My nephew Jack is holding up a piece of donkey poop triumphantly.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”
He tosses the donkey poop aside and turns back to the pile, undeterred. My mother shows up and shoos him away from the mound of tantalizing brown nuggets. He goes, though reluctantly. That was me once, I think. Thirty-odd years ago my mother was pulling me away from exposed electrical lines, open flames and snarling neighbor-dogs. In other words, she was a total buzzkill.
Fathers, by and large, seem to revel in placing their children in mortal danger. They toss you in the air when you’re a baby and pelt you with wiffelballs when you’re older. Because I’m an admittedly terrible person, one of my favorite memories from childhood is my father trying to teach my sister to ride a bike. We had a front yard with a fairly significant slope and one lonely tree at the bottom. My father placed my sister on her bike, gave her some cursory directions and pointed her down the hill. Slowly, very slowly, she began to roll forward. Then she promptly panicked and started screaming. The bike began to pick up steam, rolling in a very straight line towards the tree at the bottom of the hill. My sister was basically welded to the bike with terror, so there was no hope of her applying the brakes or bailing out or even turning slightly to the right or left. Her course was set and we were all powerless to help. And yes, she did inevitably crash head-on into the tree. And yes, it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. (Don’t worry, the brain damage she suffered was minimal – or at least I presume it was, as I hardly noticed a difference.)
I’m pretty sure my takeaway from that moment was not “Boy Dad, this probably isn’t the safest way to teach us how to ride bikes.” More likely it was something along the lines of “Scrape her off the seat! It’s my turn!” Once the blood stopped flowing we were always ready to re-up with whatever dangerous outing my dad dreamed up next.
Of course when we do fall off our bikes or run into the side of the house diving to catch Nerf footballs it’s Mom – lame, reliable Mom – who tends to our war wounds. As a child the thanks I gave my mother was usually a perfunctory “thank you” delivered with the enthusiasm of a robbery victim. As a teenager I responded to her countless efforts to help, console or understand me by ignoring her completely. It wasn’t until I was something approaching an adult myself (I’ll never claim to be an actual adult until I manage to reduce my ice cream sandwich budget by at least half) that I began to appreciate what it was like to be a mother.
At Christmas time my mother and my nephew Nolan were sitting together on a love seat in my sister’s house. “Nahmie?” said Nolan, leaning in to give my mother what appeared to be a spontaneous hug. “Yes, Nolan?” said my mother, sweetly. He blinked in his most roguishly disarming way. “Can you move so Grandpa can sit next to me instead?”
From the outside it appears that one’s ability to successfully navigate motherhood is highly predicated on your ability to withstand constant snubs and indirect put downs. Given that, it’s pretty understandable that mothers everywhere spend so much time engaged in the joyful re-telling of their children’s most horrifying failures and embarrassments. So in honor of Mother’s Day and in contrition for many years of mumbled thanks and evasive answers to even the simplest of questions, I present My Mother’s Favorite Story to Tell Other People about Me:
(Please note: I can’t vouch for the veracity of any part of this story and personally find parts of it hard to believe. But this is the story my mother has told for years and so I present it as truth, or at least close enough.)
When I was a baby, in the time before I could walk, we used to live in a duplex downtown. Downtown is of course a somewhat relative term, but it’s enough to know that there was a house and there were streets and that people drove down those streets with fair regularity. I was playing with another boy of a similar age and capacity (that is to say, not much of either). My mother turned her attention to something else and when she returned I was gone.
The door was ajar and a quick search confirmed that I was no longer in the house. I was also not in the front yard. I was nowhere. Panic set in. Time went by. The search widened. Panic turned to dread.
Then someone found me.
I was located in the back of a parked car, on the floor, fast asleep. Apparently I was curled around a box of stale doughnuts, at least half of which I had ingested before losing consciousness. The theory was later posited that I had crawled out of the house, across a somewhat busy street and into the back of a stranger’s car, where I had located an impressive bounty of forgotten pastry items and helped myself. My mother likes to imply that the discovery of the leftover doughnuts was not a lucky coincidence, but rather the very impetus for my journey – that I, as an exceptionally fat, food-motivated baby, had somehow sensed the presence of unguarded foodstuffs within an achievable distance and set out on a mission to obtain said foodstuffs. And since that’s still pretty much how I feed myself these days I guess maybe it’s not that preposterous.
In any event I can’t make up for years of being a punk, as much as I’d like to. The best I can do is say that I love you, Mom, and even though I seemed to go out of my way to make it seem otherwise, everything you did for me mattered, everything you did for me registered, and everything you did for me made me the person I am today.
…in other words, it’s all my mom’s fault. Go get her!
