Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (16 page)

“Here, I’ll get you both one,” the salesman said, thrusting another controller into my hand.

Mom pushed the button on her control box. The helicopter veered towards the chipper young woman with the Zeppelin hair and slammed into her butt. She jumped back in surprise. Her hair did not move.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” Mom said.

“It’s okay. I love those toys,” she laughed and handed Mom the helicopter. Then she turned her sunny disposition on me. “They’re only $29.99 apiece or two for $49.99.”

“Rechargeable?” I asked.

“You can buy the rechargeable batteries near the check out.” She smiled. “They’re on sale. Two for one.”

I did the quick math in my head. If I bypassed the eco-friendly frogs, ditched the iPod widescreen movie player and went with the helicopter, I not only provided myself with hours of amusement, but could provide hours of amusement for my boyfriend as well. I saw us sitting in his living room, he with a glass of wine, me with the phone pressed to my ear, dive-bombing my annoying cat. Finally! A way for me to strike back against her piercing scream for attention.

I must have these helicopters. I will die without these helicopters.

“Your mom’s over there,” the man said.

I found her with a solar-powered flashlight with a hand crank. “The crank is for the times when there is no sun. You just crank this and wham! You’re never in the dark again.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Only $9.99,” the young man said. “It’s on sale.”

“Well, that wasn’t bad,” Mom said as we hustled out of Brookstone, bags in hand. “Under an hour. Your father and I could stay in that store for hours.”

“Really,” I said. “It’s a huge toy shop for adults.”

“No, that place in New York was a toy shop for adults. This is just fun.”

“I’m telling you, Mom, Americans spend too much on disposable crap. We need to start picking up books.”

“Nice helicopters,” she muttered, rolling her eyes.

“This is different! I never buy fun stuff.”

“It is fun stuff, isn’t it?” she asked, taking my hand. “Your dad said the same thing. He loved that store.”

“Yeah, I can understand why. I love it, too.”

“Well,” she said, patting my hand, “we all need a little fun in our lives.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I said to empty air. She had already wandered off into Tiffany’s.

“I’VE DECIDED
I’M MOVING.”

“No shit?”

“I need to get away. This is the house I had with your father and I just don’t want to stay here anymore.”

I smiled to myself. It was an act I knew she would do, which was why I asked her to wait a year after Dad had died. The best advice I ever heard is that if your partner dies, you never want to make life-changing decisions the first year. Luckily, Mom had done what I asked and stayed put. Over a year had passed, and it was now in her hands.

“I have to make a life for myself,” she said. “I need to move on.”

“I’m proud of you, Ma,” I said. “I think it’s a great decision. Where you going?”

“I was thinking Florida.” She paused.

I paused. I’ve always hated Florida. The weather is as humid as the Midwest and hot as the south, without the charm of either.

“I really don’t want you moving to Florida.”

“Why?”

“It’s gross. And it’s so … weird. Like California with alligators.”

“Well, where do you think I should go?”

I paused for a moment, knowing that I should tell her what I’d been thinking for months. I thought about the ride home from the airport over a year ago when she rambled on about inane and unrelated things and I had felt so angry at her that she wasn’t more upset that Dad was dead. I felt ashamed of myself and ashamed of the way I thought of her that night, but while my confusion and anger over her illogical attitude consumed me, I had a job to return to after the funeral. I had bills to pay, a car to wash, a kitchen to clean. Mom had all those things too, of course, but I was used to doing these things alone. She was used to shooting Dad random questions while he watched
The Price is Right
.

I mentally flipped through the freeze frames of time in my mind’s eye, replaying all the “You need to go to summer recreation” or “Get a job! Life isn’t easy, you know!” or “Nothing’s free!” and remembered how mystified I was that someone who was supposed to love her kids could be so harsh in forcing them to do things they didn’t want to do. I saw myself as a kid, a teenager and then older, listening to her reprimand me for lapses in judgment, using the same voice as she used now: Calm. Cool. Collected.

Then, the pictures in my mind fluttered to a stop on an image from several months previous. We were in a car for this argument, naturally, as driving is a surefire way to ignite my total mental meltdowns. I abhor being in a car. The only thing worse than being in a car is being in the unfortunate position of having to drive one. Usually, Mom is more than happy to leap behind the wheel of the Buick and play the role of chauffeur, as long as I’m willing to pay the price—usually a nice bottle of red wine, preferably by a local winery. The only problem arises when she isn’t driving; this means I’m driving. Me + road + driving = textbook road rage.

So in this memory, I’m the one who is driving. Mom’s in the passenger seat asking about my new job, which isn’t going well. At one point she sighs and says, “I just want you to be happy.”

That was the last straw. This constant discussion about my irritating job, combined with the unexpectedly cold weather in Seattle and the fact that everyone on the road that day was not even competent to drive a skateboard, much less an automobile, made me snap. I shot back, “Don’t give me that. If you want to disagree, just say so. But don’t spew trivial blah-blah. It’s insulting.”

