This is a horrible post, and I apologize. Truly, I'm sorry.

My mother doesn’t understand many things about me.

These posts are silly. You know the kind—when the writer complains about how their parents “have never really got” them. But my comment still stands.

She doesn’t, and I don’t hold it against her. At all. I’m a pretty strange person, so if she did get me, then I would question her sanity almost as much as I question my own.

Although, it would explain a whole helluva a lot if she did understand me. Then I could point to her and say, “YES! It has a source!”

You see, my mother is very different from me. And it baffles her that her look-a-like (I’m apparently a spitting image of my mother. I don’t see it) refuses to behave exactly like she did when she was my age.

My worst experiences come from my high school days (as most teenage girls’ worst experiences do).

Do you remember Kelly from the early 90s sitcom “Saved by the Bell”? Roll back the clock two more decades and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of what my mother was like back in the day. She was the pretty cheerleader, always on the arm of the most popular boy in school. So, you can imagine her confusion when she popped out a softball-playing tomboy, more interested in smearing mud all over her face than makeup.

Obviously my mother lost all hope for me by the time I was 5. However, with puberty came what she believed to be my saving grace.

I started noticing boys.

Now, I had always noticed boys. That gender made up the bulk of my friends. I regularly watched movies/played dodge ball/wrestled with boys, and had usually considered myself one of them. But as my ninth birthday came and went, the differences between us (mainly, the physical differences) began to really stand out.

Boobs. (Did I mention I developed early? Really early).

I’ll never forget when my good friend John pointed out to me that I was getting fat around my chest. His intelligently worded comment of “You got fatty pillows, Mol” grabbed my attention and pulled my self-esteem down to a level that would not be seen again until the Prom Fiasco of 09.

My first reaction was to get rid of the pillows. With the help of John and a few other of my guy friends who were concerned about my changing form and wanted to aid in the removal of my tumors (we decided that’s what they must be), I attempted to compress my chest. I laid on my back and stacked two of John’s grandmother’s hard shell suitcases on top of me. During a Pokémon marathon, the boys took turns sitting on top of the stack.

In case you’re wondering, this well-thought-out plan did not work.

I mean, I had an odd square shaped bruise across my torso, but the dreaded lumps were still there.

Back to my “saving grace” (yeah, that was a long tangent), my differences soon made me really uncomfortable around my buds. Add to that, I started wondering about what I looked like and how my guy friends thought I looked… Needless to say, when I took a glance in the mirror above my dresser and saw grass stains, an overbite, and a dirty face, I wasn’t too confident about my inherent hotness.

[This was from the ages nine to eleven. You can just imagine the depression I went through as I got older and even more awkward].

My mother is responsible for many of my first toe-dips into the great pool of womanhood. At twelve she took me to get my brows waxed (it was terrifying at first, but now I have no feeling in the skin around my eyes). Thirteen, she had my hair highlighted. By the time I was fourteen, my head was almost completely blonde—I have black eyebrows. Let that sink in for a second. Also at fourteen, she laid out a makeup routine for me. Originally it would take me fifteen to twenty minutes. By fifteen, I could do it in three.

Anyway, I have completely lost track of where this post was going. Suffice it to say, any prettiness I now possess is due to my mother’s influence. And while we rarely see eye to eye, she really does care about me.

You know, enough to make me pretty.

That was a shitty post, and I’m sorry if you read it.

Have a nice day.


UPDATE: Here's a picture of some cute pigs as an apology.