My mother and I disagree on everything. That’s how, she says, she’s able to get me fantastic, on-point birthday and Christmas presents.
“I just walk into a store and, if I love something, then I buy you the exact opposite of it. Here, I bought you this shirt. I absolutely hate it though, so I’ll walk two feet in front of you when we go to dinner.”
Ha.
My mother — I think — loves me. But our banter never reaches Rory-Lorelai proportions of epic and our conversations never approach “Full House”-worthy sentiments.
For a longer time than I’d admit, I thought it might be possible that — and this probably sounds a lot harsher in writing than I mean it to, Mom — I was adopted. And the idea, or at least some tiny suspicion of this possibly being true, probably would have endured had it not been for the following two things:
1. I once saw a picture of her from when she herself was in college and had to double take because we looked “The Shining” twins level of terrifyingly similar.
2. Most importantly, we have an unabashed and shared, fervent love for lowbrow Indian television — specifically, soap operas.
Take it from me — Indian soap operas, with their overdramatic, overcooked plotlines, are better than Samoas, better than Tagalongs.
Better than Thin Mints. I’m dead serious, even if these soap operas often aren’t.
Some mother-daughter pairs enjoy scrapbooking mundane moments from their life, planting flowers that will eventually die in Michigan’s six-month winters or traveling together for highly inappropriate benders to Cancun, but not Mom and me.
The foundation of my relationship with my mother is built on our mutual obsession for badly acted television programs with excessive thunder sound effects. And, like many of my other bad habits (i.e. nail-biting), it started young.
To give you a bit of background, soap operas in India, called “serials,” take drama to a whole other level. Telenovelas are nothing in comparison. Serials usually involve a large, wealthy family that owns some sort of vague, powerful Google-like company. The men in the family are always signing some contract or fighting over some “very important merger that will determine the fate of their company.”
But that’s irrelevant to the actual plot of the serials. More often than not, people — like Mom and I — tune in for the conflict between the women on show. Because serials are so family-oriented — probably stemming from India’s widely-held belief in traditional values, but that’s neither here nor there — they rely on classic tropes of rivaling daughters-in-law and aggression between the son’s mother and his wife.
It’s all very riveting and, every year since I was four, my mom and I have gotten sucked into a show’s black hole. That was all before I went away for school, but I still get updates from my mom and, after asking standard Mom Questions — How are you? Have you eaten? — she’ll give me vivid descriptions of what I’ve missed and who’s been poisoned or pushed down the stairs since the last episode.
It’s like I haven’t missed a thing. It’s like I’m back home, parked in front of the TV with my eyes glued to the screen, guessing exactly how the evil, eye-patched mother-in-law is going to separate her husband’s adopted daughter from the girl’s husband.