She didn’t miss a beat with her reply. “You don’t understand because you’re not a mother. One of the things that makes a mother truly happy is knowing her children are safe and content.”

“So just because people are safe and content, mothers everywhere leap up and down in relief and joy.”

“Yes, they do,” Mom said. Then, after a long pause, “and stop being a sarcastic shit. You have no idea what it’s like being a mother. When you do, you can talk about it.”

Being a mother? Is she kidding me? I’ve always viewed pregnancy as nothing more than a nine-month battle against a parasite. (Stop crinkling your nose and think about it: The unborn fetus will take what it can from the host body to survive. In fact, the fetus will often inflict great damage ranging from swollen feet to a shrinking bladder to strange urges for pickles at 3 a.m.). Plus, the act of giving birth is prolonged torture. So how in the hell does your children’s happiness suddenly paramount in your life?

I thought all these random thoughts while she waited for me to share my feelings on her moving. It struck me that maybe there was something to that “mother” comment. Maybe all those years of watching my sister and me fall off bikes, stub our toes, date really horrible people and put white underwear in with the red shirts were harder on my parents than I had suspected. Maybe those acts of adolescent defiance my sister and I inflicted upon Mom did more than allow us to act out our frustration and stubbornness. Maybe they forced her into a position of making a choice about her life, too. Was she going to be an overprotective enabler who will teach her kids to believe that they will always be rescued after making stupid decisions, or was she going to create members of society who will be able to accept failure and disappointment and face the consequences of their actions? Maybe her distant, seemingly uninterested attitude towards us when we were young was the role she felt she had to play to raise two children in an ever-changing, ever-more-complex world. She made herself look unaffected and unemotional when, inside, she was crumbling, or worse, wanting to throttle her kids for being such dopes.

In my family, self-actualization and enlightenment are stumbled upon, usually during car rides, over food or while talking about something else.

I thought about telling her that over the last year and a half, I’d spent a lot of time chatting with the mothers I know and I finally got it: Mom had learned the art of acting earlier than I had. Mothers of her generation are like stage actors. Just like their scenery-chomping counterparts, mothers go for the jugular in an attempt to reach their objective; namely, you learning what you need to learn. Mothers of her generation didn’t mutate into demanding, chore-enforcing demons for no reason. Mothers of her generation didn’t want to be your friend, didn’t want to process their kids’ feelings and, when they swore in public, slapped them across the mouth. Mothers of her generation are like most other mammals—they want to help their offspring reach adulthood without getting eaten by predators. They thought putting on the Mom Face would protect their young by toughening them up, getting them to understand the world isn’t fair and preparing them for the world. They knew the price of raising a kid, and they were willing to pay the cost. Even if that cost was themselves.

Maybe that’s the role she was playing on that day a year ago in the car as we drove home from the Nashville airport after Dad died, that night she’d seemed so calm, cool and collected while I sat in the backseat wondering what the hell was going on. Maybe that night, she was falling back into the familiar petri dish, refusing to jump no matter how hard her world had been thumped. She was hunkering down, saying, “Ha! I smite thee down, facts! I will believe what I choose to believe, despite all logic to the contrary, for I am comfortable in my petri dish!” the way so many of my friends defend their abusive, alcoholic unemployed partners—familiarity is better than loneliness.

Regardless of why mothers do what they do, their children have no idea how deep the act of impartial observer hurts them. Perhaps all children will never know when an act of pretending to not be emotionally affected by your children stops and the act of healing starts. Perhaps it’s for the best.

Perhaps I’m wrong; I have no kids, only a cat—and she doesn’t care about much of anything one way or the other. Except catnip. Never skimp on the catnip.

In a flash, I found myself worrying less about my pain and more about Mom’s.

“I think you should consider Seattle.” I finally said.

“With you?”

“Why not?”

“Well,” she thought for a minute. “I guess we’ve survived worse.”

“Yeah, Ma, we have,” I agreed. “So when are you moving?”

THE END

Bumbling into Body Hair – A Transsexual’s Memoir
by Everett Maroon
(LGBT Memoir) A comical memoir about a klutz’s sex change, showing how a sense of humor—and true love—can triumph over hair disasters, and even the most crippling self-doubt.

Dating Bradford - A Memoir
by Bradford Noble
(LGBT Memoir) Dating is awkward. Sometimes it’s fun and exciting, sometimes romantic or hopeful, but often it’s demeaning and fraught with embarrassment.
Dating Bradford
is about searching for the recipe to make dating appetizing, and the pursuit of love on the long and lonely road to romance.

Write for the Fight
by Tess Hardwick and Tracey M. Hansen
(Memoir) Heartwarming, funny and thought-provoking,
Write for the Fight
reveals the personal memories, fears and dreams of 13 writers as they reflect on defining moments of the past and dream of possibilities for the future.

American Goulash
by Stephanie Yuhas
(Memoir / Humor) A story about a nerd girl jousting with her Transylvanian family on the battlefields of suburban New Jersey for a chance to grow up authentically awkward and live a so-called normal American life.

Discover more books and learn about our new approach to publishing
at
www.booktrope.com
.