PTSD

Happy Mother's Day

Have you called your mother? No? Then go tell her that you’re sorry you
put her through 18 hours of labor, jelly beans up the nose, and all
those infomercials she had to watch while waiting for your teenage self
to get home from a party. Go on, go buy her some flowers or something.
Make her a popsicle stick wallet, or write her a poem. While you’re
at it, put down a deposit for a place in Boca that she can retire to.
You owe her.

How do I know this? Because if we’ve given you the url for this blog
(and you aren’t actually Priya’s mum or my mom), then chances are you
are the sort of person we like to talk to.

And that category includes an awful lot of people who were not very
good children. The sort of children who lit things on fire to see if
anyone would notice. The ones who sat in the back of the classroom and
melted crayons on the radiator because the lecture was boring, and
mutated crayons were more fun than spelling, and then got caught when
the fire alarm went off and everyone had to stand outside for twenty
minutes in the snow. The preschool angels who told the Sunday School
teacher that her story was bullshit. The sort of people who
reorganized the science books in the school library using an obscure
binary code knowing that it would give the poor librarian a breakdown
when it happened the third time. Went through 18 goldfish while
working on a science project entitled "The effects of acid rain on
Freshwater Lakes" and then got harassed by the ASPCA at the fair. Got
caught tagging the high school gym with quotations from the Tractatus.
Reprogrammed everyone’s permanent record to include a mandatory class
in “Disaster Preparedness and S’more Construction.” Stole a Taco Bell
table just to see what would happen, made up rude lyrics to every song
in Carousel and then sang them during the production (“This was a real
nice sperm bank”? That’s not nearly as funny as you thought it was),
refused to join in during camp singalongs because they were an example
of the imposition of European culture on native spaces, snuck into
bars, not to get drunk, but to attend POETRY READINGS. And got kicked
out of the girl scouts and the church youth group for very good reasons.

You all know who you are. And boy, do you owe your mother an apology.
She’s the one who had to explain to the principal that you weren’t a
communist, you were just an instigator. Or that you weren’t an
instigator, you were just misunderstood. And that no, you did not
think that it was okay to make a mockery of the educational system,
that in fact you were simply trying to improve the system by drawing
attention to its limitations. And the principal didn’t believe it
either, but somebody had to keep you out of detention long enough to
graduate.

And you know what? When you have kids, and the apple doesn’t fall far
from the tree, it's your own fault that she laughs until she snorts
because your kid is the one who drew an anatomically correct
self-portrait for the kindergarten Open House display. To her, it’s a
case of poetic justice that your kid is the one singing “what shall we
do with a drunken sailor” during the Christmas pageant. So get over
it. If that’s all that goes wrong in the next eighteen years, you’ll
have gotten off very lightly indeed.

It’s the one day each year when we try to be nice to the person who
worries about us every day and only wants us to be happy, even when she
really wishes she could, just once, sit down and watch a movie without
needing to bail someone out of a lockup in Poland.

Go buy your mom something pretty. And would it kill you to call home
once in a while? You know, when you don’t need money? And when are
you going to give her grandchildren? She wants to be young enough to
enjoy them, you know.

posted by Elizabeth @ 7:07 PM