I am frivolous, and I resent the fact that I am. This early afternoon, as I was contemplating ways to make a box of macaroni and cheese stretch as far as it possibly could, I thought of my mother, the meals she used to cook for my brother and me, how filling they were, how completely unfrivolous she has always been. Mama used to stretch a box of dollar store mac and cheese into a full meal on a regular basis when Jeffrey and I were little boys. Boiled elbow noodles and powdered cheese sauce mixed with chopped hot dog or browned and drained ground beef, a can of mixed vegetables. Dinner was served, and god, was it filling. We were never hungry little boys.
Thursday nights we always ate canned chili and store brand hot dogs, red and boiled, on light bread and Fritos. In the winter, lots of beef stew and peanut butter sandwich dinners, pinto beans and corn bread. Skillets of fried Spam and potatoes. I never ate anywhere besides home and my grandmothers' houses, and they ate like we did. I thought everyone did.
I was shocked this weekend spent at a cabin in Pigeon Forge with six of my closest friends when I saw the food they all brought. Ashley and his salmon fillets, peeled and de-veined shrimp. Jeremy and his expensive cheeses, Parmesan not from a green sprinkle can. Virginia's wheel of brie. These things I'd never dream of buying.
Even when I can afford higher-end groceries, I often don't buy them. It's class guilt, I think. Experience has taught me that things like expensive food (or weekend cabin trips for that matter) are frivolous. Money is better spent elsewhere, like on unexpected doctor's visits and prescriptions. Last minute car repairs. And I'm the king of unexpected crises of those varieties. Every damn time I reach for the non-off brand whathaveyou at Kroger, I hear Mama's voice, the voices of my aunts and grandmothers, back and back and back, telling me to think, to plan, to save my pennies here to pay on the dollars I'll have to spend later. And I listen, do as I'm told, and I always seem to have the money for those unexpected things, though I worry that might change with the current state of the economy. But that's a different blog post.
The point is, I can't spend a dime of my hard earned money without toiling over it. I can't have a meal at a restaurant without calculating what sacrifices I'll have to make at home for the rest of the week to make up for exorbitant spending or buy a tank of gas without contemplating canceling my cable service. I know what my means are, and I hate living beyond them. That's the cardinal sin of salt of the earth, lower-middle class people, my people. So, I feel badly for going on a weekend getaway when I should be saving for the unexpected. When I remember how when I was little, Mama was always on a diet, because she was conscious of her weight, but also because she wanted to make sure her husband and two boys had enough to eat. I was raised on my mother's small portions, her practicality. I worry I'll never be as unfrivolous as she is.
Showing posts with label momma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label momma. Show all posts
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Saturday, August 23, 2008
On the topic of Friendship
When my momma managed the Family Dollar store at Bullfrog Corner, she became best friends with a hairdresser named Eunice who worked at the Mac's. No. 2 hair shop in the same strip mall, past the Super Valu that used to be a Piggly Wiggly that used to be a Big Star. That was back in the late 90s when I was just starting out in high school and came home crying a lot because I just didn't have any friends. Fourteen, fat, and effeminate were not traits that put one on the fast track to likablity and Horn Lake High School, and I knew it well every afternoon when I had no one to sit with on the school bus. My momma, though, she always knew how to make friends. A real go getter, my mother takes situations by the reigns and guides them in the direction of her favor. I still smile when I think of the story of Momma and Eunice's (now defunct) Friendship. It goes like this.
Eunice used to walk down to the store on her breaks from hairdressing and waste her tip money on polyresin angel figurines. Being the astute Southern woman that she is, Momma noticed Eunice's melon nail polish one day as she rang up her covey at the cash register and told her how much she loved the color. Within the same conversation, Momma found out where Eunice worked, her living situation (poor thing rented a mother-in-law wing from some family on Horn Lake Road) and decided they'd be friends. So, she said it, just like that: "Eunice, you look like somebody I want to be friends with, so let's be friends."
They were good friends for quite a few years, too. Eunice used to come over to the house and bring Momma little boxes of candy and neon colored cigarette lighters, and Momma would drive Eunice to see her mother at the nursing home. For a while there, I even got into the habit of calling Eunice "Aunt Nez," as Inez was her middle name and she had no nieces or nephews to regard her affectionately. She even would cut my hair for free if I went down to the shop after it closed.
