Hopeless
Ever since my mother’s gotten her fancy car with BUILT IN SPEAKERPHONE she has been ambushing me with spontaneous phone calls to relatives and rando friends and forcing me to talk to them whenever I’m in the car with her, which happens to be all the time. Half the time I have no idea who I’m talking to. “Say hi, this is Jay’s mom, the one with the bakery. You remember him? He went to Stanford. For LAW SCHOOL.” Then I have to remind my mother that like all of her friends’ kids went to Stanford for whatever how can I possibly keep all these highly successful and wealthy Korean sons and daughters straight? You know who I’d remember? The kid who ran away to NYC to pursue a successful career in costume design for drag queens. Yeah I’d totally remember him.
Anyway this is our number one mother-daughter activity: sitting in traffic and getting phonebushed. So I’ll be at the wheel because there’s no way in hell that lady is driving when my life is on the line, I mean seriously she is the world’s shittiest driver, and all of the sudden her bony freakishly long fingers are pushing some buttons and then oh hey there my uncle’s voice is coming through the stereo totally interrupting my groove to Crystal Blue Persuasion. It is SUPER annoying. Because now here I am in traffic talking to my uncle about not being married. “Don’t worry, Annie, next year you’ll have a boyfriend.” OK THANKS I’M NOT WORRIED BUT YOU APPEAR TO BE. So then my mom dials my father and he says, “Take care of you self, Anne.” I thought this was sweet and then he says, “Because you don’t have husband. Who take care of you? You so alone. No one care for you.”
My mom laughs because to her it’s one of those funny-because-it’s-true situations. I laugh because you know what else is there to do? I am in traffic.
Hopeless perhaps…but the good kind of hopeless.
Take care of yourself AC, because that’s better than taking care of yourself plus some fool you met when you were too young, doesn’t appreciate you and is slowly sucking your will to live.
My father, being from a central asian country where goats outnumber the people, once told me when I was 18 that I was getting way too old and needed to find a husband soon in order to have children otherwise I’d die alone…I responded to him a few years later by letting him know I was a lesbian. The joys of family conversations