obscene price of her fictitious hotel stay. The night before, she even sent me a picture of herself in front of the National Mall. Due to all the overwhelming evidence that she was safely ensconced in our nation’s capital, watching President Obama make history, I lulled myself into a blissful little bubble of complacency and invited Jared to spend a night of strictly “above the waist” action in my bed.

“My God, Kate, what are you doing in there?” my mother yelled. “Open the door! I don’t care if you’re naked, just let me in! You know I’ve seen that tuchus doing just about everything!” My mother raised her voice. “I’ve seen it naked, farting, pooping! Remember at your second birthday party when you started screaming in front of everyone: ‘POOPY’S COMIN’ AND IT’S A BIG ONE’…?”

“Mother! Shhh! Stop!” I roused Jared from the coma-esque state he had drunken himself into the night before and sprinted over to the door. She was impeccably dressed in all black.

“What are you doing here?!”

I smiled apologetically at my hallmate Nicole, who had emerged from her room three doors down, rubbing her sleep-crusted eyes.

“I thought the poop talk might get you to hustle! Now, get your butt in gear. I’ve got a
big
birthday surprise for you!” Of course she did. How could a cross-country early-morning serenade be the only shock of this day?

“We’ve got to hit the road right now.” She glanced down at the clock on her phone. “And I have to say, this is by far the best birthday gift I have ever given you!”

This was an unsettling thing to hear, as she used the exact same words to describe my 2007 present: a consultation with LA’s top nose job doctor “in case you want to fix your nose before you go off to college!”
I didn’t
.

“Move!” She brushed me aside, picking up a shirt
off the floor. “And of course it’s a total wreck in here! We should have never cleaned up after you when you were growing up. You never learned to keep a clean hou—”

She trailed off as she rounded the corner and noticed Jared sitting at my desk, helplessly swaddled in a pale yellow blanket from the waist down, covering his bottom half. He had searched in vain for his pants, which were likely hiding in whatever recess of the room also contained my dignity.

“Well, well, well,” my mother said. “Who is this…handsome young man?”

“Uh, this is Jared! We’re just getting an early start on a project for playwriting. I thought you were in DC, Mom!” I stepped between them.

“Surprise!” She tilted her head. “Jared? I’ve never heard anything about a Jared!”

Nope! Not true. She knew everything there was to know about Jared. The unfortunate consequence of our extremely close relationship in this case was that I had armed her with the knowledge that Jared was a “player” who constantly pressured me to have sex. She
hated him, and her advice to me from the first day I kissed him was “RUN!” In college, however, I realized a beautiful new freedom: the ability to filter my mother’s advice. I could send her calls to voice mail! The twenty-five-hundred-mile divide gave me the flexibility to choose which of her suggestions (demands) to heed.

Now, the physical buffer between my mother and my questionable decisions had collapsed, and here she was, rifling through my belongings and approaching Jared like a lioness stalking her prey. But Jared just sat there, blissfully unaware of the tsunami about to crash over his artfully faux-hawked hipster little head.

“Uh. Hi, Mrs. Siegel…”

“It’s Friedman, Kim Friedman, but you can call me Kim. So, how long have you two been an item?” First shot fired. She knew that Jared and I were not “an item.”

I had once mustered the courage to ask him about being exclusive, and he led with “Monogamy is such a bougie construct,” followed that up with, “I just got out of a relationship” (he hadn’t), and closed with, “Let’s just keep things chill.”

Maybe I should have seen that coming. This was a guy who constantly tried to have anal sex with me, arguing: “Just let me put it in your butt; you’ll still be a virgin. God, are you really going to give me blue balls again?”

I always felt guilty when he said things like that, which is absolute bullshit. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, “blue balls” refers to the
slight
discomfort
some
men feel when they’ve been aroused for an extended period of time without ejaculating.

“Frankly, I don’t care if it feels like an elephant is stomping on your testes; your arousal does not entitle you to any of my holes or appendages. You’re lucky to be in my bed, so shut the fuck up and masturbate forth!”…is what I should have said. Sadly, I always just blushed and apologized. My mother’s anger toward him smoldered hotter with each day our casual arrangement continued.

Now, you might be wondering why
I
was willing to tolerate that kind of treatment. College had worn me down. It was my second year at school, I had yet to nab my first boyfriend, and I wanted to fall in love. Every
guy I made out with on the dance floor only wanted a single serving from the Spanx-sponsored buffet I offered up each weekend, so the fact that Jared was coming back for seconds made me feel like Helen of Troy/Beyoncé!

“You know,” I said, “Jared probably has to go now.” I stepped closer to the desk where he sat.

My mother rolled her eyes with such gusto, it’s a miracle she didn’t detach a retina. She threw my own words right back in my face.

“Where does he have to go? You two are working on your project,
right
?”

She didn’t wait for a response, whipping toward me, her nostrils flaring wide. Her eyes darted around the room, and I could tell the focus had shifted from Jared to a new outrage.

“Kate, what is that smell? I smell pee! Oh, for the love of God, tell me you didn’t get a cat! We talked about this, Kate! No more animals!”

“No, no, no, I didn’t get a cat, Mom.”

At this point I should probably mention that the reason my mother smelled urine was because Jared had
wet the bed and thrown his pants off in his drunken stupor the night before.

“A DOG?! Kate, you agreed when you went away to college, you promised that there would be no more animals! Your father and I are not taking care of any more of your rescues!”

