Bam, I have the same type of mom. The one upside to that is that I can use her as a cop-out when I don’t want to eat something: I just tell her that I’m not hungry, and when the other grown-up urges/forces me to eat my mom can crack a cute little joke about how we have to preserve our “byuti”.

But you know, the extra pounds are her fault in the first place.

Well one day I did it at work, when the head of shipping said something in Tagalog to my friend Paul. They kind of looked at me funny and then Paul and I left to go back to our building. “You have no idea what she was saying, do you?” he asked. “Nope!” I said. “Don’t do that again. She just told me I was making her public hair go grey.” I never, ever did that at work again.

And I just kind of had to shrug and make a “my mother is crazy” face.

For example, this one time when someone cut my mom off on the freeway and she was like, “You BIOTCH!” I even recorded it for posterity.

The “bling bling” thing comes from my mom’s magpie-like fondness for big shiny jewellery. My Aunt Liza saw my mother’s diamond ring one day and said “Darling, ang grabe naman ng bling bling mo!” (“Darling, your bling-bling is too much!”)

Ha, this is fun. Everyone, feel free to jump in with your Filipino/foreign mom stories.

I think Megan Hart’s next book should be enitled “The Black Album” and be pure black with her name in white at the bottom. That’s the only way she’ll get a halfway decent cover it seems.

Incidently, I’m Buddhist.

Darragha