Eunice was a recovering alcoholic, though. Momma knew this going into the relationship. Hell, she probably found out that much in the initial cash stand meeting, and that probably made her want to be Eunice's friend even more. I'm a lot like my momma in that we both take on the underdogs, the underachievers, the fucked up friends we hope to fix. Momma did her best to fix Eunice, even took off work for two days, paid for the gas, hotel--everything--and drove her to the hospital in Jackson so she could get on the list for a liver transplant.
I doubt Eunice got the transplant. How could she have ever afforded it? And anyway, Momma put her down a year or so later because the poor hairdresser got depressed and turned back to the bottle. That made my momma so mad that she swore she'd never talk to her again, and I don't think she has except once, a year or so ago. She called Eunice because she had read in the paper that her momma died.
I say all of this because I've been thinking a lot about my friendship style in the past couple of weeks, and I am trying to make sense of my motivations. Taking a cue from my mother, I approached a new MA student named Eric and informed him that he will be my new best friend last week. We have hung out together every day since. I wonder if that was a creepy thing to do--to approach a relative stranger and demand mutual affection beyond the boundaries of acquaintanceship when we really are not more than acquainted at this point. I like to think I'm being proactive in the situation, and I remind myself that I've routinely done this type of thing before, just on a more discrete level. I meet people, decide I want to be friends with them, then proceed in charming them with my dazzling, albeit self-deprecating, wit. That's what I do.
But I hope my motivations are pure. I really do believe they are, but I always worry that I try to orchestrate too much in my life instead of allowing things to develop organically. I like to be in control of what happens to me, y'all, because I feel like if I don't take my life by the reigns, surely someone else will. I'm a chronic rehearser, I come from a family of planners, and, like my momma and daddy before me, I weigh all the options before making decisions. It's my legacy.
Maybe this friendship style is, too.
Eunice used to walk down to the store on her breaks from hairdressing and waste her tip money on polyresin angel figurines. Being the astute Southern woman that she is, Momma noticed Eunice's melon nail polish one day as she rang up her covey at the cash register and told her how much she loved the color. Within the same conversation, Momma found out where Eunice worked, her living situation (poor thing rented a mother-in-law wing from some family on Horn Lake Road) and decided they'd be friends. So, she said it, just like that: "Eunice, you look like somebody I want to be friends with, so let's be friends."
They were good friends for quite a few years, too. Eunice used to come over to the house and bring Momma little boxes of candy and neon colored cigarette lighters, and Momma would drive Eunice to see her mother at the nursing home. For a while there, I even got into the habit of calling Eunice "Aunt Nez," as Inez was her middle name and she had no nieces or nephews to regard her affectionately. She even would cut my hair for free if I went down to the shop after it closed.
Eunice was a recovering alcoholic, though. Momma knew this going into the relationship. Hell, she probably found out that much in the initial cash stand meeting, and that probably made her want to be Eunice's friend even more. I'm a lot like my momma in that we both take on the underdogs, the underachievers, the fucked up friends we hope to fix. Momma did her best to fix Eunice, even took off work for two days, paid for the gas, hotel--everything--and drove her to the hospital in Jackson so she could get on the list for a liver transplant.
I doubt Eunice got the transplant. How could she have ever afforded it? And anyway, Momma put her down a year or so later because the poor hairdresser got depressed and turned back to the bottle. That made my momma so mad that she swore she'd never talk to her again, and I don't think she has except once, a year or so ago. She called Eunice because she had read in the paper that her momma died.
I say all of this because I've been thinking a lot about my friendship style in the past couple of weeks, and I am trying to make sense of my motivations. Taking a cue from my mother, I approached a new MA student named Eric and informed him that he will be my new best friend last week. We have hung out together every day since. I wonder if that was a creepy thing to do--to approach a relative stranger and demand mutual affection beyond the boundaries of acquaintanceship when we really are not more than acquainted at this point. I like to think I'm being proactive in the situation, and I remind myself that I've routinely done this type of thing before, just on a more discrete level. I meet people, decide I want to be friends with them, then proceed in charming them with my dazzling, albeit self-deprecating, wit. That's what I do.
But I hope my motivations are pure. I really do believe they are, but I always worry that I try to orchestrate too much in my life instead of allowing things to develop organically. I like to be in control of what happens to me, y'all, because I feel like if I don't take my life by the reigns, surely someone else will. I'm a chronic rehearser, I come from a family of planners, and, like my momma and daddy before me, I weigh all the options before making decisions. It's my legacy.
