by elizaligon

I want you to read that headline, then read it again. Know that this is a true story.

My mother got on Twitter around the time I did. Yes, she was one of those “you can have Twitter, but I’m gonna stalk you” parents. I was unbothered by this; after all, how much could she reeeeeaaally stalk me on Twitter? I doubted there would be anything on my Twitter page that could not already be seen on my Facebook and Instagram. That being said, I was less inclined towards Twitter because I knew my mother was there to see every move– she followed only me, a few of my friends, and several news stations.

As it turns out, I did not need to worry about my mother stalking me on Twitter. Instead, I should have been worried about the news that she got from Twitter. Every day I would come home, and there she would be, sitting on the couch with CNN roaring in the background, staring intently at her small metal rectangle– reading about the very news that she was watching. If Joe and Mika declared the day bad, there was no hope. If Rachel Maddow said the sky was yellow, it was so. For every way in which this frustrated me, I had to accept that this was not the worst case scenario. At least she was not tweeting explicitly racist things? At least she wasn’t homophobic? At least she was not… a Republican? 

After Donald Tr*mp won the election, as you may have expected, my mother lost her fuckin’ marbles. It was at this point that she started following more and more Republicans for the sole purpose of cyber-bullying them off of Twitter. In many ways, I respected her ambition and the mission which she chose to undertake. Still, her methods took some of her mild viewpoints to an extreme place. For a liberitarian, she sounded like an anarchist. (But, yknow, less cool.)

“TRumplestiltskin, you fat motherfucker!” She would yell while tweeting.

“Mom, that has nothing to do with his politics or his ill morals.”

“Oh, so you’re a Republican now, too? Well I know for a fact that you’re not inbred, so what’s your excuse?”

Yes, the woman who had once read me bedtime stories as she tucked me in had gone completely apeshit. “Do you think you would feel that way if you weren’t white trash with a fourth grade education?” she would ask some right-wing lunatic. She became obsessed. She had thousands of likes and retweets, hundreds of followers, and she was seeking verification. She was conquering Twitter, and I had to get out. I deleted the app within a few days, and I have not looked back since; it will be forever tainted. 

My mother was suspended from Twitter for the first time approximately three years after she had begun tweeting. (Yes, my mother was removed from Twitter faster than most neo-nazis are. Thanks Jack Dorsey.) I do not care to repeat the tweet for which she was removed because, again, this IS my mother, and it was a lot more salacious than something you might expect your mom to tweet. This is it, I thought, this is the end– no more Twitter for her! Oh, what a fool I was. Like a thirteen year old gamer with sticky Mountain Dew fingers, my mom had made a brand new Twitter account and picked up where she left off. 

And so, my mother remains addicted to tweeting about the news. Every day, she sends her tweets to Donald Tr*mp and his administration, hoping to bully them out of office. This has become part of the way that my brothers and I recognize our mother, foaming at the mouth over some idiot’s tweets about the second amendment. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Categories: eliza ligon, october 6, 2020, water cooler