You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I was a truly
terrible child. Appalling. Abominable. A real nightmare. I was mouthy and
whiney and pissy and needy: basically, I was insatiable, and I could not have
cared less what my rotten behavior cost me in terms of either dignity or basic
privileges.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I stole or lit things on
fire or supported Nixon. I just wanted to get my way, immediately and for all
time, which more often than not involved having the constant, undivided attention
of my mother. My mother, who had a full-time job in addition to four
considerably less rotten (but still a little rotten) kids, and me, the crown
prince of rotten. This was not a woman with a lot of what you might call free
time on her hands. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you
she paid a great deal of attention to all of us, which is why we’re all
brilliant and funny and, each in our way, a little bit charming.
But, again, I was insatiable, so I pushed the envelope with
impunity. One afternoon when I was probably about four, she got out of work
early, and I was so delighted to have her home I decided to join her in the
living room for, you know, a little debrief on my day. At some point she
noticed I wasn’t wearing socks (because, yeah, I was that kind of asshole – I’m
sure the socks I’d been assigned that morning were somewhere that made no sense
for a reason that made even less), and so she instructed me to climb the stairs
to my room and put on a pair of socks. When I opened my sock drawer and saw the
array of options, I immediately realized there was only one person who could
help me choose: my mom. So I wrapped my stupid, puny arms around the entire
pile and carried them to the top of the stairs to go seek her guidance. But,
being an asshole, I immediately dropped a pair on the stairs and proceeded to
slip, banana-peel style, and then tumble ass over tea kettle all the way to the
bottom. Surprise twist: I broke my collar bone, which necessitated a trip to
the emergency room. Gary: 1, Mom: 0.
Of course, that was actually a fairly benign event:
inconvenient, definitely, and almost certainly costly, but that was just me as
a doofus, not me as a dick. Me as a dick generally resulted in an entirely
predictable and not unreasonable banishment to my room, where I would then
proceed to yell, at the absolute top of my lungs, about how unfair this was
(because I was smart, so I opened with full-throated negotiation), then I’d
shift into desperate supplication, and when that failed, my finishing move
involved a particularly virulent attempt to shame her: I would tell her she was
the worst mother I’d ever had. In spite of the fact that this happened some
forty-five years ago, I still distinctly remember the thought that followed the
moment I first came up with that line: Oh, man, that’s gold. She let me be
impressed with myself for a few punishment sessions over the course of, say, a
week or two, before she finally pointed out the flaw in my judgment of her:
“Gary,” she said, “exactly how many other
mothers have you had?” Hoisted on my own petard. Mom: infinity, Gary: shut up.
I could literally tell you a hundred stories like that from
my childhood: stories in which I was a jerk and my mom was, in retrospect, kind
of a saint. I say she was a saint in retrospect because, in spite of all the
grief I caused her, over and over again unabashedly, it turns out my mom liked
me. She liked most everyone, and she certainly liked all her kids, and I’m not
saying she liked me more than the others (because I know she liked us all
equally), I’m just saying she liked me in spite of how much I didn’t deserve to
be liked. And she didn’t just like me because I was her kid (although, let’s be
honest, it didn’t hurt). No, she liked me because she thought I was pretty
smart and pretty funny and pretty interesting. She thought I was pretty cool,
despite all the ways in which I wasn’t nearly cool enough to her. I’m no expert
on super powers, but I feel confident that was hers: an uncanny ability to see
through the nonsense so forcefully presented and appreciate the underlying
intangibles. If not for that, there’s no way this woman doesn’t drown me in the
bathtub when I’m two. And I’m grateful for that, for many reasons, but right
now mostly because her patience and benevolence gave me the opportunity to know
her for a little more than forty-nine years.
My mom went into the hospital with pneumonia the day after
Valentine’s Day. She’d been dealing with a handful of chronic health issues the
last few years, one compounding the other on a rollercoaster ride that lasted
three weeks. She took her last excruciating breath right around midnight
Wednesday, her most rotten son stroking her hair and smiling down at her. There
are words you hear and words you use, but I can tell you it wasn’t until the
nurse walked into the room and said, “She’s gone. She passed,” that I truly
understood the meaning of the word forlorn.
I’m not telling you this for sympathy or so you’ll send me
hugs, I’m sharing this in part to honor my mom, Cheryl Socquet, who was not
only not the worst mother I ever had – she was the best mother I could have
hoped for. And I’m sharing this to offer you some very basic but useful advice,
advice I wish I’d taken much, much more often. That advice is this:
Call your mom.
