Looking For My Mother

She's in there-- somewhere, I guess.  She's got to be.  On outward appearance, it's the same bespectacled face, the same careworn hands, the same short, salt-and-pepper hair.  It's got to be my mother.

Lately, though, I'm not so sure.

The wry smile is gone.  I don't know that it's gone for good necessarily, but I haven't seen it-- not since December or thereabouts.  That's when my brother-in-law was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic cancer.  That's when the reality set in that her first grandson was going to grow up having never known his father.  "Buddy," my wife asked me tentatively last night during a rare, quiet moment in our house, "will your mother be sad for a very long time?"

"Yeah," I said, not looking at anything in particular, "I think so."

Tragedy doesn't visit our family.  Death does, as it drops in on every family, but tragedy?  Not so much.  I went to my first funeral at age 9, but it was for Dr. Porter, our next door neighbor, who died at a ripe old age-- an irascible, bent over, shriveled up raisin in suspenders and tatty old Florsheims.  People we know and people we love tend to die late in life, when they should.  The only person who exited the world out-of-order was my mother's mother, who was felled by lymphoma-- but that was years before I was born.  So I was not scarred.

But my mother was.

And maybe that's part of the reason why the death of her son-in-law at the age of 34, from cancer, no less, hit her so hard.  Because she'd been there.  She knew.  She'd watched the woman she loved more than anything get eaten up, eaten alive, become barely recognizable.  A shell.  A shame.

Now that I have children, I see my mother more.  For a while, while my brother-in-law was dying, I never saw my mother, because she was caring full-time for his son, while my sister was caring for her husband.  Now that my brother-in-law is dead, my mother comes by to help me with the babies when I'm home with them alone.  Part of it, I think, is because she feels guilty about missing their first few months.  Part of it is because she's from the generation that is absolutely sure a father will kill his children through sheer incompetence and absent-minded negligence by putting them in the dishwasher when their diapers get dirty or something.  Part of it, maybe, is because watching me be a father is one of the few small pleasures she gets to experience anymore.

Maybe.  I don't know.

When she's with me at the house with the babies, conversation is quiet, and the content is either superficial, or it's sad.  I can't manage to get us anywhere in between, and the fault is mine as much as it's hers.  Sometimes, I find myself trying to keep it light, because I can't bear it when it's heavy-- sometimes I say deliberately inappropriate things just to get her to smile-- and, sometimes, it works.  That's what I used to do at the dinner table when we were all young together.  I'd make a cutting remark about a distant relative or someone from the neighborhood just to see my mother smile.  I never thought then that the corners of her mouth turning up would ever mean so much to me.

Or happen so infrequently.

She's in there somewhere, I know, just like we're all in there somewhere-- who we were before cancer and before twins and before mortgages and cars we paid for ourselves and colleges we shouldn't have gone to and majors we shouldn't have chosen and girlfriends we shouldn't have slept with and friends we shouldn't have made.  But did.  We're all in there somewhere.  My daughter is cooing downstairs and my son is sleeping in the next room and my wife, a mother, who's also in there, just finished pumping.  And I'm wearing red and pink argyle socks, because, somewhere, I think I'm in there, too. 

Stay The Fuck Away From Me, World

As my wife and I walked hand-in-hand up the path to the front door of my parents’ house, we spied an unfamiliar sticker affixed to the screen door.

If my mother could be summed up in a sticker, it would be this one.

Fearful, paranoid, constantly warding off the evil eye or evil bacteria or evildoers in general, she is a 5’2” hundred-odd-pound bundle of anxiety with stylish short hair and librarian glasses.

And, we love her. And not just because yesterday was Mother’s Day either.

Being greeted as we were by this new sticker last night made me smile, because nothing says “my mother” quite like a “stay the fuck away from me, world” sticker on the front door that’s approximately a full foot tall. If she could enclose the property in razor-wire without it looking institutional, she would do it. Because, really—why take a chance?

We do not take chances in my family. In fact, when my wife texted me while I was at work Saturday to let me know that she had an idea percolating about something special to do next weekend to celebrate my birthday, this was my reply:

“As long as it doesn’t involve me performing and/or socializing too much, or potentially risking my life or our lives outside of the normal risks, you should be okay. I love you.”

Ah, good old genetics. Thanks for those hand-me-down worry-warts, Mom.

