*face palm*
Mom called this morning. It's not out of the ordinary because that's what we do - call each other at random hours of the day just because. But this morning she started with a question that made my heart skip a beat. "You're my favorite child, right?"
Immediately, as a child, my head started spinning, winding through 28 years of life. Oh my god, what lie did I tell? What secret did I keep? Shit. What does she know? Wait. There's nothing to know. Is there? Oh my god.
"Yes. Yes I am."
What? It's the only response I could come up with.
"Then what is going on?" she retorted.
Ah. She was speaking of Friday. Friday, my sister and I are heading home to take her out for a belated birthday dinner. Dad's coming. Amber's boyfriend is coming. It's an event, clearly. In all fairness, it is sort of out of the ordinary for all of us to head home on a precious Friday night over a month after her (50TH, cough) birthday, but come on. We have lives. It's the first Friday in a month we could all wrangle our schedules accordingly. It's just bad judgement on our parts to clue her in to this event only three days in advance, hence the immediate panic attack on her part.
Of course, because she's a mom, she is not satisfied with this explanation. Oh no. Not even a little.
"Something's going on, I know it," she says. Without skipping a beat, she runs through the gamutof worst case scenarios: someone is dying, someone is pregnant, someone is getting married (and then she thought about that one, laughed, and realized that's definitely not it).
"Mom. No. No one's dying. Nobody's pregnant," I tried, to no avail.
She continued, hardly listening to me.
"... I'm not going to be able to sleep, you know this," she rambled. "Oh my god, what is it? Something terrible is happening. Wait. Is it good or bad? Is it good? Tell me it's something good..."
"MOM."
"... Is it about you or Amber? Wait. If it's not about either of you, why do I care? I'm not pregnant..."
"MOM."
She then jumped to - obviously - the next logical explanation, in her mind.
"You're a lesbian aren't you?"
"MOM. I am not a lesbian, oh my god," I said, banging my head against my cell phone, regaling in my mind all the dating horror stories I've shared with her in recent months.
"Well. You should be."