How to Keep Your Mystery

I called my mother on the phone this week.

I don’t know why. It always ends badly for me.

She’s pretty cool, but she has been getting a little more and more eccentric as of late.

Recently she was certified as a ‘Past Life Regressionist,’ which means she can tell you (but ends up only telling me) all about your past lives.

This is actually kind of a big problem for my mother and I. Not because I straight up think it’s insane, but because the concept of reincarnation makes me have a panic attack. It just really stresses me out to think that I have been making the same mistakes for millennia and have yet to learn from them. And it will never get any better for me, ever.

Also, my mother recently told me that in a past life her and I were fraternal twins. The tricky thing here is that while I don’t want to acknowledge the plausibility of any of this, deep down it makes me take her less seriously as an authority figure because in a past life I might have been older than her by 3 minutes.

Moving on – I called her this week to say hi and see how here medium classes were going, and she asked about my relationship status. She brought it up by saying, “oh, so you’ve been off your bipolar and depression medication for a long while now – are you attracting a higher caliber of person?” And I had to tell her, “No Mom, I’m not attracting any sort of person – terrible or otherwise.”

To distract her from my woes, I followed that immediately by saying that B Team has a much more interesting love life than I do.

This was the right decision.

My mom and B Team get along really well, mostly I think because B Team doesn’t think it’s at all weird that my mom finger-paints with ghosts on Friday evenings and Sunday mornings. So we were all on the phone a few months back – gabbing – and my mom asked B Team how her love life was going. B Team said it was ok but that she was having a hard time attracting non-sociopaths. So my mother said to her, “sweetie, you just need to learn to keep your mystery.”

It was hilarious. Because while I assumed my mother was just trying to say politely not to be a whore, she refused to confirm or deny what that statement meant. So we were left in the dark by her mystery. The irony was unsettling.

Anyway, to divert my mother’s attention away from the fact that no one is interested in my mysterious bits, I brought up B Team, and I told my mom that I wasn’t entirely sure that B Team knew what that phrase meant – but that “perhaps it was possible that she just isn’t the mysterious type.”

And my mom sighed, and started telling me – again – that all the problems that any of us have in our current relationships are brought about by mistakes we’ve made in our past lives. I told her I was unwilling to concede her point in the slightest, and she said that was ok and some people are just meant to be single – something about having too many gifts to share with just one person – but that I should work on my contrarian attitude at some point in the next few centuries because she was getting tired of it.

D’oh.