Maybe this friendship style is, too.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
My Mother's Handwriting
I was a writer long before I knew how to string words together to form meaningful phrases. Even before I could tell a good story, I could write with the prettiest penmanship any four-year-old trailer trash boy has and will ever have. I thank my momma for that. Of all the things she's taught me, most important are always to say yes ma'am and no sir and that pretty handwriting is testament to a pretty soul. My momma has the prettiest soul. It blooms in the curlicues of her S's, the precision of her cursive T's.
When I was a little boy about to embark on kindergarten, my momma sat me down at the dining table and taught me cursive handwriting. On tablets of lined paper, she would write words in luscious script--dog, car, Timothy--skipping a line between each so that I could mimic her cursive underneath. This was our after supper ritual for weeks before school started, a sort of call and response akin to Catholic prayers. My mother bidding me beauty, and me reciprocating. I learned cursive writing before I was adept at writing in print.
Once I started school, my kindergarten teacher, bless her heart, didn't know what to do with the too nice, too sensitive little boy in her class who always wrote in cursive. I remember being constantly told that I'd learn that kind of handwriting in third grade, that in kindergarten I must print. But I liked the curlicues, the connectedness of cursive letters. I liked how it bound me up in my mother.
Things came to a head when my teacher, having had enough of my haut couture penmanship, escorted me into the hallway for a private scolding. I cried uncontrollably for the rest of the day, because until that point I'd never been scolded at school. My momma told me from day one of my academic career that if I ever, ever got in trouble at school, things would be even worse for me when I got home. She assured me she'd know if I had gotten in trouble so there was no point in keeping my transgression secret from her. A precocious but overly-dramatic child, I was certain my mother would kill me for writing in cursive.
But she didn't. Instead she made cursive handwriting special , by creating writing time with me each night at home. I was to print at school, but at nighttime, after my bath and before sleep, I'd lay across her bed in an over-sized t-shirt with a pen and pad and we'd write. Not stories or poems, mind you, but words. Cursive words, usually names, family members', pets'. That's how I know all of my aunts', uncles', and cousins' full names, from writing them out with my momma each night.
Years of schooling have deteriorating my beautiful hand. Exquisite penmanship is an art form that takes patience and leisure that in-class notetaking doesn't afford. When I leave notes for my momma back home--short things telling her where I've gone, when I'll be back, what I'd like for her to pick up at the store--she scowls at the disrepair my handwriting has fallen into. I've taken her gift and thrown it by the wayside, she thinks, my mother whose handwriting still flourishes and flicks across the page.
When I was a little boy about to embark on kindergarten, my momma sat me down at the dining table and taught me cursive handwriting. On tablets of lined paper, she would write words in luscious script--dog, car, Timothy--skipping a line between each so that I could mimic her cursive underneath. This was our after supper ritual for weeks before school started, a sort of call and response akin to Catholic prayers. My mother bidding me beauty, and me reciprocating. I learned cursive writing before I was adept at writing in print.
Once I started school, my kindergarten teacher, bless her heart, didn't know what to do with the too nice, too sensitive little boy in her class who always wrote in cursive. I remember being constantly told that I'd learn that kind of handwriting in third grade, that in kindergarten I must print. But I liked the curlicues, the connectedness of cursive letters. I liked how it bound me up in my mother.
Things came to a head when my teacher, having had enough of my haut couture penmanship, escorted me into the hallway for a private scolding. I cried uncontrollably for the rest of the day, because until that point I'd never been scolded at school. My momma told me from day one of my academic career that if I ever, ever got in trouble at school, things would be even worse for me when I got home. She assured me she'd know if I had gotten in trouble so there was no point in keeping my transgression secret from her. A precocious but overly-dramatic child, I was certain my mother would kill me for writing in cursive.
But she didn't. Instead she made cursive handwriting special , by creating writing time with me each night at home. I was to print at school, but at nighttime, after my bath and before sleep, I'd lay across her bed in an over-sized t-shirt with a pen and pad and we'd write. Not stories or poems, mind you, but words. Cursive words, usually names, family members', pets'. That's how I know all of my aunts', uncles', and cousins' full names, from writing them out with my momma each night.
