It’s true, you know, and not just because it’s Mother’s Day.
I really do love her. She’s fun to be around. She has interests outside cooking and cleaning. She’s about to buy an iMac, for Chrissakes. She asked for my email address today on the phone. She’s even offered to help me paint my apartment next time she visits.
This is a woman who dealt not only with her own really weird Depression-era upbringing (maybe I’ll tell that story some day), but with a really weird kid, and she turned out just fine. I never wanted to play sports or whatever the hell the other kids did. I wanted to prowl around downtown taking pictures of old buildings. I wanted to go to flea markets and diners and read books and play DJ. She not only coped, but she encouraged me. When I went through my “drug phase”, she was remarkably sane in retrospect.
My mom has driven me places and put up with strangeness no woman should have to deal with.
And she had a career. Thirty years with the IRS. By the time she retired in 1985, she was working with computer security (but I still have to re-program the VCR when I go home). For several years in the 70’s when my dad was unemployed, she was the sole breadwinner of the family.
Coming out was never an issue really. Mom is not an idiot. One day I just introduced her to “the guy I’m dating now” and it was just as natural and normal as if I’d said “nice day, isn’t it?”. Now she asks about ex-boyfriends on the phone and walks in the AIDS Walk and sends me newspaper clippings. Lots of newspaper clippings.
She treats all my friends like family members (although I think she has favorites). You’d think Dan, my ex-roomie, and Duncan and Jeff, my two oldest friends, were her own kids. She even asked about Sarah, even before they’d ever MET. And she seems to have taken well to Mark too, which is a good thing…
She’s adopted not one or two, but THREE immigrant refugee families, and not in a stand-offish “society matron” way. She babysits, goes grocery shopping and cooks Christmas dinner for her “families”.
Mom wants to go places and do things. My dad seems to be getting more and more letharigic, and so my mom just goes without him. She’s been to New York, Atlantic City, and the beach in the past month, and she’s coming here soon. She’ll be staying with me. And I’m actually looking forward to it.
I love my mom…
And no, she’s not online yet. She won’t be reading this, so I’m not kissing up to her. And shame on you for thinking that…
