1. You call your mom to fill her in on your hard day at work. She:
- First asks you what you ate for breakfast that day and then launches into a lecture about the new corduroy skinny jeans your father has been sporting recently and how she’s genuinely embarrassed to be seen with him at the grocery store. Then, she asks insightful questions about your day and insists on sending a gallon-sized bag of frozen chocolate chip cookies she baked in 2017 in the mail to treat you.
- Immediately asks if your resentment towards your manager is, in any way tied to your nasty ex-boyfriend who left you crying in the bathroom during Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines at the junior prom. When you ask why she’d ever bring up this very pointed incident and ask how this could ever be related, she makes an excuse about her old memory and quickly hangs up.
2. You visit your parents at home for a weekend and your mom asks you to grab her glasses from the car. When you get there, you reach under the seat looking for them and pull out:
- Her purse, filled to the brim with a small, mobile pharmacy of every type of over-the-counter medication a modern American could get their hands on, in addition to at least twelve cough drops, a coupon clipping to a grocery store two hours away, her wallet filled with coins and yes, her glasses.
- A paper bag filled with printed-out Google searches in your name. There are articles about you making the dean’s list at college and yellow pages articles stating your old and current addresses. Also in this bag are several hundred photos of you printed out from your tags on Facebook and a pre-written ransom note, finished save for your mother’s signature. God, she’s quirky!
3. You give your mom a FaceTime call on a Saturday morning to see the dogs and check in on her after her knee surgery. When she picks up, she:
- Struggles to turn the camera to front-facing for three full minutes, even though you coach her expertly. During this time, you get a long, good look at your dad drinking his green tea while wearing the aforementioned corduroy pants. He doesn’t notice the camera pointed at him and picks his nose twice. When she finally turns the camera around, she shows you the puppy on her lap and the older dog on the armchair next to her. She tells you a silly story about them and their very real, confirmed personalities.
- Quickly turns off the video and audibly shuffles a lot of things around. When you ask why she did that, she says it “must be a problem with the old wacky technology,” in a deeper, huskier voice she’s never used. She finally turns the video back on in front of a white wall and tells you your father took the dogs out fifteen minutes ago. She looks largely the same, but you could swear that she has a five o’clock shadow you’ve never seen before. I guess anything’s possible in menopause!
4. You text your mother and ask her to send a scan of your passport to get onboarded for your new promotion. She:
- Sends you three different texts, one after another. Each of which is a string of unrelated emojis. She then follows up with a text saying, “Sorry honey, sneezed when I opened my phone and sent those by accident. I can get you a picture tonight after tennis. How is your rash?”
- Immediately replies with a poorly photoshopped image of a passport page where your identification photo is a badly lit picture of you doing a keg stand after the junior prom with a nipple hanging out. Printed in the “Given Name” box is the name “Horny Bitch,” and your birthday is 06/06/1666. She doesn’t provide a text with any context explaining this.
5. Your mom comes to town to drop off a few boxes of your clothes as she drives by on her way to the beach house. When you meet her for coffee, she:
- Tells you you look too skinny and gently forces you to eat a whole croissant by yourself while she watches you closely. She then berates you for fifteen minutes about your bad posture, asks if you ever figured out where that smell was coming from and sends you off with a twenty-dollar bill to “buy some snacks” with.
- Greets you from a looming 6’2” but otherwise seems physically normal. When you ask her about her height, she tells you she’s been wearing those Skechers platform sneakers recently and suddenly seems super tall to everyone. She asks you to pay for your own latte and then launches into a detailed questionnaire about where you were the night of May 3rd, 2014. When you ask if this is about her weird obsession with the junior prom again, she fakes a phone call and runs out of the coffee shop.
If you got mostly As:
Looks like that’s your real mother! Emoji-sending, cookie-freezing and all, the woman you’ve been interacting with is indeed the one who birthed you. No worries here!
If you got mostly Bs:
Shit – time to call parent protective services because I don’t think that was your real mother. It’s probably your manipulative ex-boyfriend in a realistic skin suit, at it again, trying to ruin your life! Don’t beat yourself up – it could happen to anyone! You should probably get your father and the police on the phone right now and report that old friend from high school who had a side gig making and selling extremely realistic skin suits.
