She and I

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 15, Verse 20

"A rebellious son saddens his mother."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

We all stared at the cake.  Her grandson had just blown out the candles for her-- four year olds are so considerate that way, always looking to assist with life's more mundane chores-- and she had silently made her wish, which was more of a prayer, I expect.

No more dying, she probably said to herself, inside her 64-year-old head.  Not this year.  I know that's what she wished for because she's my mother, and she and I are one.  

"So, Ma," I said, "how many Teletubbies did you have to kill and grind up to make that icing?"  

She'd made her own birthday cake, the first birthday cake she'd made in years-- probably since I was a boy, and the icing was the color of Cindy Lauper's hair, circa 1986-1988 (the "True Colors" years).  I don't know quite why she chose that insane color for the icing, but it did match the plastic birthday table cloth, which matched the paper cups and plates, and streamers, and party horns and perhaps I just answered my own question.

My mother likes it when things match.  For years and years and years, in a spiral-bound notebook, on Sunday nights she would make a clothing chart for the week, coordinating blouses with pants, sandals-- everything, down to the earrings.  Or, I guess, up to the earrings.  And I get it: matching = order.  And she and I are one.     

I didn't get my mother anything for her birthday, and I didn't write her a card or a letter as I've done in years past.  I don't think she cares.  She doesn't care about things like that.  Neither does my father.  It might be the only thing they have in common-- except for their love for their children and their grandchildren.  Oh, and they like to go to the movies.  I think they even like going together.  

My son is head-over-heels crazypants in love with my mother, and I think that's pretty amazing.  I love watching it.  He gets delirious when he sees her-- sometimes he falls on the floor and makes the most insane, gleeful noises while his eyes sparkle.  It's like he's on baby PCP.  It's a hoot.  My mother's mother died six years before I was born, and I didn't meet my father's mother until I was fifteen-- and it was just that one time.  I wonder if I would have been obsessed with my grandmothers if I'd known them when I was two.  I don't know.  As it was, there was only room in my life for my mother.

So maybe it's just as well.  It would have been hard to compete.

When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I realized that my mother responded positively towards "bad" humor.  Not cruelness, necessarily, but being, well, bad.  Naughty.  Saying what shouldn't be said.  Making fun.  Scandal.  Adolescence is, of course, a time when a lot of boys seek out scandal and cruelty, badness and meanness, and it often comes out in the form of rebellion against one's parents, sometimes against the mother.  For me, that didn't happen.  I didn't rebel.  How could I?  Why would I?  I just used that urge and used it to feed my blossoming sense-of-humor, I infused naughtiness into my jokes and imitations and dinner table conversation and I watched with sparkling, PCP-glazed eyes as my mother laughed and, knowingly or not, encouraged me.  And that became my sense-of-humor.  

Being bad.  

It got laughs-- it got results, from the only audience member who mattered a damn.  She even laughed when I made fun of her stupid fucking Cindy Lauper cake.  Because, I guess, there's something in her that wants to be bad, too.  She's a librarian, perfectly nice and kind and helpful to every irascible prat and dusty old lady and obnoxious little kid who comes her way, and after work she's typically in the company of my nephew, so she has to behave even when she's off-the-clock.  But every now-and-then, over the phone or in a murmured remark in her ear as we're saying good-bye after a visit, I can still let an off-color remark fly and pull back just in time to see her weathered grin spread, or hear her shriek and laugh on the other end of the phone, just a mile or so away, and my anxieties will be quelled for another day as I am reassured that, in spite of how much the world and our world has changed, she and I, still, are one.   

Happy Birthday.