Years of schooling have deteriorating my beautiful hand. Exquisite penmanship is an art form that takes patience and leisure that in-class notetaking doesn't afford. When I leave notes for my momma back home--short things telling her where I've gone, when I'll be back, what I'd like for her to pick up at the store--she scowls at the disrepair my handwriting has fallen into. I've taken her gift and thrown it by the wayside, she thinks, my mother whose handwriting still flourishes and flicks across the page.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
When Life Gives You Lemons, Put Them In Your Sweet Tea and Thank God You're From the South
I've been MIA for nearly a week because I made a little jaunt back to the homestead to celebrate the fourth with my family and old chum from my pre-college years, Christy. One week, over 800 miles, nearly $150 in gas, a whole slough of new teacher clothes, two fireworks shows, and a cooler full of homegrown food later, I'm back in Knoxville, preparing meals for the week and doing what I can to tucker myself out so I'll sleep well tonight. I have to wake up at early thirty tomorrow to be on campus by 8 o'clock and work in the Writing Center. Oh, the Writing Center. And I thought I was through with it. But hey, it's easy money for four weeks' worth of work.
Whenever I go home, I come back with a carload of crap, most of it really good stuff. Between Momma and Muffy, I can't make it across the state line without a boxful of kitschy junk from Goodwill and fresh food from the farm. I hit the motherlode this trip, acquiring so much food from Muffy that dear sweet Daddy had to sacrifice his new blue ice chest so I could get my goodies home without them spoiling. Here's the list:
8 homegrown tomatoes
2 gallons of freshly picked-and-snapped green beans. (I did the picking, Muffy did the snapping)
2 grilled chicken breasts (leftover from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 head of lettuce
1 dozen fresh eggs from Muffy's sitting hens
2 cucumbers straight out of the garden
1 quart jar of home canned tomatoes
1 pint jar of home canned fig preserves
1 pint jar of home canned orange marmalade
1 quart jar of what Muffy says is peach preserves but its clearly labeled orange marmalade
1 loaf of bread
1/2 bag of plain potato chips (left over from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 cabbage
Then
Momma gave me a 2 quart pitcher that holds just the right amount of iced tea for me, two large baskets I've used in my linen closet for organized toiletry storage, and a delightfully trashy recipe for Mountain Dew cake that I'll probably make only because mother dear ranted so much about it (recipe to follow).
And
Daddy not only gave me his new blue ice chest, but he also put a University of Tennessee vanity plate on the front of my little Civic, replacing the old, dented UCA one, and he filled my tank up with gas.
Plus
I hit the outlet mall in Tunica and got a nice pair of slacks, a green striped v-neck t-shirt, two oxford shirts (in pale pink and pale blue), a black sweater, a sea green zip up sweatshirt, and two pairs of argyle socks for only $41.37. My Muffy raised a bargian shopper indeed.
Today I've been cooking up a storm, preparing green beans and potatoes, cabbage soup (sounds nasty but tastes divine), corn bread, a baked chicken thigh, and seared mahi mahi (it was on sale at Kroger). I love cooking more than just about anything, except maybe eating and scribbling. Oh, and reading. And that's all I've done today, which is why I love my life. And I love my family, the good country people who make sure this Southern boy has plenty to eat, wear, and sit around his house to collect dust every few months when he rolls into town.
Now, some pictures from the trip!
Whenever I go home, I come back with a carload of crap, most of it really good stuff. Between Momma and Muffy, I can't make it across the state line without a boxful of kitschy junk from Goodwill and fresh food from the farm. I hit the motherlode this trip, acquiring so much food from Muffy that dear sweet Daddy had to sacrifice his new blue ice chest so I could get my goodies home without them spoiling. Here's the list:
8 homegrown tomatoes
2 gallons of freshly picked-and-snapped green beans. (I did the picking, Muffy did the snapping)
2 grilled chicken breasts (leftover from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 head of lettuce
1 dozen fresh eggs from Muffy's sitting hens
2 cucumbers straight out of the garden
1 quart jar of home canned tomatoes
1 pint jar of home canned fig preserves
1 pint jar of home canned orange marmalade
1 quart jar of what Muffy says is peach preserves but its clearly labeled orange marmalade
1 loaf of bread
1/2 bag of plain potato chips (left over from the fourth of July barbecue)
1 cabbage
Then
Momma gave me a 2 quart pitcher that holds just the right amount of iced tea for me, two large baskets I've used in my linen closet for organized toiletry storage, and a delightfully trashy recipe for Mountain Dew cake that I'll probably make only because mother dear ranted so much about it (recipe to follow).
And
Daddy not only gave me his new blue ice chest, but he also put a University of Tennessee vanity plate on the front of my little Civic, replacing the old, dented UCA one, and he filled my tank up with gas.
Plus
I hit the outlet mall in Tunica and got a nice pair of slacks, a green striped v-neck t-shirt, two oxford shirts (in pale pink and pale blue), a black sweater, a sea green zip up sweatshirt, and two pairs of argyle socks for only $41.37. My Muffy raised a bargian shopper indeed.
