How To: Survive Joan Crawford as a Mother

If you haven't seen Mommy Dearest, this reference is probably lost on you. It's a pretty decent movie - recommend watching it once before you die. It will make you realize your life could be a million times worse.

Scattered through this blog, you'll find stories of the failed relationship my mother and I have attempted to maintain. Part of the blame comes from the lack of time we spent together, I'm sure. However, I feel most blame comes from my mother's strictness and complete lack of humanity towards me.

My parents enjoy holding me up to the best standards of other children and relatives, but never take into consideration their flaws. While I was expected to have the straight A's of my nerdy cousins, I was also expected to be involved in dance like more preppy children and have tons of friends like my popular relatives. After I got home from my lessons and wanted to stay up late for a little relaxation time, this was unacceptable. I was to go straight to bed and wake up in the morning for class, chipper and ready to face the new day.

Throughout high school, people noticed that I was timid or apologetic. I was also shy and refused to talk to a teacher one-on-one until my junior year of high school. Perhaps it was because my parents didn't accept failure. I was yelled at for a straight hour, once, for dropping and breaking a dish. I was once grounded for receiving a C grade on a report card among seven As. Maybe it was because I had to tiptoe around the house for fear of waking up my mother during one of her five hour naps. It really began to wear on my self-confidence.

I've struggled with my weight throughout the years. Take, for example, my run-in with an eating disorder. I'd like to add a new reason for this battle: my mother. I hadn't realized it before tonight, but my mother turned food into some sort of forbidden fruit. There's a comical story about me tucking candy away from Halloween in cans on a shelf in my room. I can remember sneaking the candy and hiding the wrappers around the house so my mother couldn't find them in the garbage can. I, to this day, have to hide any sort of ice cream, cookie, or candy that I bring into this house. If my mother were to find any of these things, she'd yell at me for it.

"You shouldn't be eating all that junk!" she'd say. "You're going to gain even more weight!"

Food has always been connected to comfort for me. When I'm stressed or upset, or sometimes even happy, sweets will bring pleasure every time. They're not highly addictive, you can drive after consuming them, and they don't cause you to make poor judgments. So, the more my mother shamed me and upset me, the more I wanted to eat.

It took me 15 years to realize that this wasn't an okay way to be treated in regards to food. I wouldn't have handled tonight the same way I would have five years ago. It has taken me 15 years to deal with tonight's events without crying.

I entered the kitchen, setting up for some friends visiting, to find my parents discussing something I didn't particularly care about. However, they decided to include me.

"What's a good mixer for scotch?" my father asks the only underage person in the room.

"No clue. Since when do you drink scotch?" I ask, sitting at the table and pulling out my phone to look something up for him.

"My doctor told me I needed to lose weight to get my blood pressure down. He told me to cut back on the whiskey, which has a lot of sugar in it, and drink scotch instead."

"It's funny," I decide, foolishly, to add to the conversation. I should have learned by this point in my life that conversing with parental units only leads to their attempting to shove their beliefs down my throat. "My doctors notice that I've gained weight, but they can't figure out why my blood pressure remains on the floor. It's the strangest thing."

"I was the same way, you know" my father begins. "But it won't be that way forever. You need to lose weight." I sigh and continue searching for a cocktail, deciding not to say anything in return. This would only end in an argument.

"Exactly how much weight have you gained" My mother more demands than asks.

"I don't know" I spit, already seeing the route this discussion has taken.

"You know, you might be skinny now, but a few years down the road when you have children and hit menopause, you're going to gain weight. You need to start trying to lose it now."

"Look, I've decided I'm done dieting". I tell them both, trying my hardest to keep myself at the table and not "storm off" as I usually do.

"We're both overweight" my father informs me. "I've made attempts to get my weight down because I want to live. You should to". Disgusted, I rise to my feet.

"If a cookie is what makes me happy, I'm going to eat a cookie. I'd rather be fat and happy than skinny and miserable" I managed to prevent myself from finishing my line with "like you". "Scotch and dry vermouth" I tell my father before walking out.

