What does one do to pamper one’s liver? Because I only have 364 days to prepare mine for next fucking Mother’s Day; this year I did it sober and it sucked.
In fairness, I have hated Mother’s Day since about sixth grade.
Patterns repeat, like fractals, down generations, and I was so certain and tried so hard in my own broken way not to repeat my parents’ mistakes. My mother was a mean drunk, and my father was too caught up in his anger about her shitting all over his Advanced Directive when he had his stroke and doing CPR and calling an ambulance to protect me (all of the fucked up shit that awful woman did to him, and the one time he wasn’t cowed by her pouty-face it was over her doing something semi-appropriate).
The mean drunk thing is fixable (don’t drink, durr) but it is almost enough to make me believe in a higher power that smites you for hating your mother the way I found myself rage-crying at my husband when it got late enough that my children definitely weren’t going to call that I would never forgive him for stopping my oldest from beating me to death, because no one should survive that.
A Nigerian fellow at work tried to convert me to the faith the missionaries taught his family the other day though, and a son of Africa embracing blue-eyed Jesus THERE and then coming HERE of his own volition to proselytize a Jew who has survived the unfathomable...well. People have been trying to convert me since I learned to talk and I thought I’d seen it all. “This is so fucked up. You didn’t sell out, you fucking gave it away. I don’t need Jesus, you need INTENSE PSYCHOTHERAPY,” I sputtered. “You are COLONIZED!” (it’s like this guy is the only man in America who didn’t watch Black Panther FFS) “Well it’s either that or be like my grandfathers and believe in trees. And water. Air and birds. I go to church every week and wash my sins away!” he said cheerfully, in the manner of a man who cheats on his wife as often as he possibly can but thinks he’s found a loophole.
Nurture over nature. Read to the baby. Eat the wafer (but don’t drink the wine).
We all try to be better than the generation before us, and every time we just fail a little harder.
My children don’t call or text on Mother’s Day, but at least one of them reads the blog. You want to hear a story, kid? My paternal grandfather (your bubbe Julius, who died in a mental hospital before I was born) was crazy before there were meds that could do anything besides drug you into a stupor. He decided your great-Granny M was cheating on him (I have no idea if he was correct but as the story goes the whole thing was just a paranoid delusion of his), so he filled a burlap sack with bricks and hit her over the head, then slit her throat. He didn’t press hard enough though, and she lived with an ugly scar from ear to ear. Always referred to it as “the night I was murdered.” And that is talking the LESS mentally-ill side of the LEAST mentally-ill one of your parents (don’t take MY word for it—there was a court reporter present at our divorce hearing where both of our mental health was addressed in detail; the judge didn’t just flip a coin in deciding who y’all would live with).
Your father made your bubbe Julius look like a fantastic husband; at least Julius only wanted to KILL his wife. Living through what you and your father have done to me is so much worse.
Have yourself sterilized for the good of society. Because if the prettiest quadrant in your personal Punnet square is spattered with that much blood, the rest isn’t fit for the innernet.
