Momma's alright.

My mother doesn't get a lot of credit on this blog. I know that, and she never really has been given much credit on any of my blogs -- often, she's the butt of jokes; such classics include her angry, ranting, crazy voicemails transcribed and posted to the world wide web for everyone to read, along with the rest of my blogs that generally embarrass and outrage her.

She doesn't know about this blog, which hopefully it will stay this way; not because I don't want to hurt her feelings, but it's more comparable to not wanting to poke a grizzly (or gristly, per Matt Pagel) bear with a stick. You don't really care if the grizzly bear doesn't want to get poked, or if poking will hurt the bear's feelings, but mostly because you just don't want to incur its crazy wrath and have the crazy bear rip off your arm and shove it in its crazy mouth.

To be fair, my mother is crazy. She is a raging bull in a china shop of emotional stability. She is politically and socially ignorant conservative, she is narrow-minded to the end and she has pushed every known button I have for as long as I can remember.

But as another school year begins, this is now the third consecutive end-of-August in which I am not going back to school. So sometimes I get a little wistful. I could tell you about moving into the dorms my first year of college, and watching my father's face turn a brilliant shade of crimson as we drove past the frat houses with sheets hanging from the porches that said, "Dads, Thanks for Dropping Off Your Daughters!" (and that was relatively tame... and I did pass out in a few of those frat houses later on). But instead, I'll tell you about my college orientation, and the night I realized, as a pseudo-adult, that my mom is okay.

College orientation took place about a month before the school year began for freshmen. It was a two-day process, day one being placement tests and day two being scheduling, and random pointless orientation and icebreaker shit in between. Because I lived about an hour and a half from my college, my mother and I stayed overnight in the accommodations provided by the school -- which was in a dorm room.

I went into this thing expecting that I would share a room with my mom. Lame, but whatever. I didn't want to be there; a tornado ripped through campus earlier in the day of my first day of orientation and basically wrecked the campus, and I missed my McDonald's manager boyfriend back home. I was in the gifted program and all the other kids I had to mingle with at the gifted orientation were too smart and didn't talk to me, and I just plain didn't want to be there. Then I found out my mom would be staying on the "moms floor," sharing a room with another mom, whereas I would share a room with another female orientee.

My mom and I are cut from the same cloth in that we are not social people. I'm just not. I'm sorry. So there was a look of panic that shot over both our faces when we realized we wouldn't be sharing a room, and would have to actually *gulp* socialize with strangers. But it was what it was, we accepted our lot, and bid each other good night as we went to our separate rooms on separate floors.

My "roommate" wasn't in the room when I got there, and the only indication I had that I even had a roommate was a duffle bag with size XS Abercrombie and Hollister shit all over the other bed. There was no TV, I didn't know anyone, I didn't feel like going out, so I called my boyfriend to whine about how much it sucked and tried to fall asleep. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up eventually by what felt like an earthquake. My twin sized bed was shaking. I laid stone still trying to figure out what was going on, until I heard the moaning and, after I tried to convince myself this was not happening, realized that my "roommate" (whom I had not met, nor seen, and couldn't pick out in a 2 person lineup) was having sex AT THE FOOT OF MY BED, while I slept.

Again, may I pause to say, there were two beds in this dorm room. She had her own bed she could have done this on. Furthermore, it begs the questions, 1.) Who gets drunk and picks someone up at college orientation? 2.) Who fucks on another person's bed while they're asleep?

I laid there for a minute listening to the giggling and moaning til I realized that I couldn't do this. I flew out of bed, turned on the lights, saw two very naked strangers having sex across the foot of the bed I was just sleeping in, and grabbed my bag (which, conveniently enough, was packed), and stormed out the door while snapping at her, "YOU ARE FUCKING PATHETIC!" I didn't even hear a reaction, perhaps because they were too busy HUMPING ON MY BED, and stormed to the common lounge of the floor, with my duffle bag, and slumped onto the stiff industrial-strength couch. And I sobbed. Fucking. Sobbed.

I hated college. I didn't want to be here. This place sucked. And I just had two strangers fucking on my bed. I hated college. I wanted to quit and I hadn't even started.

So I did all I knew to do. At 3 am, I called my mom's cell phone, and prayed she would answer. She did.

In the end, my mom came, sat with me on that ridiculously stiff couch, held me while I bawled my eyes out and promised me I'd love it here eventually, she had loved it here (yeah, she had also gone to school here), and it would be okay. Knowing I couldn't go back to my room, I begged her to let me sleep with her in her room. She shook her head solemnly as she explained that her roommate was asleep and she didn't want to wake her up. I figured my entire night was shot all to hell when she told me to wait a minute, went and got her stuff, came back, took my still-hysterical ass to the car, and then, at nearly 4 am, checked us into a hotel for the four hours we'd be sleeping before I had to be back on campus to schedule classes and finish orientation.

And to her credit, she was right. I (amazingly) returned to campus later that summer and would come to have some of the greatest experiences and memories of my life there.

That night I shared a king size bed with my mom in a hotel room and slept knowing that my mom, despite of all her insane tendencies and instability and rants and raves, loved me.

The only thing that would give me more satisfaction than I had that night would be knowing that girl got a raging case of genital warts. Which the STD rate of that campus is something like 50%, and I know I made it out of college clean as a whistle, so by law of statistics, and in the name of karma, I bet she did.