Today I've been cooking up a storm, preparing green beans and potatoes, cabbage soup (sounds nasty but tastes divine), corn bread, a baked chicken thigh, and seared mahi mahi (it was on sale at Kroger). I love cooking more than just about anything, except maybe eating and scribbling. Oh, and reading. And that's all I've done today, which is why I love my life. And I love my family, the good country people who make sure this Southern boy has plenty to eat, wear, and sit around his house to collect dust every few months when he rolls into town.
Now, some pictures from the trip!
I am the queen of this double-wide trailer
My seven-year-old cousin, Lily, modeling the fish goggles I gave her.
Action shot of my brother, Jeffrey, playing with Lily
Me, complete with battered nose, and Muffy. And Rosie the chihuahua.
Sunset on the Mississippi River, July 4th
Christy and me at the fireworks show. Note the green striped v-neck t-shirt and battered nose.
Fireworks over the River
My seven-year-old cousin, Lily, modeling the fish goggles I gave her.
Action shot of my brother, Jeffrey, playing with Lily
Me, complete with battered nose, and Muffy. And Rosie the chihuahua.
Sunset on the Mississippi River, July 4th
Christy and me at the fireworks show. Note the green striped v-neck t-shirt and battered nose.
Fireworks over the RiverFinally, Momma's Slap Your Momma Mountain Dew Cake
Beat all ingredients until smooth. Pour in a greased bundt pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until done.
Momma knows I've been on a healthy eating kick recently and she told me in all earnestness that I could make a healthy version of this cake with sugar-free pudding mix and diet Mountain Dew. Bless her heart.
- 1 lemon cake mix
- 1 pkg. lemon pudding mix
- 1 (12 oz.) can Mountain Dew
- 3/4 cup vegetable oil
- 4 eggs
Beat all ingredients until smooth. Pour in a greased bundt pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until done.
Momma knows I've been on a healthy eating kick recently and she told me in all earnestness that I could make a healthy version of this cake with sugar-free pudding mix and diet Mountain Dew. Bless her heart.
Friday, May 30, 2008
The Man I Have Not Become
One thing I know for sure: The Lord put my Daddy on this earth to be a daddy. It's taken me a while to come to that conclusion, but I think it's right, and I'd prefer not to be contradicted. For a long time, especially when I was a know-it-all teenager, I didn't know what to do with the man. Bald head, rotten teeth, incapable of uttering a sentence only once, my daddy the chronic repeater just didn't jibe with what television and children's books led me to believe a father was supposed to look like. He chews tobacco and paces the floors when he's talking to you. He has never said I love you before in his life. I'm nearly 100 percent sure of it, and that used to bother me endlessly until I came up with my Theory of Predestined Roles. At least that's the working title.
The thing my daddy is best at--and he's good at lots of things--is being a father. Not the handsomely trim, emotionally demonstrative soccer coach dad you'd see on Desperate Housewives (a DILF, if you will). He's a born caregiver. He doesn't have to look the part because he invented it. He doesn't have to say "I love you" because his body screams it with every muscle spasm and joint pop.
My daddy ran my bath water for me until I was ten years old. I think it hurt his feelings when I, in my decade's worth of grandiose wisdom, told him I would no longer need his services. He obliged me without an argument, but he was right there when, just after he left, I cranked up the hot water and yelped from the scald. Daddy cared about me, and he didn't want me to burn myself from the water that got much too hot as it traversed its way topsy-turvy through the persnickety pipes of our double-wide trailer. He cared about me enough to let me burn myself, though, and learn caution. Learn that maybe I still needed him after all.
He was at each of Jeffrey's home football games, and at most of the away ones, too, unless they were too far south in Mississippi, so far he couldn't make them in time after he got of work. Daddy loved watching those boys fumble on the field, particularly his own son, my brother, the 2nd string whatever who got little field play. Despite his love of sports and my disinterest in them, Daddy was there for all my adolescent rites of passage: choir concerts, school plays, countless academic awards ceremonies. Even the Momma I Adore can't say that much.
