Mothers and Daughters

There are only a few words guaranteed to drive fear into the most confident of women. These include:

• You're pregnant
• Will you marry me?*
• I'm coming to visit**

It's the third one that I've been dealing with all week. Any word that my mother is coming to visit, and suddenly I turn into the woman on the left. It's not that I don't welcome a visit from my mother, but it's a fact that when she comes to visit, she gets bored and likes to clean. Despite the fact that the night before she arrives, I'm doing the desperate momma-didn't-raise-no-slob hose-down of the house, she'll find something that just needs to be "reorganized." Even though she's really not seeking them out, this usually results in her finding things that I really didn't want to attempt to explain; therefore, the entire week preceding the visit, I'm prying up floor boards stuffing away tax receipts and erasing all traces of the latest "mistake of the month" or, even worse, the fact that there's no "mistake of the month" currently in the picture. God forbid, we repeat the condom box incident of 2001 (let's just say that I was in a really healthy relationship, and my parents have never made the mistake of opening any of my drawers since then).

The thing is that this is nothing new in the history of mothers and daughters. My mother hid things from her mother (I still remember being taken to the movies when my parents just HAD to get out of my grandparents' house after the dog chewed up something that my mother had hidden in her luggage), and I'm sure that every grandmother from the ones I was lucky enough to know to the women in Plymouth, Mass had secrets to hide. But then again, the gals in the colonial era were hiding their secrets from the entire town lest they land some seriously ugly accessories a la Hester Pryne.

And so I clean and hide and stuff and pray that I didn't miss anything major. I sit and wait for the visit to end, and for my mother to drive away none the wiser and with a continued appreciation for the responsible girl that she raised. And then I vow to one day have a daughter of my own because payback is guaranteed to be a bitch.

* Ok, maybe not usually. But definitely if delivered during the seventh inning stretch at a MLB game
** Especially when delivered by your mother...