Saturday, January 17, 2009

Paxil-Addled Soccer Mom Yoga #4


I’m sitting with my mother in our normal 11:00 tea session, usually when I roll out of bed. I haven’t shaken California time, not because I haven’t been in the Mitten long enough, but because the medication makes me sleepy. We are just chit-chatting about nothing, dealing with dishes and dinner plans and the locations of food stuff in her kitchen.

“Mom, where’s the milk?” *, I ask.

“In the pitcher on the top shelf of the fridge. There’s Splenda® in the cupboard.”

I should mention that my father is diabetic, and my mother has been on a perpetual diet- one that gets thrown out around noon every day- ever since I reached an age in double-digits. As a result, everything in our house is fat-free, sugar-free, and flavor-free. I’m also 35, getting uglier by the day, worried about my dating prospects, and currently rubbing generic Rogain® ( the Meijer’s Thrifty Acres substitute) on to my growing solar panel. Even the tea we are drinking is a British version of Lipton. I realize, sitting at the counter with my mother, that I’m drinking fake tea with fake milk and fake sugar, watching the fake gas-powered fireplace, growing fake hair, feeling fake happiness with my fake mood, preparing to go to fake yoga, and fretting over the fact that my mother might have to get a fake boob. I tell her as such, and we laugh, the only real moment born of plastic parts.

*Being a family of both Anglo and Indian stock, we take milk in our tea on both sides of the Raj**. We don’t want lemons, and if you are a waitress, please ask before you dump a bunch of coffee on top of it. It’s TEA, damn it, and that’s important to us. Just sayin’.

** “Raj” meaning “king”, it refers to the British occupation of India from the 1800’s until Partition in 1947.

No comments: