Today is Mother's Day. So, I am stuck in the suburbs trying very hard to be a good daughter. But, as usual, nothing I do seems to please my mother.
I'm relaxing in a chaise lounge on my parents' patio as I write this, watching my mother toil away in the garden. Occasionally, I ask her to spritz me with the hose because it's rather hot outside today. For some reason she resents this. Each time I make the simple request that she haul the hose half-an-acre to the patio, she makes a big production of rising up on her creaky 65-year-old knees and then loudly refers to herself as 'the field hand.'
She's such a baby.
But since it's Mother's Day—and given the fact that she has a tendency to abbreviate our cocktail hour when she is in this martyr mode—I decide to coddle her. I tell her that if she runs into the house and fetches us some lemonade she can take a break and help me write my column.
When my mother returns with the lemonade, which is thankfully laced with Stoli, I ask her to offer lesbians tips on how to impress their lover's mothers.
'Wear a bra,' she says without hesitation.
'But what if she doesn't need to wear a bra?' I ask.
'ALL women need to wear a bra,' she says. 'Even in the days of Communist Russia, those poor women had enough sense to wear bras.' (You may be asking yourself what communism has to do with undergarments and/or lesbians. I have no idea. And, I suspect, neither does my mother.)
'And she shouldn't wear a baseball cap,' she says, ripping the cap from my head and hitting me with it. When I carefully replace the cap backwards on my head and explain that it makes me look 'jiggy,' she asks if 'jiggy' is synonymous with 'stupid.'
My mother takes a thoughtful sip of her drink and then adds sternly, 'And, would it kill you to bring home a Danish girl?'
What my mother really means is that my girlfriend should be any nationality except Swedish. My mother is Danish and the Danes have some long-standing beef with the Swedes. I'd rather not go into specifics because I have a large Swedish readership and I don't want them to think that I share my mother's crackpot prejudices. In fact, most of the women I've dated have been of Swedish descent. I've always tried to pass them off as Danes, but as soon as my mother gets them alone she demands that they spell their last names. When she discovers that the name ends in the Swedish 'son' instead of the Danish 'sen' she shakes her head sadly and then speaks very slowly to them so the dimwits can understand her superior Danish intellect.
'Wear a bra and no baseball hats or Swedes,' I repeat as I type. 'Anything else?'
'I suppose asking that they be a man instead of a woman would be too much to hope for,' she says with a sigh.
'Would he be required to wear a bra, too?' I ask. My mother ignores the question and quickly changes the subject. And because it's Mother's Day, I let her.
----------------------------------------