My BMI would say I'm overweight, but I happen to have some melons on me that add a good few pounds. I battled with my body image the large majority of my life, mostly because of conversations like this one. My mother wouldn't hesitate to tell me when I looked like I was putting on a few pounds. With all the body hate the media is forcing onto women and men alike,  your parents should be the last people on earth telling you that you should conform to the standards the modeling industry has impressed upon us all. They should be your greatest allies. If they ever tell you otherwise, kindly inform them that they should forcibly insert their thoughts into their anus.

On second thought...Don't do that if you still live with them. It's usually best to wait to use this language until after you have the means to survive on your own. Regardless, you get the point!

I have been told that I am an attractive person. I currently wear a size 13 pair of jeans and I am still getting asked out on dates by guys. Hell, I've even had a few girls ask me out. Your weight is not what makes you pretty - it's your confidence. Screw those anorexic models on magazine covers. Ever notice that they kind of look like aliens? Guys do too. It's not attractive to wake up next to a skeleton in the morning. It's downright frightening.

Never feel embarrassed about what goes into your mouth. If that's what you want to eat, and you're not threatening your life with it, more power to you! If losing weight is what you think will make you feel good, then try that too! All the more power to you! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a damn cookie. Maybe I'll even dunk it in some milk. Even better, I might smother it in peanut butter. And, if my mother has anything to say about it, I'll be sure to tell her she should have a cookie too. Maybe, if I'm lucky, she'll choke on it.

How Not To: Play Drinking Games (Part Two)

This is a night that has lived in infamy among my friends. It's a night that I would prefer to never speak of again...But here I am, sharing my embarrassment so you don't have to live through the same pain.

The drinking escapades continue from Part One the next weekend. We decided to up our game and go all out with more Fun Day Monday drinking games. This time, there were two bottles of Wild Turkey between the five of us: myself, Marshall, Lily, Barney, and a girl we tend to refer to as Morgan Freeman. Last time, I was saved by the fact that there was only a half a bottle of tequilla to go around. However, Lily dropped out after three shots, then Morgan around eight. We lost Barney shortly after and lost count before Marshall and I decided to finally call it quits for our own health. We didn't finish all the alcohol, but we came frighteningly close.

We never finished watching that episode of Fun Day Monday. We all stumbled our way down to the dining hall to get some food in us before we ended up sick. It was obvious we were all trashed. I'm sure we smelled like a brewery. A cop was wandering the lower halls of our dorm that we narrowly dodged on our way out, so we were trying to lay low. All of us, that is, except Morgan Freeman. Morgan had convinced herself that she was invincible to humiliation, but also trouble. As  leaned against Barney, fully relying on him to keep her standing, she began to play the Penis Game. We're not sure who she was playing with, but we think she was winning. It was obvious how drunk she was just by the way her voice cracked and her speech slurred. If there had been a cop in the dining hall, we all would have been busted, though she assured us it would be fine because she did this all the time in the dining hall. Of course, Morgan, of course...

We finished our food went back up to the dorms and sat down in Marshall's room. We then turned to each other, realizing Morgan and Barney had vanished. Typical Barney, I guess. Marshall and Lily insisted that I stay with them, afraid to leave me alone with how drunk I was, so Marshall and I settled in p where Lily could watch our drunk asses.

It was at this point that Marshall and I became violently ill. I typically would have been too embarrassed to go into the men's restroom, but at this point, I was too sick to care. Unfortunately, while Marshall was able to toss his cookies, I could not. I clung to the porcelain throne in a cold sweat, but nothing was coming out. I learned a valuable lesson this night. You may think that throwing up makes you weak so you might try to hold it back. Take it from me: if you think you're going to puke, it's better to force yourself to get it out of your system than to relive the following scenario.

The beds in Marshall's dorm were bunked. With all three of us being too drunk to climb up to the top bunk safely, all three of us were forced to lay together in the twin sized bed. I'm still not sure how we managed to do it. I was ready to fall into my drunken coma and sleep through all the next day's classes. However, as I closed my eyes and drifted off toward a peaceful slumber, my stomach lurched. Oh shit.

