My mom does not like opals. She has a suspicion that the opal necklace she was wearing at the age of 14 had something to do with her father’s sudden death. Despite admiring their milky, psychedelic rainbowiness as a kid, I was strongly discouraged from wearing one.

My mom regularly expresses a fear that I will loan a guy I’m dating approximately $2,000.

“Becky, you’re not borrowing ___ any money are you? If you guys break up, I wouldn’t want you to have to go to small claims court to try to get $2,000 back.”

“Where would I even get this money? I don’t even have $2,000.”

“Becky. You don’t understand. Young boys take advantage of girls every day. Especially the charming ones.”

As you may have guessed, I only date the charming ones.

“Mom, have you been watching Judge Judy again?”

“Yes, I have, and I’ve learned a lot.”

Despite finding this somewhat insulting to both me and ___, her fears did prevent me from loaning an ex-boyfriend $200 so he could buy a sitar. Yeah a sitar. Yeah she was right.

My mom fears falling asleep during movies. This is why she does not want my dad to get a Netflix account.

“What, so we can get movies that I fall asleep to at night? No way.”

My mom finds zombie movies to be the most frightening. Resent isn’t the right word, but she still gives my dad a hard time for making her watch Night of the Living Dead. She said she once had a dream that her father was sewn into a couch, and she brings this up when the topic turns to zombie films, re: why she doesn’t like them.

My mom fears I’ll write something about her she wouldn’t like. This might be because in college I wrote a short non-fiction story about her mother, wherein I mentioned that she once tried to “get her fill of corn on the cob” and ended up in the hospital.

“Becky, write a book about me when I’m dead so you can say whatever you want.”

My mom fears laughing in church. When I was about to receive my Catholic confirmation, she went with me to a “group confession.” A group confession is when a bunch of suburban teenagers and their parents miss Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be absolved for an amalgam of unspecified sins, marked by the ring of a tune fork. Every time the tune fork rang, her giggling got worse and worse, until a family with the last name Purcell turned around and glared at her like she had been possessed by the devil.

My mom fears computers, so she probably won’t read this.

–Becky Lang told her boyfriend what she was writing and at the part about loaning $2,000, he giggled and said, “I need $2,000 stat!”