Mother, Can You Not?
Read Mother, Can You Not? Online
Authors: Kate Siegel
Copyright © 2016 by Business Beagle Productions, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Siegel, Kate, author.
Title: Mother, can you not?: and you thought your mom was nuts…/ Kate Siegel.
Description: First edition. | New York: Crown Archetype, 2016
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000957 (print) | LCCN 2016004236 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101907047 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101907054 (tradepaper) | ISBN 9781101907061 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters—Humor. | Jewish women— Humor. | BISAC: HUMOR / Topic / Relationships.
Classification: LCC PN6231.M68 S54 2016 (print) | LCC PN6231.M68 (ebook) | DDC 818/.602080353—dc23
LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000957
ISBN 9781101907047
eBook ISBN 9781101907061
Cover design by Matt Chase
Photograph and illustration credits appear
here
.
v4.1
a
For Mom and Dad
Dear Lawyer Evaluating This Book,
1. I’m sorry.
You probably took this job, vetting manuscripts for Penguin Random House, to read books by important authors like Salman Rushdie and the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. You certainly didn’t sign up to read about my mother’s vagina. So for that, I apologize.
2. I’m so sorry.
As you read these essays, you may be shocked by some of the mortifying situations my mother has gotten herself (and me) into over the years. In an effort to avoid humiliating (and getting sued by) innocent third parties who appear in this book, I have changed names and small details to protect their identities. Hell, I wish
I
could assume a fake name for some of these stories! For instance, I would love to pretend it was my
sister
who was the accomplice to my mother’s cat larceny instead of me. Alas, I do not have a sister.
3. I’m so very, very sorry.
That last point in section two brings me to the following elephant in this metaphorical room: my mom has had a few minor brushes with the law! And I’ve written about some of them in this book! I’ve done a fair amount of research, as I don’t want my mom to go to jail (most of the time), and I believe the statute of limitations has expired on the criminal offenses disclosed in the essays. But of course, you’re the one with the law degree, so I’ll defer to you!
Truly Sorry,
Kate Siegel
W
hen my mother was twenty-five years old, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a television director. She hitched a ride to Hollywood with no idea how to drive, no job, and no place to live (unless you count the floor of a garage in West Hollywood without direct access to plumbing or heat). She was ultimately successful, even nominated for a directing Emmy, but in the early days, she had no money and wrote porn scripts to pay the rent. When asked about that time in her life, she always remembers it proudly: “Oh, honey, it was fabulous! So, I wrote a few pornos? You do what you have to, and it was fun!”
Incidentally, if anyone reading this is in possession of a late ’70s skin flick called
The Bionic Tool,
please email me at
[email protected]
. My mom doesn’t remember her “porn name,” so the writing
credit could either be Kim Friedman or (if I had to guess) her superhero alter ego, “The Castrator.”
Given my mother’s job history, I suppose I should have anticipated a positive response when I told her about a seemingly crazy idea I had for a project: sharing our intensely personal conversations on the Internet every day.
At this point, I should mention that my mother texts me a lot. Like,
a lot.
Seriously, I counted. She averages 111 text messages a day.
In light of the content of these messages, I had some serious privacy concerns when I thought about sharing them.
Her reaction to my idea was: “TRY IT! I mean, I’d prefer you make an app and become a billionaire Mark Zuckerberg with ovaries, but are you kidding me?! What are you afraid of!? Try
something
! You’re not getting any younger.” With my mother’s “encouragement,” I began posting screenshots of our conversations on Instagram.
I immediately regretted the decision: “OH DEAR GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?! HOW AM I EVER GOING TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AFTER PEOPLE KNOW THAT MY MOM TEXTS ME DAILY KEGEL REMINDERS AND HAS A LOT TO SAY ABOUT DILDOS AND MY VAGINA IN GENERAL?” Sharing my personal life so publicly was a major adjustment, and for the first few weeks, I wanted to hide in my apartment. Was my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss just staring at me because of last night’s vagina post?
Probably not,
as he didn’t know my name.
Was my dry cleaner smirking about the soy sauce stain on my blazer, or because he read this afternoon’s conversation about waxing my boyfriend’s pubic hair?
After a few months of getting accustomed to the fact that a wealth of information about my vaginal canal was publicly available, I just leaned in to all the oversharing. Hey, if my dental hygienist is already well versed in my mother’s anal bead curiosity, why not strangers in Iowa? So, when an editor named Morgan Shanahan reached out about writing an article on @CrazyJewish Mom for BuzzFeed, I thought
why the hell not?
