Hello, Pushkin

I know it's probably unavoidable. Despite our best intentions, we all turn out like our mothers in some ways. In my case, it isn't such a bad thing. My mom has her quirks (she sometimes wears a hat with a dead racoon tail attached to it), and we have our differences (she follows political races closely; I've been guilty of voting for the city councillor with the prettiest last name), but she loves me very much and, quite probably, loves Mae even more. I know that makes me lucky.

That said, there are a few minor ways I plan to stay different. One has to do with food. My mother does horrible things with food. Nasty, nasty, revolting things. Like, for years, she stored her homemade soup in the same tupperware container she gave my sister and I to vomit in when we had the flu.

Or, like this weekend, when she came to visit her grand-daughter. We went out for brunch and she accidentally dropped a big gob of pesto-garlic sauce on her shirt. Whatever, right? But wait. Next, she picked up her butter knife, scraped the sauce off her sweater, then licked the knife clean - sweater lint and all. And as though that was not gross enough, she dipped her dirty napkin into my water glass (she didn't have her own) and used it to wipe at the stain. I was suddenly not thirsty anymore.

Or there's the last time she came to visit, when Mae was three weeks old, and I caught her trying to feed a bottle of slightly-off expressed breastmilk to the cats. (She said it was a shame to waste it.)

Or last Christmas when she said, "Do you want a piece of cake?" and I said, "I thought you threw the cake out." And she said, "I did, but I changed my mind and fished it out again."

I know I will eventually do things that both embarass and gross-out Mae. (All mothers do, right? It's practically a rule). I might wear the wrong clothes; get an embarassing haricut; drag out the naked baby photos when her first serious boyfriend comes over, but, with God as my witness, I will NEVER offer her garbage cake or feed breastmilk to her cats. It's the least I can do to make things a little better for the next generation.