Becoming Mom

Everyone says, inadvertently, we become our parents. In this case, I become my mother, which fills me with fear. My mother is a great person, she's selfless and she will go to thenends of the world for her family. But my mother is also neurotic and I need to not be neurotic because I will drive my children insane the way she drives me insane.

She rings me this morning.

Mom: I bought you more baby clothes.
Me: Ok, thank you!
Mom: But how big are your babies going to be?
Me: Small.
Mom: Yah, do you know that if your babies are under 2kg, they have to go into the incubator?
Me: Yes mom, I know. I'm not illiterate and it's not like I don't have a doctor. ( I didn't want to scare her and tell her it wasn't an incubator as much an entire neo-natal ICU ward).
Mom: So, you better stop dieting!
Me: ????
Mom: Yah, I see the way you eat, it's hardly enough for you.
Me: I eat the way I eat because if I eat anymore than I do, I will throw it up because there's no space!
Mom: How you want your babies to grow if you don't want to put on weight?
Me: I waited so long for this, you think I'm going to throw it away because I don't want to be fat????
Mom: Yah what, you were always scared of growing fat!
Me: Have you seen me lately? Do I look like a person who is now bothering about how fat I am?
Mom (tone becoming a whine because she knows it's a losing battle): Yah, but you don't eat. How your babies going to grow?
Me: My babies are growing fine.
Mom: Yah but....
Me: Don't you lie there in the middle of the night and think up things to irritate your pregnant daughter with!
Mom: How you know??
Me: Wah lau.....

So yes, that's my mother, being pesky, neurotic and as usual unreasonably accusatory. She'd hear one thing from someone, extrapolate it into a situation that fits one of her children and accuse us of doing the same thing. As a teenager, I had a lot of issue with that because she once overheard my tuition teacher scolding another friend I was having tuition with for not doing her Economics homework. After tuition, I got hauled into my parents room and given a stern talking to about how they were paying so much money for tuition and I wasn't to waste it by not doing my homework.

Unfortunately, not only am I going to inherit my mother's neurotic nature, I have a memory like an elephant which spells great danger for the children. Now I just need to get a cricket paddle and get Packrat to smack me over the head everytime I seem to channel my mother's peskiness!

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