When Your Estranged Mother Follows You on Twitter
It’s the second day of 2021, and I squint at my phone in a just awake haze, careful not to move too much, or Lea will wake up and make me get out of bed to feed her. I bring the phone closer to my face, to see it clearly without having to reach for my glasses. The artificial glow blinds me. As my eyes refocus, I read last night’s notifications, and think I’m seeing things. In between a text message, and some Instagram likes, I see an @ with my mother’s first and last name, followed by an exclamation point. It basically reads, Your estranged mother is now following you on Twitter!
I quietly take my phone off the charger and turn to lie on my stomach, confused as I put my thumb to the Home button and open the Twitter app. My eyes readjust again. I click on what I can only assume is my mother’s profile and recognize the black and white photo of my maternal grandparents, the one my mother uses as her go-to profile picture for everything. She never uses her own photo. Pictures mortify her. She literally runs away from cameras, hiding in other rooms until people promise not to photograph her, like she’s terrified of proof that she exists beyond the realm of her own reality.
As I scroll past my grandparents’ picture, to see the rest of her profile, I’m careful not to let my fingers slip. I don’t want to accidentally like anything. For seven years, I’ve chosen estrangement, and the last thing I want now is to acknowledge that I know she exists online, in a world where I’ve learned to be myself without her presence lingering in the ether. You saved me this election year, she writes, @ing The Lincoln Project. I donated to you often. Her next retweet: Pete Buttigieg. I feel my jaw tighten as I scroll through more of her tweets and replies. I’m worried! she writes to Mike Madrid. I’ve had a knot in my stomach for four years!
I’ve often wondered how my mother fared in the Trump era, how she navigated having a sociopathic con man living in both the White House and at home. She’s always been a staunch Democrat, a proud former George McGovern supporter who I’ve learned, through extended family, now hates Bernie Sanders with a passion. I’m sure she cried on election night, cussing at the T.V., wondering out loud how America could have elected such an obvious con man to be President. I don’t know how she can’t see the irony of her rage.
My parents stole my identity while I was in college. They took out nearly $100,000 in fraudulent student loans, a mess that’s taken me years to sort out. When I first found out about it, after I graduated in 2006, I thought it was my father’s doing. Up until that point in my life, I believed that everything awful and abusive that had happened to my family and me was my father’s fault, that my mother was somehow being forced against her will to stay with him, and that if she could have, she would have warned me about the loans before the debt collectors started calling. But seven years ago, I realized that my mother didn’t just know about the loans. She had also signed the fraudulent disbursement checks, her shoddy attempts at forgery both laughable and insulting, like she wasn’t even trying to pretend anymore. I’ll never know where the money went, just that most of it didn’t go to my school. I’m sure they squandered it the way they’ve always squandered everything.
I hear from both my parents through debt collectors now. Every so often, the phone will ring, and the person on the other end of the line will ask to speak to one or both of them. “Is there another number where they can be reached?” the person will ask, skeptical when I say I don’t know, when I grip the phone tighter, ignoring the knots in my stomach, and firmly add, “I don’t speak to them anymore.” One time, a lawyer called and asked to speak to my dead grandmother. “She’s been dead for years,” I sighed, mouthing, Wow to my wife as she sat on the couch shaking her head with a smirk.
And they still use my number for things. Sometimes debtors will call because I’m listed as a known relative. But other times, I’ll ask how they got my number, and they’ll say it’s because, “This is the number listed on the account, ma’am,” and they’ll ask me again if I’m sure I didn’t just buy a Honda Accord. Maybe this is my parents’ way of reaching out, their way of saying I miss you from the other side of reality. Or maybe they just want me to know that I’ll never truly be free.
My arms begin to fall asleep, and as I readjust myself, Lea runs from her bed toward the stretch of carpet in front of mine. She shakes, yawns, then stretches, before suddenly pouncing at nothing, cocking her scraggly little head from side to side as she growls, insisting I get up right now to take care of her needs. In her old age, Lea has become quite adorably demanding. There’s no way that I, the designated “morning” of her two mama’s, can’t get up now to feed her.
I get up off the bed and begin to put on my booties, smirking as Lea playfully starts attacking my feet. “One second,” I whisper, grabbing my phone off the bed, quietly shushing her while I take screenshots of my mother’s profile instead of going to the kitchen. I need proof that this is real, that my mother really does exist outside the life I’ve created, before I make it unattainable to her again.
I think about my mother daily. I wonder what she’s doing with her life, how my parents are navigating being con artists in the middle of a pandemic. Does my father wear a mask to go shoplifting at the grocery store? Do they keep six feet apart from the people they tell sob stories to for cash?
Now I know that my mother was on Twitter last night, trying to give herself access to all the things I’m willing to share with the world, but not with her. I don’t want her to know anything about me. I don’t want the woman who sent me a box full of Hormel Compleats meals in the mail when I told her I couldn’t afford new tires, who paid more for the cost of shipping than the food, to see who I retweet, who I follow, what awkward things I say on a platform I barely know how to use. I don’t want her to know that I say things about my abusive childhood sometimes, or that I adore Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for many reasons, not the least of which include her views on student loan forgiveness. I wonder what my mother, a self-proclaimed moderate Democrat, thinks about student loan forgiveness. Does she want that? Or does she think that’s too radical?
In the kitchen, I open the fridge and take out the Tupperware full of Lea’s low-fat, homemade dog food. I put it on the counter, and take a measuring cup from the dish rack. As I fill her bowl, I notice that the lemons I bought to make my Christmas lemon bread are starting to go bad. You only need one lemon to make lemon bread, but every year, without fail, I buy four or five in a panic, just in case I mess it up, just in case one of them is bad, or I open the recipe and find that I actually need two or three. I used to make lemon bread every Christmas Eve with my mother. It’s not Christmas without lemon bread. Now I’m not sure what to do with all these extra lemons. Sometimes it’s easier to just let them rot.