Things that my mother does

She talks. A lot. She leaves the room we’re both in, and carries on talking to me, even though I can’t hear her. Invariably.
When she talks, both her hands flutter constantly.
She turns into a whirlwind and sorts out the garden single-handed in one afternoon.
She brings me a bottle of wine, opens it on the first night; I’m ill, I can’t drink; by the third night, the wine is gone and she says: if I’d known you wouldn’t have any, I wouldn’t have bothered.
She has great plans of flying over to Colorado. Or California. Then we can all go backpacking to the Grand Canyon – ‘we’ would be she, and I, and my girlfriend, whom she hasn’t met. She doesn’t understand my lack of enthusiasm.
She has discovered the joys of unlimited Internet connection and ASDL. Apparently, right this minute it’s 42°C in New Delhi and in Laos it’s raining again.
She talks to my neighbours more in one afternoon than I do in a year. Mainly because she thinks they need gardening advice.
She questions my sartorial purchases: don’t you have ten just like it? I hope you didn’t pay too much for this. Do you really like it? She wants to go shopping and buy me some clothes.
She gets angry at car drivers who won’t stop to let her cross the street.
Most things she says are accompanied with a slight laugh, as if distancing herself from what she is saying.
She talks to the plants.
She laughs at the things I have to wear for work.
When relating a past incident that made her mad, she gets mad.
She wants to take pictures of me with the cat.
She wears expensive, designer labels that look cheaper than they are.
She thinks that if I had ‘a husband with a good job, who could teach [me] things, a nice house and two kids, [I] wouldn’t ask so many questions.’
I can tell she, just like the rest of the world, wonders what lesbians do in bed, but she won’t ask.
She loves me.