The Problem with Milk & Mothers

Milk

Some of us can’t drink it.  We all know that it gives us calcium and all that good nutritious stuff that a daily dose of frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts can’t.  But I confess: I don’t like milk.  (Let it be known that I only drink it in cereal.)  I can’t drink skim, 1%, 2% or whole milk plain.  Just can’t.  Yuck.  Double yuck. It tastes like cold, slippery water.  With a really weird aftertaste.  It just makes me bust out the Hershey’s chocolate syrup and go crazy with it.

Now why is it that it wasn’t always this way?  I used to drink milk aplenty when I was a kid.  I adored it.  Deferred to it.  Made a shrine to it in my bedroom.  Blew bubbles in it and made a mess all over the kitchen with it.  And now…well, it would be scary if all of a sudden I started drinking milk because my family (read: my eldest brother) goes through milk like it’s free water at a marathon.

If I suddenly get calcium deficiency when I’m fifty, I’m going to look back and go, “Milk, I should have hung out with you more.  You were such a good friend to me when I had the patience for you, but things had changed and my appreciation was a sorry thing.”

Mothers

We all have them.  Some of us love them to absolute pieces and some of us really, really wish they’d go do their hair somewhere else—preferably in their own bathroom where no one else has to listen to the blow drier over the TV.  My specific issue has to deal with a whole lot of teenage drama + a 50-year-old mother who doesn’t listen worth a crap = angst-ridden said teenager in room ranting about her said mother on a blog.

Now, you’d think that when I ask my mother during a rare serious conversation not to go telling people all about MY business and that it bothered me that she told her bff in Britain all about…yeah, you’d think the seriousness and maturity in the conversation might make her listen.  And then…well, it must have been the recent events because there she sat in the middle of the living room, talking to her sister about MY business—yeah, the kind that I asked her please not to spread around—and then having the audacity to tell me not to listen in on her conversations…as if anyone couldn’t hear it passing by the living room…

Is this my mother?  Or is this the universal representative of all annoying mothers?  Or is it the kind where their lives are so pathetic that they have to feed off of their teenage daughter’s already depleted social life?

Over mothers vs. milk, I’d rather drink six gallons a week of skim milk a week than deal with my mother for a whole car ride somewhere.