When Your Own Mother “Unlikes” You On Facebook

This week KidFreeLiving.comhit 100 fans (or, I guess now I should say likers) on Facebook. For almost a full day I had 99 fans, which was frustrating, so I winged through my Facebook friend list to see if anyone I knew well was missing. That’s when I noticed one glaring omission. The peculiar absence of one of my original fans.

My mother had unliked me.

It is quite a blow to discover your own mother has unliked you.  I mean, just the other day she’d brought me 456 pre-read magazines and clippings she thought I might enjoy. Does that sound like unliker behavior?

Just finding I’d lost any fan brought on feelings of rejection, heartbreak… I never dreamed the turncoat was my own flesh and blood. It’s bad enough my brother, father and husband Mike aren’t fans. They refuse to join Facebook, so they can’t publicly like me, though I have talked Mike into periodically giving me the thumbs-up sign whenever we meet a new person, so at least those new  people will know he is a fan. I can’t risk letting these strangers make up their own mind about me without some social guidance and risk throwing us back to that dark time when people willy-nilly decided if they liked someone using their own unreliable senses.

My brother, Dad and Mike all think Facebook is for grade school girls, perverts and 40 year-old virgin dungeon masters.  My father thinks getting a Facebook account is probably one step from taking out an ad in the New York Times that boasts your social security number, home address, where you hide your spare key and a calendar outlining the days you’ll be away from your home. Of course, this is the same guy who stated the other day with much seriousness: Flip-flops are the most dangerous shoe ever invented. Forget about the steel-toed boot. Worry about the flip-flops with the hidden buck knife and exploding toe thong.

Anyway, once I got over the shock, I realized pretty quickly my mother hadn’t been hiding her dislike for me all these years, like some sort of an embittered housewife secretly poisoning her husband with lovingly home cooked meals  (though thinking back on one lemon veal dish, there is a small chance Mom actually is trying to poison us).  She wasn’t trying to make a statement about how I’d forgotten to bring in her trashcans the other day. It wasn’t revenge.  My mother just keeps her Facebook page the way she keeps her house. Very neat. You could eat off her Facebook page.

That week she had already called me twice to ask how to bring me back after she banished me from her Facebook wall entirely. The first time, I had liked the blogShit my Dad Says. Mom saw that I liked it and checked it out herself. Mom didn’t appreciate the language on Shit my Dad Says(apparently the title didn’t tip her off) and consequently she didn’t want mention of it there on her wall. So she hid me. *Poof!* I was banished. 40 years of being a pretty good daughter, all things considered, and she dismisses me from her Facebook life over a blog about a cranky old stranger with a penchant for dropping F-bombs.

To her credit she quickly missed me, and called to find out how to put me back on her wall. Tragedy averted. Then a couple of days later I befriended one too many people at the same time, and Facebook’s unbelievably annoying habit of posting Amy is now friends with Who Gives a Damn type messages cluttered up my Mother’s Fastidious Facebook page. *Poof!* AGAIN I am banished. Again, she called shortly afterward to ask how to get me back. This time I tell her it will involve money.

So why did she unlike my blog? Because when I post a new entry I post notice of it on my personal page AND my Kid-Free Living Facebook page. That means Mom gets TWO postings on her wall. That sort of repetitive bullshit will NOT happen on her watch.

If you like a neat Facebook page, you might want to hire my mother to keep things in line. be I’ll get her to write a book outlining her cold-blooded techniques.  If you want a neat Facebook page, you want Mom on that wall. You need her on that wall.