His Uterus and Her Need to Scrub the Floor

Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Wife Swap meets Leave It To Beaver ... that's what's been going on around here ever since my daughter moved in with my brother and my mother in turn moved in with me.

Let's start with my brother.

The day my mother moved out, he stayed up until 2:00 in the morning trying to eradicate her existence from the kitchen. An actual exorcism of her Asian fusion decor was performed. His goal: to turn this tiny little 3 x 5 cell of a galley into some kind of Tuscan-styled renaissance kitchen. I get it -- he wants to place his stamp on the house and he's gay which, if you were into stereotypes (shut your mouth, we all know you are), you might think the results would be faaabulous: shiny copper pots, Italian Country ceramics, textured walls, and somebody pouring me a glass of Chianti. But there isn't too much you can do to a kitchen that consists of a sink, a stove, a refrigerator and two feet of counter space. So with little resources and probably even less understanding of anything Italian (except knowledge that his father's-father's-father's family was from The Old Country), he took some plaid fabric that contained at least some of the warm colors one might find under a Tuscan sun, and swagged it across the metal spice rack drilled dead center in the middle of the wall.

He is also cooking things like creamy mushroom chicken and soup made from the carcass of a turkey. He's planning ungodly events like Family Game Night and doing other crazy things like growing hips, tits and a uterus. Look! Here's a picture of him taken just one hour after my mother's mattress was loaded on the truck:

And then over at my house, my daughter Boss Lady has completely given me the finger (apparently a running theme amongst my girl-children) and joined my mother's camp. Not only is she a traitor (if she keeps this shit up I told her she can forget about getting new underwear for school next year), but she has become some kind of cleaning hurricane, a category five. Her idea of fun is to clean out the garage and I place the blame entirely on the woman who made me bleach the fucking sidewalk when I was little. Now my daughter comes home from school, throws back a chocolate milk and a PB & J and then it's off to work: dusting, sweeping, cleaning her room, making her brother's bed and wetting clumps of napkins then wiping down anysurface that gets in her way. As I write this post, she is downstairs with my mother breaking in the new vacuum cleaner. Seriously.

Later she'll ask, "What about laundry, mom? Shouldn't we do some laundry?" "No, honey. I already did the laundry."

She'll shake her head at me and think to herself, Man, my mother is some kind of lazy and would anything get done around here if it wasn't for my tireless devotion to cleanliness?

Where my mother's estrogen levels may be plummeting , it is clear that Boss Lady's are spiking. She has become consumed with brushing her hair and painting her nails and smearing all kinds of sparkly glitter vaseline-like substances all over her face. "I like to be shiny," she says.

She wants to get her ears pierced even though she knows it will hurt. It's obvious to me that the next request will be to have her legs waxed before swimsuit season arrives. "They're hairy," she says.

At this rate, my brother will turn into my sister and my daughter will turn into my mother and I will be forced to turn myself into some place with soft walls and no forks.