douglas! grow a beard!

I can't tell you how painful this entry is for me. For thirty-five years, I awoke every morning to the sound of my mother at the bedroom door shouting "Douglas! Grow a beard!"

Traumatic, I know.

Worse when you point out the fact that my name's not Douglas. Not that you'd want to point that out to my mom. No! That would be a mistake. Let me tell you: Big Mistake.

When I was just an infant, it didn't quite bother me. I didn't understand a word she was saying. When I was a toddler, it was mildly confusing as it wasn't my name (but rather the name of this really smelly pet turtle I had. And I couldn't figure out why my mother would be talking to the turtle. Though years later she did flush that turtle down the toilet while I was out at my senior prom.)

When I was in grammar school, I fixiated on the Douglas part, wondering why my mother never seemed to call me by my own name. Was it that she forgot? Did she confuse me with my brother Phillip (who she called Gerardo). Did she wish I had been named Douglas?

Middle school had me worrying about other things, like her walking in on me in the morning. We'll just skip over those years.

High school had me all self-conscious because I couldn't even grow a five-o'clock shadow over an entire summer. And so all I could think of was how she was nagging me to grow a beard and there was no way I could. I'd curse her when she left to go cook the toaster strudel for breakfast.

During my college years, I went through an ambivalent phase, where sometimes I worried she'd walk in when I had a nice, young lady over for some all-night studying. Other times I just thought she was tired of my not making up my mind to shave regularly or not.

After I got my first job, sitting in tiny little corner cafe's, writing those witty sayings you often see on the backs of napkins, I thought she was getting on my case for the goatee I sported. Maybe she thought I looked too Parisian or perhaps like some computer geek. That must have made her scared.

I think I finally got fed up one day when she barged in one morning and woke up my wife as well as myself. My wife was going through some hormone treatments for a weird problem she was having, and she was starting to show a little more facial hair that usual. Well, my wife went into a flying rage, knocked my mother aside and ran down the hallway and locked herself in the bathroom. I just stared coldly into my mom's eyes as I heard my father banging on the bathroom door demanding to be let in and my wife crying.

If she continues to do this, I swear, I am going to move out of the house and get a place of my own!