A few nights ago, my mother and I were talking on the phone. I don't remember who called who, but as she is wont to do, she asked me what I've been working on. My first thought was to change the subject. My second thought was to lie. But sadly, I don't lie well, especially to my mother, so I took a deep breath and told her about the Hellish Handbasket ebook, which I had just published.“Oh, what is it about?” she asked.
“It's called 'Welcome to Dissertation Hell,' and it is a collection of selected posts from my blog,” I replied.
“Oh. You know, I don't think I've ever seen your blog,” she said.
“You've been offline for a while,” I said, trying to steer her away to a different topic.
“Where is your blog?”
Suddenly, in a nanosecond, my future life as a demented person who wears her underwear on the outside of her clothes in public, on Trimet, passed before my eyes. Dirty red underbelly alert! Alert! Not... happening. My brain worked feverishly as I considered and discarded 50 lame reasons why I shouldn't give her the URL to my blog. In the end, I came up with zip. Zilch. There was no good reason to exclude my curious mother from reading my anonymous blog. The thought of telling her she couldn't read it felt worse than the thought of her reading it. Still, I made a half-hearted attempt to dissuade her.
“You know I blog anonymously, right? That means you can't tell your condo friends, 'My daughter has a blog.'”
“OK.”
“And you know I write about personal things, right? So you can't be offended.”
“OK.”
So, I sent her the URL to this blog in an email, hoping she would accidentally delete it or corrupt it or something. Well, I can hope, can't I? No such luck.
The next day she called.
“Hello, Mudder,” I answered, as I always do when I hear her voice blasting through the phone.
“You sound like you are the most frustrated person who ever existed!” she shouted. Oh Lord Kumbaya. She read my blog.
“Ma, relax, it's therapy for me,” I tried to explain.
“You are frustrated!” she accused.
“OK, I'm frustrated!” I agreed. “But it's also an exciting time in my life! It's not bad! It's good!”
There was a moment of silence while we both pondered our next move. In used car sales transactions, the person who speaks first loses. So I took a breath and waited.
“Your younger brother tripped over the cat and fell down the stairs,” she said. Whew. Won that round. The equivalent of a 1968 Dodge Dart, I guess. That is to say, not a huge win.
So now I'm outed to my mother, which may possibly be worse than being outed to the entire world, because only mothers can press all the buttons that put us into that special orbit we experience as frustration. I'm not worried she'll reveal my identity... it's out there in the ebook. And who cares if a few silver-haired old ladies know who The Chronic Malcontent is? Not me.
My fear is that knowing my mother is possibly going to read this blog will cause me to censor my words. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, certainly not hers. I don't think I've said anything too derogatory toward her, have I? Besides calling her scrawny. Which I'm sure she would agree with; anyone can see the woman is a stick.
Well, no use fretting over the wreckage of the future. The cat is on my lap, but he would fight to the death to avoid going into any bag, so it looks like I'm going to have to let this one go. I surrender, Mom. Welcome to my blog.