That weekend, my boyfriend and I were visiting my parents’ house, and we went to lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant my dad and I love. Unfortunately, the restaurant is in the back of an Asian supermarket that smells like the inside of a whale’s rectum. My mother was grimacing as we sat down.
“Uch, this place is disgusting.” She turned to my father. “Hey, Michael, tomorrow do you want to take me to dinner in a Porta Potty? I saw a really nice one at a construction site on the way here.”
I pulled out my phone to check Instagram, leaving my father to fend for himself. Thousands of new followers flashed onto my screen. I refreshed my feed again, one hundred more in less than a second! “Jon! Look!” I grabbed my boyfriend’s arm.
“Kate, turn that off.” My mom glared at me.
“No wait.” She reached for my phone, but I put a hand up. “Seriously hang on, something crazy is happening.” I refreshed BuzzFeed for the fiftieth time that day, and the interview was finally live!
“Oh my god!” Thousands of new followers were pouring in, and my heart started fluttering. “Oh my Go—I—I—I have to throw up!” Perhaps the orca butthole contributed, but I jumped up from the table, ran to the bathroom, and puked up the entire contents of my stomach and possibly some of my small intestine.
“You see, Michael?” My mom smacked my dad on the shoulder as I walked back toward the table. “You take us to places like this and we all get food poisoning and die.” Note: We hadn’t eaten yet. My dad and Jon looked at me with concern.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. They did an article about the Instagram account on BuzzFeed. I think it’s going viral!”
“What’s Buzz Freed?” My dad tilted his head quizzically.
“You mean, the blog?” My mother pulled sanitizing wipes from her purse. “So that’s good, right? What’s with all the vomit drama?” Yes, she called the Instagram account a “blog” for the first five months. Now she usually refers to it as “Kate’s Instagram App,” and in light of my recent promotion to CEO of Instagram, I’d like my stock options now, please.
“Give me your phone, Mom.” I smiled. “I need to sign you up for an Instagram account, so you can see the text messages I share.”
“What do I need to look at them for?” She picked up a chopstick with disgust and began cleaning it with a Handi-Wipe. “
I’m
the one who sends them to you. If I want to look at them, I’ll look at my text messages.”
“Yes, but don’t you want to follow? What if I post a conversation you don’t like?”
“Honey, if I say it to you, I mean it. I give great advice!
So, let everyone see it; it’ll help people. And besides, I really don’t care what people think. This is me.”
In a week, @CrazyJewishMom had gone fully viral. The Instagram account went from having about 13,000 followers to 300,000, all watching and waiting to see what hilarious new adventure my mom and I would get into next.
However, my mother was
involved
long before the advent of the text message or Instagram. When asked about her parenting style directly, her response is usually: “Helicopter Mom? Please! I’m a Drone Mom!”
Her obsession with my well-being and future truly began when I was in utero. She refused to wear deodorant for a full nine months—“the aluminum!”—and she read Shakespeare to “fetus me” for one hour each day when I was in her womb.
The best way I can describe her shenanigans while I was growing up is that it was like living in an episode of
I Love Lucy.
She was Lucy, and I was constantly roped in as Ethel, her unwitting accomplice.
The mother-daughter relationship is a complex one though. As a daughter, you have to respect the fact that this woman grew you inside of her for nine months and then squeezed your watermelon-sized ass out of a small, sensitive hole. A hole that up to the point only ever experienced kielbasa- (if she’s a lucky lady/owns a vibrator, maybe bratwurst-) sized objects passing through. Add to that the unconditional love, diaper changing, and years of vile bodily fluid clean-up duty, and there’s a lot to be grateful for.
But watermelons and vaginas aside, there is no one else on the planet who knows where all your emotional land mines are buried, and exactly how to get away with tripping them. For instance, my mother will sometimes ask me this: “Kate, whatever happened to that adorable green skirt? You still have it, don’t you? It looks so good
on you!” Seems innocuous, right? So when I detonate with “SHUT UP, MOM! I DON’T NEED THIS RIGHT NOW, OKAY? LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!” it’s confusing for the casual observer. She always responds to my explosion with feigned bewilderment: “What? All I did was ask about that skirt you love! What’s the issue?”