I took a composition class at Mississippi University for Women the summer before my senior year of high school and wrote a personal essay about my father, how he was born to drive. It makes sense. He drives a silver boat of a patrol car for a living, would spend evenings driving all about the county after he got off work, taking Jeffery to Taekwando and me to church. He always drove Aunt Mollie to the Methodist church at Pleasant Hill on Sunday mornings and picked her up just before noon since she never stayed for the invitation hymn. And the only two times I've ever known of him go to church of his own accord were the day I was baptized and the night I played Shepherd Number 2 in a musical at the Cedar View Baptist Church. My Daddy doesn't do religion, but when his youngest, most precocious went through that Evangelical Phase small town Southern kids are susceptible to, he took off his cap, tucked in his shirt, and sat right there in the back of the sanctuary to watch me take the plunge, make my joyful noise.
Jeffrey is so much like my father. He paces the floor when he talks just like Daddy, and he never quite knows what to do with his hands when he's conversing. He is restless now, constantly burning up gas bumbling down the road in his red pick up, finding some relative or another to get mad at. That's our Momma coming out in him, but he'll settle down when he has a child. Like our father, my brother was born to be a daddy, to care for another person more than he does for himself. In Jeffrey's case, like in Daddy's, I think the other person will have to be his own child, or the equation just won't work. Men like my father and brother make strange bedfellows. They aren't passionate lovers, which precludes them from being husband material for the types of women to which they are attracted. If I had a crystal ball it would tell me that my brother will marry right around 30, have a couple kids and remain completely enthralled with them through his divorce and high cholesterol diagnosis, right up until the day he dies. Just like our father.
More tenuous is determining the Theoretical Predestined Role for myself. I'm not like the men in my family, and those men closest to me, Daddy and Jeffery, have never treated me like I would grow up to be a man at all. Daddy still doesn't want me driving late at night, and Jeffrey calls to check on me when I'm sick, not like a brother would but like a father, to impart wisdom and utter proclamations of finality, words infused with healing, "you'll be alright come morning." I often feel like the daughter and sister they never had, because I'm the sensitive one. I am the son who loves in a different way than they know how. For me, love is my mother buying me a glittery star candle holder at Goodwill because she knows that my interior design taste tends towards a tacky-hippie infusion. It's my grandmother picking me up a John Grisham book at a yard sale for a quarter, not because she knows whether or not I like his work, but because she knows I'm a reader. Thoughtfulness, random acts of kindness, evidence of care beyond the conceived parameters of care giving: this is the style in which I love, and it's often gotten me in trouble with my male friends who, upon reflection, consider the cookbook or homemade banana muffins I gave them demonstrations of my romantic interest.
I don't love like men do, because I feel that love is contingent. It's something that can slip away unless little signs are shown to indicate it's still in blossom. I learn that from my mother, and I see myself in waking dreams like her, endlessly loved yet constantly aware that at any time the affection could slip away. Love is something we pine for, like school girls, longing for a kiss, who spend Sunday afternoons weeping in unmade beds. My father loves differently, constantly, unquestioningly. He is the only man I accept this type of love style from, because I believe more than just about anything else that he was born to love his sons with every movement of his body.
But I wasn't born that way. I was born for something else, yet to be determined.
This scribble comes from a discussion I had with my therapist (did I just demolish any credibility I may have had?) and from thoughts I've had while reading The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers. I'm thinking of polishing, tightening, and including this piece in the collection of creative work I'm submitting for my master's thesis, tentatively titled Learning To Talk.
The thing my daddy is best at--and he's good at lots of things--is being a father. Not the handsomely trim, emotionally demonstrative soccer coach dad you'd see on Desperate Housewives (a DILF, if you will). He's a born caregiver. He doesn't have to look the part because he invented it. He doesn't have to say "I love you" because his body screams it with every muscle spasm and joint pop.
My daddy ran my bath water for me until I was ten years old. I think it hurt his feelings when I, in my decade's worth of grandiose wisdom, told him I would no longer need his services. He obliged me without an argument, but he was right there when, just after he left, I cranked up the hot water and yelped from the scald. Daddy cared about me, and he didn't want me to burn myself from the water that got much too hot as it traversed its way topsy-turvy through the persnickety pipes of our double-wide trailer. He cared about me enough to let me burn myself, though, and learn caution. Learn that maybe I still needed him after all.
He was at each of Jeffrey's home football games, and at most of the away ones, too, unless they were too far south in Mississippi, so far he couldn't make them in time after he got of work. Daddy loved watching those boys fumble on the field, particularly his own son, my brother, the 2nd string whatever who got little field play. Despite his love of sports and my disinterest in them, Daddy was there for all my adolescent rites of passage: choir concerts, school plays, countless academic awards ceremonies. Even the Momma I Adore can't say that much.
