All about my mother

Holden: Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.

Leon: My mother?

Holden: Yeah.

Leon: Let me tell you about my mother. (Shoots him)

– From the movie Blade Runner

Of all the hallmarked holidays in my memories, Mother’s Day was the one of forced greetings and emotional exploitation.

Gift and card-giving at assorted celebrated occasions, including birthdays and Christmas, were done away with after the initial requisite gesture was unmasked as a commercial sham, cynical family that we are. But on this particular day of the year, every year, my mom insisted, no, she demanded that we kids better show some appreciation ‘round here. At the crack of the whip, my brother and I scurried to our rooms, not to be let out lest we emerged with some suitably scrawled poem or handmade card that expressed our groveling gratitude.

Not that we were ungrateful or unloving children, but perhaps the whole concept of it all escaped our young, self-centered rationales. It was just another imposed way of making us be nice. Now of course, I’m a little bit smarter and more sympathetic towards the matter of the mother. After all, it doesn’t take much effort on our part to be born or wish Jesus another happy one, but a mother is made every day. That is, motherhood is an ongoing embodied experience, and whether it is biologically hers or not, from the moment a woman decides to raise a child in this world she becomes a mother, and it doesn’t end, this relationship of responsibility and unconditional love. Every year, she is a different one – wiser, a bit wrinkled, more forgetful and frustrated, cantankerous and menopausal, then a mask of Zen-calm with a Botox fill, but always the more enriched and blessed.

Or so I’d like to think. I was such a dreadful teen that I swore to myself never to have kids. It started around the time I fell into rock ‘n’ roll (God bless its soul), which we all know is really about sex and drugs (not that I was indulging in either, mind you). Coinciding with that precious stage when we attempt to construct an alt.identity based on something other than home-bred values – stuff we read, see in movies, or people we think are cool. So my hair went green, my clothing went "vintage" (there were holes on the ass part of my jeans and this was pre-Christina Aguilera), and while on vacation, insisted on a devotee’s detour of duty as I dragged my slightly bemused mom to Jim Morrison’s Parisian grave. And speaking of music...

My mother, in fits of moral delirium, would try to burn, I mean, destroy my CDs that she deemed evil just from looking at the covers. Grateful Dead, Jane’s Addiction – anything with names sounding remotely satanic or vice-encouraging – were confiscated faster than you could say an explicit lyric. One time, she came to me horrified and ready to ground me, upon hearing that someone had seen me "drunk and dancing on the tabletops" in a nightclub. I was 15. How could I explain that it was not the lecherous image she imagined. How could I get across the blurry youthful sentiment of being at the declining heyday of Weekends Live, where the tequila was open and some band like Advent Call or KO Jones ended their set with an always-rousing rendition of Sweet Home Alabama (this was pre-Reese Witherspoon), and there was no one in the place who would not jump up and dance?

Erich Fromm said, "The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent."

Glenn Danzig also said, "Mother/Can you keep them in the dark for life/Can you hide them from the waiting world/Oh mother."

I spent half of my high school life in detention and even suspended, and I suppose the other half grounded. Think Almost Famous meets The Virgin Suicides. What was I rebelling against? Nothing and everything. The wisdom of the elders. Anti-experimentation. Being dorky, mostly. The ironic thing is, I really wasn’t a problem kid. It was all a matter of perception, and a bit of bad luck (don’t get caught!). Where my interests and my mother’s interests for myself diverged, therein lay the trouble. Every time I broke curfew for another hour of fun, I broke my mother’s heart with worry.

I grew up, and got a little smarter. My mom said she "prayed hard" for me, but I always knew I had to wade my own way out of these adolescent battlegrounds. And so Mother’s Day rolls around again and this time it’s my editor who asks me to write something about mother. Although I’ve really talked about myself, it’s all these things we do that shape our mothers, as they shape us. The mother readjusts herself as we grow along, discovering different roles, some of which are grueling and unexpected, but always finding that last bit of hope in the seemingly hopeless. And ephemeral moments, perhaps forgotten or forgiven, are stored in the heart’s memory, threading the warp and woof that separation and independence cannot unweave. And it’s simple really. All she wants is to raise a good kid, someone she can be proud of, a mirror reflecting back endlessly.

* * *

The boyfriend (testing the waters perhaps?) asked me what kind of mother I think I’d be, and if I’d be like my mom. Considering this a highly loaded question, I hedged before launching into something non-committal. "Well, factoring the certain genetic and environmental influences-we do share genes and a habitat, after all –I have noticed the emergence and development of a few similar traits (such as eating chili peppers by the handful) and maybe one or two inevitable values (like a disapproval of mediocrity, guns, and Penelope Cruz…)" But a bit of Freudian slips in and I get paranoid that maybe some repressed cyclical weirdness would happen, and that my kids will punish me for the sins of their yet-unborn mother. Why, I demanded, do you want to know? "Because," he says, "I think she did a great job." Ohh. Well then, that’s actually sweet. See mom, did you hear that?

You made me a great mother.