Conversations with my Mom

A few months ago, my mother shocked me with the news that she is voting for Kerry. She's since promised that Kerry definitely will win. When I expressed worry about Pennsylvania's and Ohio's electoral votes, she promised that both states will tip Democratic.

I really, really want her to be right.

And, no doubt about it, I really love my Mom. She's intelligent and generous to a fault. She also can rile me like nobody else.

For example, she's told her friends that she feels "trapped" between her FOX-watching husband and her NPR-listening daughter. She's intimated that FOX and NPR are equally distorting, a logic that leaves me equal parts befuddled and incensed. And so I had to laugh when, during a recent phone conversation, she said, "You know, I listen to way too much NPR and it's giving me a negative outlook on the world. That's why I should really cut back on my radio listening so I'll be a happier person." She paused, expectant. I paused too, wondering whom I was talking to. My mother rarely listens to NPR, so her confessional made no sense.

Finally, I said, "Mom, are you trying to offer some sort of instructional allegory?" She muttered something about the unpleasantness of talking politics and hung up.

The next time I phoned my parents' house, the call wouldn't go through. A robot-woman informed me that "The number you have dialed does not accept blocked calls. Please hang up and try calling from a different number." Huh? We don't have a blocked number, so this came as a surprise. I imitated the robot-woman's spiel for Adam: "The number you have dialed does not accept blocked calls. Please hang up and urge your brother to phone your parents, as they would much rather speak to him."

So, yesterday, I called Mom again, this time from a cell phone, outside our doctor's office. Ten days ago, my period failed to show. Six home pregnancy tests declared me not pregnant, but my abdomen seemed to disagree. Once it had swelled to strange and painful new proportions, I got nervous enough to call a doctor.

"You're probably pregnant," said the nurse I saw on Wednesday. "Don't you want to be pregnant?" Then she frowned at the urine and bloodtests that came back negative.

"Don't you want to be pregnant?" asked the doctor who examined me on Friday. He prodded my puffy belly, and I tried not to scream.

Verdict: ovarian cyst. But only a sonogram next week will say for sure. I phoned my mother to ask about her own experience with ovarian cysts.

"You're probably pregnant," she said happily. "Don't you want to be pregnant?"

As patiently as I could, I explained how impossible that was. But over-the-counter home pregnancy tests only became available in the late 70s, and so my mother had never used one. "Those home tests can't be all that good. It probably takes about a month before they can pick anything up, right?" When I told her how some of the tests detect traces of the hormone hCG as early as the day before one's period, she said, "Oh!.... Well, don't let them cut out your ovary until you get a second opinion!"

Several hours later, I started to bleed. Copiously. I'm crampy as can be, but glad to see my abdomen returning to normal. According to the doctor, this is the best thing that could happen with a cyst — that it would resolve itself and my cycles would return.

Meanwhile, my mother has decided that I would feel better if we say that I had a miscarriage. "You were sick earlier this month, so it probably wasn't a viable time. But you're getting closer!"

Yeah. Closer to a bizarro world in which a lost pregnancy is somehow better news than a resolved ovarian cyst.

Still, maybe Mom and I can both have our way. A grandchild AND President Kerry in '05.