I’d be a worse son than I already am if I didn’t wish my mom a happy Mother’s Day – I know she reads this blog but I’ll give her a call later today as well. For a while I tried to (slightly) censor myself here because I knew she was reading, but over time I’ve decided that I’ll write what I want to write. I’m an adult and if she doesn’t like me using words like “fuck,” then that’s too bad. Anyway, she describes my stories about my childhood as “mostly fiction,” anyway, so I would hope she doesn’t give my words too much weight.
Mom is a unique character with her very own special brand of parenting. When it came to feeding us, she was obsessed with “broadening our horizons,” so she’d go to ethnic grocery stores and stock up on foods in bright packaging and no English on their labels. Opening our lunch boxes at school became a kind of Russian roulette, because you never knew what you were going to find. Sometimes we’d get lucky and discover that a green package with cyrillic writing was actually full of fruit snacks. Other times a packet with Japanese writing turned out to be full of something like pickled squid. I think it was this lunchtime anxiety that scared my brother into eating little except familiar things like cheeseburgers and Coke, a practice he continues to this day.
One of the parenting rules my mother repeatedly broke was playing favorites, specifically she’d tell me, my brother, and my oldest sister that she liked my sister Veronica the best. “No offense,” she’d tell us, “she’s just the best student out of the four of you and never gets into trouble.” Also, my mom taught me that respecting authority was conditional. When my third grade teacher became convinced I was retarded and tried to put me in a special education class, my mom called the school to say that my teacher was the retarded one. Many years later, when that same teacher died, I told my mom that I felt bad for always hating her when I was in her class. Mom quickly replied with, “no reason to feel bad – she thought you were retarded.”
Looking back I can’t really complain about her methods. All four of us have our limbs intact and we’ll never starve because in a pinch we’ll eat things that other people in Western society might not consider “food.” Happy Mother’s Day, mom.
