...a Mother’s Day Blog
In 1994, I was fourteen years old and my mother had pretty much given up on rock ‘n’ roll. That’s not to say that once a month she didn’t disappear for the weekend into the midnight, all-night, wee-morning clubs of NYC, taking the train from Boston without a word, just an unspoken desire in her bottomless brown-gold eyes, to be lifted (or was it a lateral move?) from her life as mother and wife and dropped into the anonymity of the rave scene (before it was called raving). She was tall and lean, with long legs and full lips, a former model with an “exotic Mediterranean look” (because apparently geography is a dying art) who could play tomboy as easily as high femme. And she hated ’90s rock.
“...Love is like a bomb, baby, c'mon get it on
Livin' like a lover with a radar phone
Lookin' like a tramp, like a video vamp
Demolition woman, can I be your man?
Razzle 'n' a dazzle 'n' a flash a little light
Television lover, baby, go all night
Sometime, anytime, sugar me sweet
Little miss innocent sugar me, yeah!”
They talk in parenting magazines about the dangers of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and rhubarb on unborn babies. My mama, I’m afraid, passed her wild on to me in utero. Her love of clubbing to dance. Her desire for music in her blood. Her late-night eyes watching a crowd while she owns a room. There is something so fine... something that closes my eyes just to think about it. That deep warmth that starts in the pit of my stomach, that radiates out through my limbs, that stomps through my boots and raises my hands above my head. Who’s watching? Who cares, baby?! This is about movement in the darkness. This is about beat I can taste. This is about the crush of strobes and making love with that sacred thing called music. Mix it. Turn it on. Kick it up. I’m there. Right there. Realizing that there’s this power that God gave women. And with great power...
"You don’t have to read my mind,
to know what I have in mind.
Honey, you oughta know...
Now you move so fine,
let me lay it on the line.
...I wanna know, what you're doin’ after the show.
Come on, baby, do you do more than dance?"
I may not abide much with written scripture, with chapters of begot and begetted, when God is willing to whisper/shout/converse with us today and now about nuclear disarmament and green energy if we just ask Him, but you can’t argue that verse for verse we’re told that our children are our responsibility. It’s not man’s place to raise our children. It's not society’s place to educate, illuminate and elevate our off-spring. Public school may work for creating the perfect socialized, socialist community of pseudo-capitalist competitors (isn’t alliteration fun?) but it sure don’t teach our white grrls how to dance.
What my mama taught me, with her weekends away, was a lesson that stayed with me undeniably -- the way my parents stayed together, to the day my father died, and foreseeably beyond that. Her lesson, of course, was that being a mother didn’t make her not a woman. Being a wife didn’t make her not a person. She was forever alive with a spirit all her own -- all Christ’s own! She was fully realized. First thing in the morning or sick with the flu, agonizing over bills or devastated by the death of her parents, nothing – nothing! – stole away her presence... her *Presence.* Life did not pass by her kitchen window sill draped in herbs and aloe vera. Life was tucked in her pocket.
“If it feels all right,
maybe you should stay all night.
Shall I leave you my key?
But you’ve got to give me a sign,
Come on, girl!
Some kind of sign.
Are you old enough?
Will you be ready when I call you bluff?”
I wrote to two friends recently, to paraphrase/combine: “Is he all about you, babe? Do you believe that you deserve poetry, and roses and all-night conversations? Where’s the romance? Where’s the courting?! It ain’t all over just because there’s a license from the State. Your man needs to be *all* about you. Trust me, sweetheart, my mother is the most aggravating woman on the planet but my father was always – always! -- about her. No excuses. Always the sugar. Even when it got hard. Now. Tomorrow. Forever.”
Because, come those weekends when Mama went away, my father always got that little smile on his face. And he tied his hair back, and we’d put power tools on the dining room table, and eat tv dinners and way too much ice cream, and he’d kick his feet up with a sweet sigh. Because Dad knew... Mama *always* brought it home. She was out exercising that wild, exerting her force in the world, but she never crossed that line, and come Sunday night, she was tucking me in, checking the messages, planning for PTA... and quietly closing the door down the hall. Come Sunday night, there were always roses in the master bedroom.
"I can't stop
The way I feel
Things you do
Just seem unreal.
I can't get any rest.
People say I'm obsessed
Everything that's serious lasts
What we have, I knew was true.
Tell you what I got in mind...
She drives me crazy.
Like no one else.
She drives me crazy.
And I can't help myself."
Globe-trotting Mama, that’s my mother today. It has been some time since my father’s death. She stands alone like a willow, always drinking deeply from life, bending, dancing, but never falling. She is the epitome of elegance and ferocity. She is like fire and ice in the same body – still tall, still lean, still tomboy/femme... and still, of course, a mother, and a person and a woman. I asked her: “What should I write about for Mother’s Day?” She made that sound of impatience that I know so well – that hmph sound from the back of her throat, then, always accented, always black velvet smooth, “Well, most certainly don’t write about me, darling. I’ve already been saved. Don’t waste a blog.”
“She drives me crazy... ooh, ooh! Like no one else... ooh, ooh!” Oh, Roland, you have no idea. But she also gave me the strength and fortitude to demand the best from everyone and everything around me, including myself. She gave me the courage to look at myself in the mirror. To ask myself the hard questions... the *really* hard ones. Not the “Should I take this job?” or “Do these chaps make me look fat?” but the “Is this love?” and “Do I deserve more?” The questions that we can only ask ourselves and Christ in the quiet midnights of our discontent. In the still silence when we are alone.... Because of her, because of all that she is and isn’t, was and wasn’t, I can know that in those moments that stretch into hours, I am pleased with -- no, I am *proud* of -- who I am, what I am, and the life I keep in my pocket.
Yeah, Mom. This blog is for you and about you and all because of you. I believe in Mother’s Day because I believed in Mother’s Weekend. I believe in dancing until I can barely drive home. I believe in leather and silk. I believe in weight-lifting and motorcycling and grrls that box. I believe in Christ. I believe in pure love. I believe in angels. I believe in beat-pounding, head-banging raves peppered with tall, cold glasses of Coke and cream. I believe in ’70s and ’80s rock. And yes, I believe in you.
Now... where’s that mix tape?
E.J.
“Now it’s up to you,
can we make a secret rendezvous?
I’m a little bit high,
and you’re a little bit shy.”
Def Leppard, Pour Some Sugar On Me, 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWHSWPgi90
Fine Young Cannibals, She Drives Me Crazy, 1988
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jG8EWr63k
Foreigner, Hot Blooded, 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKdSVYEjj4