I took a composition class at Mississippi University for Women the summer before my senior year of high school and wrote a personal essay about my father, how he was born to drive. It makes sense. He drives a silver boat of a patrol car for a living, would spend evenings driving all about the county after he got off work, taking Jeffery to Taekwando and me to church. He always drove Aunt Mollie to the Methodist church at Pleasant Hill on Sunday mornings and picked her up just before noon since she never stayed for the invitation hymn. And the only two times I've ever known of him go to church of his own accord were the day I was baptized and the night I played Shepherd Number 2 in a musical at the Cedar View Baptist Church. My Daddy doesn't do religion, but when his youngest, most precocious went through that Evangelical Phase small town Southern kids are susceptible to, he took off his cap, tucked in his shirt, and sat right there in the back of the sanctuary to watch me take the plunge, make my joyful noise.
Jeffrey is so much like my father. He paces the floor when he talks just like Daddy, and he never quite knows what to do with his hands when he's conversing. He is restless now, constantly burning up gas bumbling down the road in his red pick up, finding some relative or another to get mad at. That's our Momma coming out in him, but he'll settle down when he has a child. Like our father, my brother was born to be a daddy, to care for another person more than he does for himself. In Jeffrey's case, like in Daddy's, I think the other person will have to be his own child, or the equation just won't work. Men like my father and brother make strange bedfellows. They aren't passionate lovers, which precludes them from being husband material for the types of women to which they are attracted. If I had a crystal ball it would tell me that my brother will marry right around 30, have a couple kids and remain completely enthralled with them through his divorce and high cholesterol diagnosis, right up until the day he dies. Just like our father.
More tenuous is determining the Theoretical Predestined Role for myself. I'm not like the men in my family, and those men closest to me, Daddy and Jeffery, have never treated me like I would grow up to be a man at all. Daddy still doesn't want me driving late at night, and Jeffrey calls to check on me when I'm sick, not like a brother would but like a father, to impart wisdom and utter proclamations of finality, words infused with healing, "you'll be alright come morning." I often feel like the daughter and sister they never had, because I'm the sensitive one. I am the son who loves in a different way than they know how. For me, love is my mother buying me a glittery star candle holder at Goodwill because she knows that my interior design taste tends towards a tacky-hippie infusion. It's my grandmother picking me up a John Grisham book at a yard sale for a quarter, not because she knows whether or not I like his work, but because she knows I'm a reader. Thoughtfulness, random acts of kindness, evidence of care beyond the conceived parameters of care giving: this is the style in which I love, and it's often gotten me in trouble with my male friends who, upon reflection, consider the cookbook or homemade banana muffins I gave them demonstrations of my romantic interest.
I don't love like men do, because I feel that love is contingent. It's something that can slip away unless little signs are shown to indicate it's still in blossom. I learn that from my mother, and I see myself in waking dreams like her, endlessly loved yet constantly aware that at any time the affection could slip away. Love is something we pine for, like school girls, longing for a kiss, who spend Sunday afternoons weeping in unmade beds. My father loves differently, constantly, unquestioningly. He is the only man I accept this type of love style from, because I believe more than just about anything else that he was born to love his sons with every movement of his body.
But I wasn't born that way. I was born for something else, yet to be determined.
This scribble comes from a discussion I had with my therapist (did I just demolish any credibility I may have had?) and from thoughts I've had while reading The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Fathers. I'm thinking of polishing, tightening, and including this piece in the collection of creative work I'm submitting for my master's thesis, tentatively titled Learning To Talk.
Monday, May 19, 2008
"It's okay since Momma gave it to me"
I took a diet pill this morning. Pound-X whatever. The stuff was pure speed, made me jittery for hours. I felt quite sure if I took another one my heart would explode, even if the stuff kept me from snacking. So I took another one. "It's okay," I thought, "since Momma gave it to me." And then I paused.
My habit for justifying certain bad-for-me things always involves my mother's validation. The diet pills make my heart race beyond healthy contractions? It's okay! Momma gave' em to me. I want to lay around the house all day and eat fried bologna sandwiches and Neapolitan ice cream? Mama thinks that's a good way to unwind. Even sometimes when I'm engaged in intense debates about academic things (and I'll admit that never really happens because I'm not so confrontational), I sometimes long to take the easy way out--or is it a backhanded approach?--and tell my adversary, "Well, I'm right because my Momma said so!"
