The Adventures of Miss Bonnified

How My Mom Met My Friends
by Bonnie N. Clyde

It doesn't matter how old I am because my mom will still be my mom. I can be 35, 42, freaking 58 and she will still picture me in her head as the pig tailed 4 year old girl with the broken English coming home with new bruises and splinters embedded in my hands because I was climbing the tree at school or got into some kind of trouble. >.<

Asian moms are notorious for getting all up in your business. My actual geographical location doesn't really matter because she will start peppering me with the same questions. However, I have noticed that she will kick her level of interrogation up a few notches if she's in the same city as me. I attribute this tendency to being in such close proximity and in the same time zone...which basically translates into her being able to wait up for me until I get my butt home. Awesome. Her typical line of questioning sounds like:

"So.....where are you going? Huh? Who are you going there with? HUH? What time are you coming home? *HUH???*"

Yeah.

I'm like "Dude! Mommy!! Chill! Please please please!" And she will but only because she knows what her next plan of attack is. So I'll be out with my friends tearing it up wherever it is we decided on wrecking that night and SURE ENOUGH, MY MOM HAS STARTED BLOWING UP MY PHONE STARTING AT 1 A.M. SHARP.

Oh wait. Let me start over. Remember alphanumeric pagers and when we could have entire, detailed conversations in English using nothing but numbers, # and * ?

1774317 57088 71153 7415 177603 531753?

In case you can't read that, that says "When stuff like this made sense." Ah yes. Back in the day wHeN wE cOuLd tYpE LyKe DiS aT LyTe sPeEd, f00 with absolutely no problem, we didn't go blind from all the alternating caps and Hooked On Phonics almost sounded like a new hip hop group I'd want to listen to. Yeah. Anyway, I had taught my mom how to alpha page me "MOM". It's 1770177 ....except she couldn't remember so she would page me with the following:

17701770.

Yeah. She pages me with MOMO because she couldn't remember there's no "O" after the second "M" in mom when trying to spell out the English alphabet using numbers. Gotta love her. I call her my beloved Flintstone mom. She thinks it's hilarious and will even start referring to herself as such. My mom's dope.

Okay. So back to my story. When I still had a pager with the intro that made me sound like the missing Asian chick rapper in Bone Thugs, she would start paging me MOMO starting at midnight. She'd start with 30 minute intervals and she'd step it up to 5 minute intervals if I didn't get back to her by 1:45. But seriously....how the hell did she expect me to hear my pager when it's BURIED in my purse and I'm out? C'mon now.

So NOW that we've all sailed into the glorious age of tricked out cell phones, she will call me instead of paging me starting exactly at 1 a.m. in the friggin morning. And why the hell is she up so late?! Wait. She's probably thinking "Why the hell is my daughter out so late?!"

People, I'm turning 30 this year. That's right. I'm hitting the Dirty Thirty but that's doesn't matter to my mom. She's still checking up on me when I'm out and if she's in the same state as me because she knows exactly when I go out. Uh huh. I tried sneaking out a few times but seriously. As Ninja-Fu as I am, all you people with Asian moms will know that they are like Ninja-Fu MASTERS compared to us. There is no way this side of Heaven or Hell you can sneak out of the house when they're awake. If you're really brave, you might think you're slick by peeking into their room just to make sure they're sleeping but what you don't know is that they're just pretending because they're setting a trap for you. They're faking it to see what you'd do but if they really WERE asleep then Heaven help you if they wake up and discover your ass gone. I would not wish that upon anyone. Too scary, man. *shudder*

Having said all that, I decided to ease her mind because I love my mom and I don't want her to worry. I decided to have her meet my friends who I see the most. Granted, I just met a few of them fairly recently but these are the friends who I see on more or less a consistent basis OR I've know them forever. Or some combo of all of the above. While some of the ones I wanted her to meet couldn't come out, there apparently is going to be a Part Deux when she comes back out stateside. Yeah....she left for Asia today and I am so sad. That's why I'm writing this today and why I took her out to meet my friends during her last week in the U.S.

Now I just had to figure out what to do. Should I just take her out to dinner and have them meet her? But that wouldn't be an accurate representation of the insanity of what happens when we go out. Should I take her to a club? I ruled that out because while my mom loves to dance, uh....there's certain things my mom should never see and me at a club is one of them. So in the end I decided on meeting up at a bar and then go to a karaoke because my friends and I find ourselves there after a night of funnery quite often. To me, this sounded like a perfect night because, honestly, how crazy could it get? Sounded like a nice, chill night to me. Those would prove to be my famous last words.

We got to my favorite bar and I ordered a Macallan neat for myself and a Diet Coke for her. The reason I got that for her is because my mom cannot drink. I repeat. Cannot drink. I don't know where my freak gene came from but my mom gets drunk off of a whiff whatever it is I'm having. Hence the Diet Coke for her. On the rocks. Because she's gangsta like that.

The only problem was, she wasn't having it. She looked at the bartender, tells him to hold his horses, looks at me, slaps the bar counter with her hand and tells me the following:

I'M YOUR MOTHER! I'M NOT A CHILD! GIVE ME A REAL DRINK!

Damn!! Jeez!! Okay okay! God....you don't have to yell at me...sheesh...

So now I'm in a very strange predicament of trying to figure out the girliest and lightest drink for her so that she won't get blasted by the time my friends show up. In the end, I got her a midori sour but light on the Midori and heavy on the mixers...in a martini glass so it'll look like a real drink and not the frou frou n00b crap it really is.

She's happy. Whew. Disaster One averted. And now we're all systems go. I introduced her to the owner of the bar and the manager. The manager is immediately taken by my mom and by the end of the night, he's calling her Mommy too. Love it.

My friends all started showing up one by one and my mom gets to see how we play in all our glory.

Shots were flying. The drinks keep coming. Mr.Naughty's getting man handled. MissKoreanQtee told my mom how much she loves her in Mandarin. My mom told MissKoreanQtee how much she adored her in all the Korean she picked up watching Kdramas. There's a whole lot of love in the lounge and I couldn't be happier. MissMDM and I did the Future ExHusband dance to the delight of my mom. Mr.Naughty and Mr.GlowWorm pretended not to know who we were. Luckily for them, MissMDM and I kept helpfully yelling out their names so they remembered that we're all friends. We're very helpful people. My mom's turning purple in the face because she's laughing so hard she can't breathe.

We're all getting pretty crazy. At one point, I look over at my mom all concerned because she had finished half her drink. This is when she's usually pretty tipsy so I ask her "Mommy!!! Are you okay? Are you drunk"? She swivels a wee bit unsteadily in my direction and gives me a very emphatic "NO!"....right before her face turns red and she starts giggling. Oooooh my God...

We all took a final shot (my mom included. What a soldier) and we all made our way upstairs to the karaoke lounge so that we could live out our dreams of being rock stars in Asia. I won't go into great detail here about how the night ended but what I will say is that my mom got to see EXACTLY how we interact with each other when we're out and she loved it. What made the night so funny in hind sight was me thinking this would be a tame version of how our nights usually go. Oh no. No no no. My hope of having a sort of watered down version of what really happens was total Epic Fail. We showed her more or less exactly how we party in all our alcohol fueled glory and she thought it was the funniest thing she's ever seen.

That's great. My mom was amused by the combined antics of me and my friends. Now that's love right there.

From that night on, she keeps telling me how much she loves my friends and knows that I am in good hands especially when Mr.GlowWorm and Mr.Naughty are around because "they're such good boys! Take care of all you girls!! Very very good boys. Mommy is happy".

Mission accomplished. :)

Copyright retained by Bonnie N. Clyde.