There was a snow storm here Saturday so I stayed at my mother’s house for company. We each laid on our own couch with blankets wrapped around us watching movies. I remember when I first moved back to Rhode Island, we did that a week or so after I’d been here and I just sighed and yelled into the living room, “THIS IS SO NICE! HOW COULD I DEPRIVE MYSELF OF THIS!?” and she yelled back, “I KNOW!” Essentially sealing my fate as someone who is always going to have to live close to my mother, from here on out, because I just like doing couch time and movie time with her so much.
We put on a Lifetime movie called Under The Bed. It was disappointing except it gave mom and I a lot of opportunity to talk about how the woman in the movie was doing absolutely everything wrong. She had terrible survival skills. Mom and I, on the other hand, have good survivor instincts. We kept yelling “ZIG ZAG! ZIG ZAG!” at the screen because the woman was running in a straight line into the woods and everyone on earth knows you don’t run in a straight line, damn, you have to zig zag.
There was another scene in the movie where the lead is being held captive by the obsessive stalker and her mother walks in on the two of them. The stalker’s set up a candle lit dinner and the mother (who has obviously never seen him before) is confused. When the stalker asks if he has the mother’s blessing to marry the daughter all pandemonium breaks loose, people try to stab each other, and (SPOILER?) the mother — played by a mystifying looking Beverly D’Angelo — gets shot in the chest.
“That’s crazy!” my mom said. “She played that completely wrong! If you were kidnapped by a lunatic who said he wanted to marry you I would say, ‘Oh, how exciting! Let’s all go to the mall and get a dress!’ Then I’d drive you to the mall and once we got to the mall we’d start screaming and run through Macy’s zig zag.”
We wondered how difficult it is to get a Lifetime movie made. We thought it must be pretty easy. It was a conversation we’d had many times over the years, watching different trashy thrillers, and everything seemed basically normal about my night of mother/daughter bonding until my mother turned to me and said:
“DID I EVER TELL YOU I HAVE AN OLDER SISTER?”
I feel like at this point, the story is better told through the text messages I furiously began sending my brother.
I know you’re wondering, “Fallon, why did you begin this post about Lifetime movies?” IT’S BECAUSE MY LIFE IS NOW LITERALLY A LIFETIME MOVIE.
LIKE, LOOK AT THIS THE PLOT THICKENS TEXT I GOT FROM UNCLE LANCE WHEN I TEXTED HIM.
What does any of this mean!?
It’s like the entire family woke up with this vague, implanted memory!
Everyone keeps talking about the Berenstain Bears, Sinbad the genie, and all these other ridiculous, low-level Mandela Effects. So is this an extreme version of that? Did my mother jump to a new timeline in her sleep?
I don’t even know what’s real anymore.