I'm just going to go ahead and confess. I was that kid. You know, the little boy who loves his mother maybe a little too much. Not in a creepy way, but I was most definitely a momma's boy. A daddy's boy too, much later when I realized I'd tricked my father into loving me. But I never had to trick Momma. When I turned six, she brought 24 cupcakes (homemade, courtesy of Betty Crocker) with blue-tinted icing and M&Ms on top for my kindergarten class. She brought them up to school with bottles of Hawaiian Punch and sang "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain" to the kids in my class. I sang right along with her, much louder than the other children. It was my birthday after all.
There was a boy named Jeremy, who, after my mother left, told me I couldn't sing. I was incensed, I remember, but knew he couldn't be more wrong. I could sing well because Momma told me I could. And that's what I told him. And he laughed and I cried and a week later we became very good friends until middle school when he just disappeared from school because he'd gotten in trouble or into drugs or into jail--whatever it is unsupervised adolescent boys do to vanish from the earth. Maybe it serves him right for scoffing at my mother's omnipotent decree about my singing ability.
Now, I'm an adult, and I realize that as adults we can't weasel out of arguments or justify poor decision making by citing our mothers. I'm perfectly capable of understanding the harmful effects of diet pills and bologna sandwiches and late nights spent shotgunning beers (well, Momma wouldn't like that). But I like the feeling that what I'm doing, no matter how bad it really is, can't be that bad since my mother says it's okay. Despite her 6 a.m. phone calls that drive me crazy, my momma is the best person in the world (probably just after yours, right?). She knows more than I care to admit about living in this world, and I know she'll never steer me wrong. Because she said she wouldn't.
Besides, it's not really her fault that she doesn't read ingredient labels or worry about calorie intake and the caffeine content of diet pills. That's not what folks from her generation do. A bologna sandwich is a delicacy for her, and diet pills have helped her lose weight and make some money back in the mid-nineties. She was in on the class-action Fen-phen suit. So maybe I should readjust my rationale and give up the Pound-X whatevers. I hate to think what it would do to my poor mother if my heart exploded.
My habit for justifying certain bad-for-me things always involves my mother's validation. The diet pills make my heart race beyond healthy contractions? It's okay! Momma gave' em to me. I want to lay around the house all day and eat fried bologna sandwiches and Neapolitan ice cream? Mama thinks that's a good way to unwind. Even sometimes when I'm engaged in intense debates about academic things (and I'll admit that never really happens because I'm not so confrontational), I sometimes long to take the easy way out--or is it a backhanded approach?--and tell my adversary, "Well, I'm right because my Momma said so!"
I'm just going to go ahead and confess. I was that kid. You know, the little boy who loves his mother maybe a little too much. Not in a creepy way, but I was most definitely a momma's boy. A daddy's boy too, much later when I realized I'd tricked my father into loving me. But I never had to trick Momma. When I turned six, she brought 24 cupcakes (homemade, courtesy of Betty Crocker) with blue-tinted icing and M&Ms on top for my kindergarten class. She brought them up to school with bottles of Hawaiian Punch and sang "She'll Be Comin' 'Round The Mountain" to the kids in my class. I sang right along with her, much louder than the other children. It was my birthday after all.
There was a boy named Jeremy, who, after my mother left, told me I couldn't sing. I was incensed, I remember, but knew he couldn't be more wrong. I could sing well because Momma told me I could. And that's what I told him. And he laughed and I cried and a week later we became very good friends until middle school when he just disappeared from school because he'd gotten in trouble or into drugs or into jail--whatever it is unsupervised adolescent boys do to vanish from the earth. Maybe it serves him right for scoffing at my mother's omnipotent decree about my singing ability.
Now, I'm an adult, and I realize that as adults we can't weasel out of arguments or justify poor decision making by citing our mothers. I'm perfectly capable of understanding the harmful effects of diet pills and bologna sandwiches and late nights spent shotgunning beers (well, Momma wouldn't like that). But I like the feeling that what I'm doing, no matter how bad it really is, can't be that bad since my mother says it's okay. Despite her 6 a.m. phone calls that drive me crazy, my momma is the best person in the world (probably just after yours, right?). She knows more than I care to admit about living in this world, and I know she'll never steer me wrong. Because she said she wouldn't.
Besides, it's not really her fault that she doesn't read ingredient labels or worry about calorie intake and the caffeine content of diet pills. That's not what folks from her generation do. A bologna sandwich is a delicacy for her, and diet pills have helped her lose weight and make some money back in the mid-nineties. She was in on the class-action Fen-phen suit. So maybe I should readjust my rationale and give up the Pound-X whatevers. I hate to think what it would do to my poor mother if my heart exploded.
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