I sat up, my hand covering my mouth. I looked at the garbage can across the room, then I looked down to realize I was the smashed against the wall by two people and I couldn't hold it in any longer. I wasn't aware that I had eaten and drank enough to produce the amount of puke that poured from my mouth. Suffice it to say that my clothes, Lily's clothes, Marshall's clothes and the sheets were covered and ruined.

Lily, being the awesome babysitter that she was, immediately escorted me into her bathroom in a version of what she deemed "Advanced Friend Making". She ended up having to walk out in basically her underwear in front of all the guys because I had covered her in the contents of my stomach. She is a braver woman than I.

I was too drunk to figure out how to shower and had to stop every few seconds, my breathing becoming shallow as I broke into cold sweats. Lily had to practically walk me through washing the crap out of my hair, ignoring what I felt like were endless apologies. After I got cleaned up and Marshall changed his sheets, we all went back to bed.

I awoke the next morning confused to why my phone wasn't going off. I knew I had set the alarm before I started drinking. I checked the time, panicked realizing I had missed my first class and rushed downstairs to my room, minus a shoe that we didn't recover until a full month later. To my surprise, my roommate had my phone. According to her, Morgan and Barney had dropped it off earlier that night for reasons she didn't understand. I shrugged and rushed to the bathroom to freshen up only to discover Morgan Freeman desperately trying to hide the most ridiculous hickeys I've ever seen in my life. It looked like something had clawed down the side of her neck in three long, thin stripes. To this day, we haven't figured out what Barney could have done to pull this off. She tried her best to cover the marks with the hoodie and off we went to class and work, pondering the events of the previous night.

The events of this night ruined Marshall on alcohol for a full year. Lily and I couldn't stand the smell alcohol, even in perfume, for a good three months. Barney earned a new respect for alcohol, never quite reaching that level of drunkenness again. As for Morgan Freeman...She was back to drinking the very next weekend.

And so Jack Sparrow owed Marshall a new set of sheets.

How Not To: Play Drinking Games (Part 1)

The night this story takes place, I happened to be hanging out with a guy I will call Marshall Eriksen, taken from the show How I Met Your Mother. He was watching a show about Starcraft, a  computer game I don't play or understand, nor do I have any desire to learn. I didn't understand a word of what the host was saying, but I was bored out of my mind and had nothing better to do. I decided to keep watching in hope that the man on the television, Day 9, would start speaking English sometime soon. The show we were watching was called Fun Day Monday. That's about all I understood or remembered.

About half way through the show, probably sick and tired of my endless questions, Marshall mentioned that there was a drinking game that went along with the show. He had wanted to play for ages, but he didn't know anyone who drank and he didn't have any alcohol. Excited to potentially have my first college drinking experience, but also anxious to get my hands on anything that would make this show more bearable, I scurried off to my room to retrieve the half a bottle of Cuervo Gold I had smuggled into my room.

Here's a pro tip for you all: don't play drinking games with hard liquor when you're supposed to be using beer. It ends badly.

It should have been a sign something was wrong when we were required to take drinks in such a rapid succession that we could barely pass the bottle between us before we were supposed to do another shot. The bottle disappeared alarmingly fast. So fast, in fact, that we ran out of alcohol before either of us felt buzzed. So fast that it didn't hit us until the show was over and we were in our dining hall ordering burgers.

I distinctly remember ordering my food and sitting down with it. However, I can't tell you what happened to the food. I had the burger in my hands, I looked up to talk to Marshall, I looked back down and it was gone. That span of time has vanished from my memory. I knew I was in trouble around that point. The trip back to the dorm was a wobbly one and spawned one of my most memorable drunken quotes. As I stumbled along, I was spilling my root beer out of its paper cup and all over the sidewalk.

"Careful," Marshall warned me. "You're going to get root beer all over yourself"

"No, no, it's okay" I assured him. "I'm like a ninja - I can see the drink as it falls and dodge it"

I know, I know...You don't need to tell me how stupid I sounded. I've spent ages trying to live this one down.