I’d like to take a moment to object to my mother laying the blame on me for the fact that we have five dogs, two cats, and three fish. She is responsible for ownership of at least 70 percent of our pets.

“No, Mother, I don’t smell anything…” She kept scanning the room as I tried to think of a reasonable excuse. “But they were just…uh, spraying for pests downstairs so maybe that’s why you smell someth—” I knew as soon as the words came out of my mouth that this was the wrong thing to say.

“What?! They sprayed for bugs!? I’m getting a hotel room for you right now; get your things!”

All thoughts of Jared had been abandoned for a far more pressing concern: cancer. Pest exterminators are very high on my mother’s list of carcinogenic threats.

“Mother, it’s fine. I’m actually not even sure if they spray—” I tried
to backpedal, but she wasn’t listening to me.

“Are you kidding me?” my mother interrupted. “Breathing even one ounce of that stuff is like inhaling ten pounds of asbestos!”
Not scientifically accurate.
“No, no, my daughter is not getting your cancer, thank you very much, Princeton! I’m calling the housing department; this is outrageous! Why don’t they just hand out cancer lollipops at orientation! Maybe they should start serving cancer juice next to the orange juice in the cafeteria!”

Then, in what seemed to me like slow motion, she turned around to my bed and pulled down the covers: “Come on, let’s strip your linens and get your laundry done, you’re not staying here anyw—” She trailed off as she came face-to-face with the enormous round wet spot in the middle of the bed and Jared’s wet pants tangled in the sheets.

“Noooo!” Jared reflexively sprang upright, beet red, and the blanket covering his naked legs fell to the ground.

My mother heaved a great sigh that was 50 percent
disgust and probably 50 percent relief that the reason she smelled urine was not the result of a brain tumor pressing on her olfactory cortex (a fear that undoubtedly crossed her mind). She glanced at Jared from across the room; he was wearing only soggy boxers from the waist down. Smiling like someone had just handed her a winning Powerball ticket, she started stripping the linens while Jared pulled the blanket back around his hips.

“Oh, you shouldn’t be embarrassed by this, Jared,” my mother said sweetly. “It happens to a lot of men, especially when they drink. I read an article on AOL the other day about adult-onset bed-wetting, and it said it can happen because of stress, you poor thing.” If the cause of the bed-wetting hadn’t been stress before, it certainly would be now.

“But it can also be a sign of prostate cancer,” she continued, “so you really must go see a doctor. When was the last time you had your prostate checked?” Now she was just having fun.

“I—uh…” Jared was deflated.

“You can’t remember?! Oh, well, then you better go
to the doctor to take the test; it’s easy! They just pop a couple fingers up your tush, poke around, and cough cough you’re done!”

“Mother! Stop!”

She gave me an icy look that in the language of Kim Friedman stares translates to
I know exactly what I’m doing; you’re lucky I’m not murdering this fool with my bare hands
and forged ahead, all smiles.

“Well, in either case, you must immediately start doing Kegels. They can help increase your bladder control.”

“I—uh…” Jared mumbled. His words were barely audible, and it looked like he might collapse into the fetal position.

“What? It works!” my mother said. “Jared, I’m telling you. Kate and I do them all the time. Men can do them too! Come on, it’s easy. Just clench. See, I’m doing them right now!”

“Okay, thanks, Mrs. Friedman.” My mother waved jovially as Jared rushed toward the door, clutching the blanket around his hips.

“Bye, Jared!” my mother said. “Are you sure you
don’t want to borrow some of Kate’s jeans? It looks like you’re the same size!”

Jared practically sprinted out of my room. The door swung shut, and my mother turned and gave me a pointed look.

“Well, you sure know how to pick ’em!”

“Mom, I can’t believe you! Did you really have to do that?” I collapsed against the wall, in the grips of an agonizing hangover.

She paused from stripping the bed and lifted the urine-soaked sheet for effect. “You can’t believe
me
?” she asked. “Well, I guess it didn’t occur to me that I might offend the delicate sensibilities of a drunk bed wetter with a little Kegel talk!”

I clutched my throbbing forehead. “Mother…”

She steamrolled through. “How could you possibly be interested in him?!”

I responded with the ugliest cry of my life. I’m never the girl with a single glistening tear streaming down her perfectly made-up face. On this day, though, I was violently hung over, and I had opted for a dramatic smoky eye the night before.

Bravely, my mother dropped the linens to the floor and hugged me, pulling my twitching snot- and mascara-coated face onto her shoulder.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, honey,” she murmured into my ear. “I just couldn’t help myself. The guy’s a nightmare.” She hugged me.

I wasn’t crying because she had embarrassed me (though she had); I was upset because she was right. Jared treated me like crap, and I tolerated it because I was lonely. I was so grateful that in that moment I was not alone, lying in the urine-soaked bed I had made for myself. Of course I would never admit any of that to my mother!

“Jesus, Mom! You seriously just ruined everything! He was about to ask me to be his girlfriend!” Clearly not, but I wanted to twist the knife.

“Okay, I’m sorry. I love you.”

I inhaled a deep shaky breath.

“Come on, let me make it up to you. We’ve gotta go. You’re going to
LOVE
your birthday present!”

Two hours later, I stood shakily in the door of a South Jersey beach house, as my mother beamed at me expectantly.