Not only are my parents proudly displaying this boldly-hued burglar warning on their screen-door, they had two more of them, they had two more of them, in case my sister and I wanted one for either or both of our houses.

I politely declined. The previous owners of our house, also apparently scared straight by the wicked world, had already placed an older version of this sticker on our front door years ago. My sister declined because she’s an asshole.

The previous owners of our house also have metal grates on the basement windows, three locks on the basement door, and auxiliary locks on all the windows in the house, operated by small keys. I think we must be distantly related.

I love my mom and her paranoia and her fears, many of which I have inherited. While I don’t wake up covered in sweat after having nightmares about thousands of half-naked Koreans storming the beach like she does, I am, basically, afraid of everything. Seeing that sticker on the front door of their house reminded me of the day when I was in fifth grade and I stayed home from school sick. And I called the police because some scruffy-looking guy was crawling through our bushes in front of our house. Three radio cars with emergency lights ablaze responded in under three minutes. When he didn’t comply with their directions fast enough, he was taken down.

It was the guy from the water company trying to read our meter.

I was worried that, when my mother got home from work and found out what I'd done, that I'd gotten a menial public servant thrown to the ground because I was a tightly-wound, neurotic child who watched far too much "Rescue, 911" for his own good, that I would get in trouble, that she would be disappointed in me, ashamed of me, mad at me, bewildered and confused by me. But she wasn't any of those things. She held me close and said,

"I'm very proud of you-- I'd have done exactly the same thing."

Of course she would have.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love your crazy, I love your sticker, and I love you.

Kamikaze Birds, And Other Mother's Day Tweets-- Sorry-- Treats

Hey, it's Mother's Day.

If reading that sentence on this blog is your O.S.R. (Oh, Shit Reminder), don't worry. I hear they're selling pansies at the Mobil station. You can thank me later.

Pansy.

I was thinking about honoring my mother with a post on this blog, but then I started to feel like that would be trite, maybe even a little insulting, (especially since she'd definitely disown/disembowel me if she read 9 out of 10 posts contained herein), and assuredly too predictable. I mean, come on-- a post about your mother on Mother's Day? That's like... like... um... a Justin Bieber post on National Justin Bieber Day. (By the way, my wife explained who he is to me last night. I am now fit to go out and circulate in even my own socially retarded public sphere.)

Hmm... this post is, I feel, containing an inordinate amount of parenthetical references. I used to use those fuckers (a lot) in my high school writing, which featured prominently a story about a woman named Mary Jane who gets her virginity stolen and the woefully inept Superintendent James Henry Wobbypoohs who investigates the crime.

(Gay.)

Anyway, this is not going to be a post about my mother. I felt that would kind of be wasted on her. She's greater than any Mother's Day post I could create-- she's funnier, snarkier, more demure, more assured, and more, well, more than I'm capable of creating. It would just be tinny and hollow and, probably, sad.

So I'm going to write about my oldest sister instead.

It's a funny thing, I suppose, writing about her-- someone who, at 42 and stolidly single, will in all likelihood never be a mother, but maybe that's why I'm picking her as my muse.

Julie.

(Hi, so here's another parenthetical reference. It's explaining the pseudonym for my oldest sister, because I hate referring to her as "my oldest sister" all the fucking time, and I'm sure as shit not going to call her by her real name. So, um, Julie it is. "Julie.")

Julie doesn't have children, and I doubt she's ever going to. She's never had a husband and I doubt she's ever going to. I could be wrong, but I'd feel comfortable, maybe even a little cocky betting my wife's eyelids on it.

And I'm not a betting man.

Julie moved back in with my parents back in February when the mousketeers decided to commandeer her condominium. She just sent me a text message:

"Omg its exhausting living in a house w/stairs!"

Life is exhausting for Julie. She works for my father, an unending haze of unreasonable expectations, haphazard instructions, and half-Israeli profanities shouted at cringeworthy decibels. Julie hides while at work. If my father is really laying into her, she'll run and hide in the bathroom, the only place in the factory where he can't get to her.

Otherwise, she hides behind her computer screen. On Thursday, Julie e-mailed me 18 times.

"Ho hum, another day of wondering what should go on my tombstone:

The thing I say most: 'Fuck'!"

Kind of sounds like... me, doesn't she? I'm very proud.

(That reminds me-- I need to write my epitaph one of these days...)

