THE DAY MOM GOT REAL

I just watched the video from HERE'S TO YOU THURSDAY that I dedicated to all of the moms with my mom. It made both of us cry. That was our sentimental Mother's Day moment. I just finished reading all of the blogs I follow. Almost all were about Mother's Day and were poignant and nostalgic. The truth is that being a mom is the job that never ends. It is also the job you will love the most, but will give you the most frustration and the most reward. Even though C-Man and H-Girl are not my biological children, I know that you can love other people more than yourself. It doesn't have anything to do with biology. I also know what it is like to love like that and lose them.... not to death, but to divorce. So, I could write a piece today from the perspective of a parent or a child. I know what both sides of that coin look like.


I want to tell you about the day that my mother became "real" to me. There was one day when I was in junior high school that my mother lost it for about thirty seconds, and I got to see her as a person, and not just a mom. At that time, we were driving to Zanesville (in Ohio) for me to see an allergist. I was having a really bad time with allergies, and there was an allergist there who was trying some alternative stuff that was actually helping. We were on our way home, which required getting onto the highway, and that involved merging into traffic.

Here comes the "getting real" part. Before I share this, I have to put it into perspective for you. There just isn't a more straight arrow than my mom. Period. Not only was there a no cursing rule at my house, there was a no word that sounds remotely like it could be a variation of a curse word rule at our house. So that eliminated things like frick, frack, ding, dang, durn, darn, etc. If you went there, you just had to keep on rolling with it. My brother got really good at this sort of thing when he got caught. He made up crazy words. Dingbingzingerpollywantacracker. And then he'd smile like a choir boy.

Back to the merging into traffic.... Apparently, when we merged some guy felt like my mom cut him off and he gave her the finger. I am not sure what about that hit her button. I know that she felt like she did not cut him and did not deserve the finger, but most days she would have just let this slide. Not today. She rolled down her window. And I mean she rolled it down by hand. It was wintertime and it was pre-electric windows. So, she applied some elbow work action to roll down the window, stuck her hand out the window, and GAVE HIM THE FINGER. And then she screamed as loud as she could, "TO YOU TOO, BUDDY!"

Meanwhile, I am in awe. Before this incident, I was enjoying the rare treat of a vanilla shake from McDonald's. It was now hanging by a thread in my hands. I was lucky I didn't drop it outright. I might have gotten the finger, too, because she was on a roll. Eventually, I remembered my shake and started working on that. It was a much safer pastime than commenting on what I had just witnessed.

In hindsight, am I glad that my mom had such a strict no cursing policy at home? Absolutely. Am I glad that my parents were/are the kind of people who don't incorporate that kind of talk into their everyday speech? A hundred times yes. Do I think you can turn it on and off at will? No. People who think that they can talk that way at work and with their friends, but not around their kids, are fooling themselves. They will slip and their kids will talk that way. Honestly, it is what it is with an adult. But a kid that curses is bad. They call it potty mouth because it stinks.

However, getting a glimpse of my mother as a person, and not just a mom, that was pretty awesome.

WHAT DEFINES US

Chris has "honored" me with an award. This is not me fulfilling it. This is me agonizing over it. You can meet the requirements of the award in numerous ways, but the one I am most likely to go with is *Write about your most embarrassing moment.* Now, my dilemma obviously isn't that I have a problem in sharing my humiliating moments, since I have already dished up several for your reading pleasure scrutiny. I am actually having trouble with the word most.

What quantifies something as most in this sort of thing? Is it the number of people who observe the embarrassing moment, a particular person who observes it, or does anyone have to observe it at all? Is it enough for you to know that you did something so stupid, or worse yet, that you compromised yourself in some way that you cannot take back? In some ways, that extends beyond the bounds of embarrassing and into the territory of shameful. Of course, if other people knew, then it would be embarrassing.

So, what defines us? The secrets that we keep or the ones that we tell? If we let them go, do they cease to have power over us, or by letting them out do they have more weight? I suppose if I were someone famous, it would become the thing that defined me instead of the thing that set me free. Since I'm not, I don't know. I like to think that people are generous and forgiving. I'm not so sure. Right now there is this line from an Indigo Girls song running through my head. I can't even think of the name of the song. But the line is "The things I hate in you are the things I hate in me."