Mother’s Day Thoughts From The Outer Ring

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I am made from bad ingredients.

Admit it. We’ve all felt this way, at least once. No matter who you are, there was a time when you looked at one of your parents and thought, “Oh holy shit. That- that- that weird fucking mutant is one of the components in my design ancestry.” It’s Mother’s Day, so it’s time to either fake it and send flowers, admit to a neutral ambivalence and limp along with the program, go dark and get wasted, or, if you’re lucky, get in there and give that old lady a hug for a job well done.

Those are the time honored options. Mine is a work in progress. Why? It’s pointless and weensy of you, dear reader, to be bitter on such a day. Look at what she did for you! First, she had the wherewithal to carry you around inside her body for around NINE months. What a drag! Better than I am already! Then, even if you we grunted out behind a dumpster and left for dead, a different mother found you! And somehow, you even learned to read! Was a maternal person ever involved in that? I bet there was.

So here it is my admittedly granola take on Mother’s Day. No matter what kind of ungodly hog splatter your mother was, you can and should rejoice on some level. Let’s take mine. Sandra’s childhood was… I don’t care how it was, actually. Her real dad was gunned down in a bar by a gangster’s daughter, and the mobbed up little vixen got away with it. So she was off to a rocky start. I guess that was kinda interesting. Her mother remarried, and they became the better set of my grandparents. So my mother didn’t imprint on me to the point where I ever learned her birthday, or even where she was born, and if I ever learned anything else about her early life, I forgot it. Sandra started adulthood as a Jackie Kennedy wannabe, I can gather from photos. She was a pill head, like many of her generation. The pharmaceutical industry was relentless in those days, and it still is, but Google drug ads aimed at women in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. I mean, what the fuck? As her peers became her betters, she slandered them relentlessly. It was impossible for her to rejoice in the success of others. But whatever. What really mattered?

She was sweet sometimes. She thought reading was good (reading kids are quiet kids), and she never had any terrible boyfriends. She believed that the imagination was a powerful tool. And she could be super fucking funny, too. Best of all, she was capable of misbehaving on an epic level.

The understanding that there are things you can take away from bad parents is a hard one to come to, because the apple seldom falls from the tree for humans. Mammals emulate the behavior of their parents. For better or for worse, their ingredients are our building blocks. The trick, therefore, is to manipulate your ingredient list. Find the good things and be those things. Build on them. Feed them. Identify the bad ones and starve them out. We all have those old friends who seemed to pick up everyone’s bad habits and but never their good ones. This same function is wildly more important in dysfunctional families. No one is all bad. If you’re wise, you’ll look for the good in there. If you’re clever, you might be able to find it. If you’re smart, you should try to become it.

That was a mix of hippy and Dr. Phil, far outside of my comfort zone. It’s all true stuff, too, but I feel, Dear Reader, that you might go away disappointed after the above, so I’ll offer up an embarrassing story that has little or nothing to do with any of that.

Years would pass where I could think of no Earthly reason to bug my mother. But one night, me and a couple guys I knew decided to hit every bar on Lombard. Creepy part of town really, especially in those days. We started at Tiny Bubbles and just kept on going. Around 3:00 we wound up back at my place after my Tres got us kicked out of the last three consecutive bars.

“Dudes!” Tres cried out. “I just realized! It’s April Fools Day! We’re three hours into it!”

“Who can we call,” my old pal Ben asked. They couldn’t think of even one person who would believe a fucking thing they would say at three in the morning right then. But I could, so I found her number and dialed. My mother was living with another old lady named Candy at the time.

“Wha, wha- hello?” Sleeping pills. Only half there.

“Ma! Wake the fuck up! It’s me! Jeff!”

“Jeffrey? What in the world-“

“Pack all your stuff and get out of the house! Fast! In fact just leave everything! Get in your car and drive away from the lights!”

“Wha- what,” rustle as she sat up, suddenly awake.

“Jesus! I can’t believe it! It’s France! They dropped a nuke on New York City!”

The phone dropped, then in the distance-

“Candy! Candy! Wake up old girl! We’re at war with France!” Then a pause. Then a mad cackling as she realized what she’d just said.