Momma's boy

OK, I figure if I do this, it has to be in vignettes. Giving a full dose of my mom is like going into the reactor room or looking at the sun too long; prolonged exposure can have harmful effects.

- You've probably seen how my mom had me dressed when I was very young. Add to that how she refers to my shirts as blouses and my underwear, whether they be boxers or briefs, as panties -- well, it's a good case for homosexuality being genetic, not environmental.

- My father was named George. She named me after him. That's not an uncommon thing. My mom named her youngest daughter Kim -- Kim Novak Z., actually, after her favorite actress. A bit unique, but not weird. Then my mom received her citizenship, and got to choose her own name. She chose Kim. Yes, she named herself after her own daughter.

This also caused plenty of confusion when someone would call and ask for Kim or George, and we'd respond "Which Kim?" or "Which George?" My mom often adds "Big Kim or Little Kim?" with her being Big Kim and my sister being Little Kim -- this just adds to the confustion; my mom is 5'0" and 100 pounds. My sister is considerably bigger.

- Speaking of names, she can't even pronounce mine. Imagine how much I was teased growing up, as we all know how cruel kids can be, when she came along and called me "Zhock-ZHEE."

I actually have a Vietnamese name as well, but I think I'll keep that to myself.

- I mentioned she's 5' and 100 pounds -- she's had two lipsuctions and three facelifts.

- My friends in high school learned it was futile to call. Before she'd let me talk to anyone, she'd have to know not just who they were, but she'd ask whether they were going to college, what they planned to major in, and what their grades were. They'd complain to me later that all they wanted to do was talk to me, not play 20 questions with my mom.

- There was the time she yelled at me because I had gotten my car all dirty and wasn't trying to immediately wash it. I told her it was salt and sand from the road, and I couldn't wash my car because it was like zero degrees outside. She told me she didn't care and left to wash her car. She was back 10 minutes later, freaking out and now yelling at me to help her get the inch-thick layer of soapy ice encasing her car -- like I said: it was zero degrees outside.

- She tends to perpetuate certain Asian stereotypes: She's been in four car accidents in the past four years. And a while back, she decided she wanted to buy a convenience store. I was the only one against the idea, everyone else told her to do it. So when she did buy it, she didn't tell me. For three months she left every day to run her store, and I had no clue (this was my freshman year at OU). It wasn't until one of my sisters accidentally told me. I don't know why she felt the need to hide it from me. I supported her as much as I could, working when I wasn't busy skipping classes.

She lost the store a little over a year later.

- Just a few weeks ago, she told me I should stick with journalism over nursing. She said I was an editor, and that's like being a doctor of the newsroom. She's never understood my explanation of just where copy editors are in the newsroom heirarchy, though I have a suspicion she sometimes has selective fluency in English. Actually, I know this is true.

- She took 12 years to get her degree. Not a slam against her, because it took me 12 years to graduate college, too. And while I got two degrees, she took over a decade because she was also working a lot of the time, and raising two kids. And while I spout off on how much weirder she made things for me growing up, and still makes things weird today, I know that she's always looking out for me.