It had been ages since Marshall had a drinking buddy, apparently, and he was so excited that he invited his brother over several days later for round two of the drinking games. We're going to stick with the How I Met Your Mother theme and call him Barney Stinson.

Because I was honest about every facet of my life with Tyler, I of course told him about my first drinking escapade with Marshall. He wasn't very comfortable with the idea of me drinking with another guy in his room unsupervised. Tyler then forbade me from ever drinking alone with a male if he wasn't around. I, of course, ignored him and decided to do this day's drinking behind his back. The plan was to stop drinking when he called and said he was on his way which would give me a half hour to sober up and prevent me from drinking too much in the first place based on when he claimed he would be leaving for my dorm.

This time around we would be playing Dance Dance Revolution drinking games with Wild Turkey Honey.  The rules of the game were simple: do your dance and take a certain number of shots based on your grade. You would do three shots for an A, two shots for a B, and one shot for anything less. You kept going until you felt unsafe to continue or we ran out of Wild Turkey. Half way through the bottle, Barney had to leave. He seemed fine at the time, but we received a few texts later on suggesting otherwise. After the third illegible text, we called the people he was with and received reports that he was mooning people out of car windows on their way to a football game. We really did a number on that kid...

Marshall and I killed the rest of the bottle and chatted a little. That's when Tyler called, informing me he had already left and would be arriving at my dorm in five minutes. Fuck. I shooed Marshall out of the room and let Tyler in. I managed to get him into the room but I knew he could tell something was up.

"I'm not even going to lie" I slurred. "I'm really fucking drunk". He just laughed at me and asked how much I had drank. I pointed to the bottle.

"Are you okay?" He asked, mildly concerned. He thought I had drank the bottle myself.

"Yeah, I'm fine" I waved him away.

"...Are you sure you're fine?"

"Yeah..." My stomach gave a lurch. Damn it. Why did he have to ask?

"On second thought," I groaned. "could you hand me that garbage can?" I puked once and very quickly got it all out of my system. Then, for whatever drunken reason I had, I decided to inspect my vomit. I was slightly amused, but mostly horrified, to find it a bright purple color. I hadn't eaten anything that day, so I can't be certain what would turn the contents of my stomach that particular shade of violet.

"Cool..." I grinned. "Wanna see?" I held the garbage can out for his inspection. He just took the bag out, threw it away and replaced it for me. After telling him I hadn't eaten anything, we decided it might be a good idea to go get food or I might be in for a rough night. I invited Marshall who invited down his girlfriend. I will call her Lily Aldrin, also following the How I Met Your Mother theme.

We went to a local pizza place. I had nearly fully control over my body on the way down as the full effect of the alcohol hadn't quite hit yet. It was in full swing by the time I ate, though. As we sat, Tyler caught me performing my typical anxious girlfriend routine, checking over his shoulder to read his phone every time he brought it out.

"Why do you keep looking at my phone?" Tyler finally snapped.

"Just making sure you aren't receiving messages from Sea Cow" I replied coolly.

"Who is Sea Cow?" Lily asked politely, smiling from across the table, clueless. I didn't skip a beat.

"That's the bitch he cheated on me with". Lily has told me it was this exact moment that she knew we would be best friends.

We finished our food and Marshall left for a frisbee tournament, sobering up twice as fast as I did. It was at this time that we collectively discovered what happened when I got really drunk: I turn into Jack Sparrow. I'm fully equipped with the hands, the swagger, the knack for avoiding trouble, and the moves like McJagger. Tyler and Lily each had to take one of my arms to escort me back up to the dorms. If I was trying to walk in a straight line, it didn't show. As we approached the one building separating us and the path to the dorms, I noticed something my two guardians hadn't: a cop checking IDs at the door. I came to a sudden halt, both Tyler and Lily looking at me curiously.

"Cop" I gave my one word explanation. "This way..." I scuttled off, dragging the two of them with me as I sneaked through a side door and up a back stairway. We weren't caught, I managed to get Tyler back to my room, I wasn't lectured and, although I didn't realize it, I had met one of my best girl friends.

And so Captain Jack Sparrow lived to drink another day.