Mothers: Because We All Have One

While I wait for the contents of the helix to unwind, I thought I would begin my re-re-re-introduction of myself with a small piece on mothers.

Awesome creatures, aren’t they?

I am in partial ownership of three of them. I only have to live with one. That is why you can find me in places other than the obituaries of the local newspaper. I know many, many mothers, for better or for worse. A lot of them are the reason why you all hate yourselves so much, but that is not my concern at the moment. Those of you with shitty mothers already know you have one, and there’s no reason for me to pick at you until you come here and tell me you don’t have one.

The first mother in everyone’s life is the mother that they come out of. There’s a whole lot of other mothers that bring this about, and a great deal of sons who contribute. But there is no one like the one that allowed you to come home and live with her. That’s the one you should marvel at the most. No one on the planet was dumb enough to take you from the hospital that night but her.

What needs to be understood here is that this is why your mother is a very sick person who needs your help.

This is not the person you think it is. She may have praised your schoolwork at once. She may have put out cereal for you. She can teach you to tie a shoe. What she cannot do is realize how sick she is for being a mother. Her husband is utterly useless on this count as well. He allowed her to take you home, what does he know about mental illness? That he enjoys it? That he enjoys being a part of fostering it? Clearly, this is not the type of person you should be asking about anything beyond football plays and lawn care techniques. You mother knows this already about him, that’s why they stopped talking and probably why you had a speech delay then and a bad career today. He doesn’t know anything about anything. All he really knows is one night, he found someone who was sicker than he was, and that was the woman who tried very hard to understand that “men have needs”.

She’s even sicker than we thought, isn’t she? Anyone who tries to understand men is very unbalanced, or very bored. I am a man who has enabled a mother. All I really know is that this woman sitting on the couch with me is the same person who keeps the designer pillows around so that one day, she can suffocate me without having to reach very far. But your own mother is the sickest mother of all.

Mine is a born-again Christian, which doubles her sickness in the same manner that AIDS does for physical sickness. It’s the type of personal choice a mother makes that gives anthropologists and biologists cold sweats at night, wondering how they will have to come up with a new classification of organisms to explain it properly.  Nietzsche was wrong. Super “Man” is not the next step. The Uber-Mother would slam Nietzsche’s dick into the door jamb and sing Disney tunes. What makes the Uber-Mom so dangerous is not her awesome destructive capabilities, but that she looks like the rest of us. And acts like us too, until her peace has been disturbed.

Case in point: one day, when I was thirteen or so, I was supposed to go to born-again church with the family one Sunday morning. I had already had enough with church at that age.  I could even tell then that it was full of the same type of assholes the rest of the world was populated with, except that these assholes thought God liked them more than the rest of the assholes He made because they were better dressed and were marginally better at reading their Bibles than the Catholics. By the way, I have spoken to God without my medication. He is not impressed with you, trust me. He has been impressed that I got so manic a few times in recent memory that I managed to get his direct line by drunk-dialing him in a serotonin stupor, but he is not impressed with any of you. Anyway, I did not want to go. My father, the man with needs, felt that getting the family to church was a very important job of his.

Fathers: this is not an important job of yours. You’ve already made enough of a mess, get your priorities straight.

So I said: I don’t wanna go. Yelling back and forth between my father an mother began. My father, the guy with the priorities and the needs, told my mother it was HER fault that she couldn’t get me to go to church.  This was a poor strategy to get me to go to church, because suddenly, no one was going to church. This is because my father had done the equivalent of mixing together all of the cleaning products under the sink and pouring it into my mother’s skull cavity.  The reaction was instantaneously toxic and suddenly, the thin gold necklace I was wearing to look cool at school became a murder weapon in my mothers hand as she strung together every curse word she had ever learned in her life.

“ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, BITCH BASTARDMOTHERFUCK? HUH, BITCH BASTARDMOTHERFUCK!?!?!?!?!” was what I could make out during this time period.  She said some other things, but they might have been in Sumerian, channeling something that even H.P. Lovecraft in his most fevered dreams would not have been able to describe. She shook me like I was made from teddy bear stuffing. She probably shook the neighbor’s wall. I may have also temporarily removed myself from consciousness briefly, so I can’t tell you more.

But today, I am 38, living near her, not with her.  She is a nice, unassuming, charming little lady with a country house and a dial-up internet connection, who doesn’t want much from me except for my own children.  She can have them; I’m not crossing her again. But it’s cute the way she comes to see me online sometimes, asking me what my shifting Facebook icons mean, and if I could please watch my language.

Have I made myself clear? Your mother is a very sick person who needs your help.