My mother and my daughter

Mother’s Day is the day we’re supposed to, as a people, spend money to, as Charles Foster Kane once said, “buy things.” We do this to prove our love because somewhere down the line we were taught that buying stuff equals love. We have to buy something for each and every holiday and that ensures, somehow, that we’ve proved how much we love and appreciate our mother, our lover, our secretary, St. Patrick, our kids on Halloween. Love equals stuff. Stuff you buy.

Good thing? Bad thing? Who can say. We are not here to judge. We observe and that is all. Oh, what the hell. Let’s judge. What I hate is how if you don’t buy anything it’s taken as a symbol that you don’t care.

I appreciate my own mother and appreciate her more and more as I wade my way through the bucket of shit that can be life at times. My mom was and is a fighter. I have no doubt that she would have survived the Titanic, even if she’d been one of the poor people trapped down below. There is no way she would have been refused. She is a force of nature in all ways.

No one curses like my mother. I woke up this morning thinking of one of her favorites, “what in the fuck?” She of the cocksucker motherfucker variety of swearer (curser?), she never filtered herself from her children in any way, really. She swore wildly and often all through my childhood.

She was a beautiful young girl who grew up too fast, so fast that she really forgot to grow up. What she lacked in education: a high school drop-out, pregnant at 16, a mother at 17, and three more kids before the age of 25 – she made up for in hard work, dedication and a drive to succeed and survive at any cost. That thing my mom has, that thing that pushes her every day, is the thing about her I admire the most.