Anyway, Julie doesn't have children, but she does have her beautiful nephew, on whom she dotes and smothers as if he were her very own. It's actually very touching to see the two of them interact together. When our nephew got a cold, he threw up twice, and cried afterwards.

So did Julie.

Julie has lots of stuffed animals. Before our nephew came into this world, she doted on and smothered her stuffed animals. She named them, and probably talked to them at night when she was otherwise alone. And while that's kind of unsettling to picture, it's better than what she used to do with stuffed animals when she was a young girl. She used to love to pretend she was a schoolteacher, and that her stuffed animals where her pupils. Sounds quaint, right? Well, not the way little Julie played. She would line them all up on the porch and scream at them at the top of her lungs, presumably for not having their homework completed or for going to the bathroom without signing out the hall-pass. Little Julie would scream and yell frantically and forcefully, until her face turned tomato red and her neck veins bulged almost to the breaking point. These little shenanigans frequently drew the negative, frightened attention of the neighbors.

Alas, a career in education was not in her future. She was doomed to work for my father from the very start. After all, he's the only person I know who can shout her down. Those stuffed animals never had a chance.

She tries, by God. Really, she does.

"What the hell do you want for your bday???????" she wrote to me in email #16 on Thursday. All she wants to do is the right thing, but in a world that consistently and unfailingly leaves her feeling unappreciated, why bother, right?

Julie will always bother.

As I mentioned some posts ago, there's the constant updates about crime in our neighborhood that she insists on sending to me.

"Over the past few days, several unlocked vehicles have been entered overnight in the township. Small electronics have been taken. Residents are reminded to park their vehicles in a well lighted area, remove all items of value, and lock all doors."

And there's the random consumer alerts about unsafe products and/or services that she insists on sending to me.

"More TV for toddlers equals school trouble later

By Reuters - Mon May 3, 3:31 PM PDT
Less surprisingly, children who watched more TV at age 2 weighed more by the time they were 10 and ate more snacks and soft drinks, the researchers reported in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. "The results support previous suggestions that early childhood television exposure undermines attention," wrote Linda Pagani of the University of Montreal and colleagues at Bowling Green University in Kentucky and the University of Michigan."

And then there's the random bytes from the entertainment industry that she insists on sending to me.

"Teen Mom Star Maci Has Moved On to a New Guy!
Thursday – May 06, 2010 – 10:59am
Teen Mom star Maci Bookout has found a new guy in the wake of her split with Ryan Edwards, the father of son Bentley, 18 months."

I mean, really. Where the hell would I be without my sister?

And, in spite of her best intentions, shit happens-- mostly to her. Mostly in her car. Mostly when windows or sunroofs are opened.

In 1989, she was driving along in her beautiful red VW Jetta on a gorgeous, sun-dappled day when she stopped for a red light. All the windows were down. A man on a bicycle sidled up alongside her Jetta and stopped, too, for the red light, as some bicyclists do. Unsteady, he put his left hand out to stabilize himself against her car, and he fell right through her open passengerside window, right into her car-- she screamed like hell and the guy probably shit his little shorts. Alas, they did not exchange phone numbers and, eventually rings. Though it would have made for a hell of a how-we-met story told to the grandkids.

But that was a very long time ago. On Wednesday, though-- well... I'll let her tell it in her own words. Far more effective than mine-- just proving that there's a little bit of the storyteller in all of us Aprons:

"I was listening to book on cd (first time I ever used this cd player----the fuckin’ thing got stuck in it this morning)

Had the sunroof back---same as in the morning.

When I parked in the driveway, I stayed w/the car a bit to clean out the side pockets of crap.

I thought I’d felt something roll down my back, but looked around - like the doggies do -& couldn’t see anything on my back.

So I finished what I was doing and then I turned around to close the door & VOILA, dead baby bird smashed flat on my seat where my right thigh was.

MAJOR NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.

Dad called as I was bee-lining it to the house to take my HAZMAT shower. I just kept saying “when are you going to be home?” “when are you going to be home”.

He came in the house as I was coming out of the shower. I gathered gloves, plastic cups and a container of Lysol wipes & dragged him outside.

He helped me get rid of it. He said it probably fell out of a tree on my hair through the roof and I hadn’t been sitting on it the whole time.

Nice, I’d kept my hair up & it probably became a hearse-nest for the ride home.

I have no other explanation---only the creeps."

Happy Mother's Day, you fucking lunatic. There's a dead bird on your ass. And I love you.