More Motherly Love

              Maternal Effort

When I read the facebook postings

of struggling solo mums

with whom I’m acquainted

and who are clearly doing their best

for their sprogs,

I sometimes think of my own privileged mother

who clearly did her worst for me,

and only did her best for herself.

  Slow On The Uptake

I knew throughout

my adult life

that my mother was

a disgusting person

whom I couldn’t understand,

and that I preferred

to avoid her company

if at all possible,

but it was only after she died

that I considered the possibility

of hating her,

and then close to another decade before

I realised many of the ways

that she’d ruined my life

and the extent

to which she’d done it.

            Hard As

I was in my mid-thirties,

as clueless as ever

about other people,

when my maternal unit

summoned me to her presence

in a low-rise, upmarket

condominium in the Keys

in order to show me her wealth

and to renew her delight

in dominating and bullying me –

with a touch of cruelty, just for spice –

face to face.

Still under the delusion,

despite a lifetime of evidence otherwise,

that I somehow owed her

filial devotion and emotion,

I attempted to hug her upon arrival.

She responded

by digging her fingernails painfully into my sides.

Clueless or not,

I realised that that, at least,

was inappropriate.

                    Two Shirts In Key Largo

Some time when I was in my mid-thirties

I succumbed to pressure,

as I’ve always tended to do until lately,

and made a pilgrimage to my mother’s condo in the Florida Keys

to pay homage to her greatness and money

and to provide her with multiple opportunities

to bully me and generally treat me like less than shit.

On an excursion from her home in Marathon to Key Largo,

a distance of 81 kays along the Overseas Highway,

she took me to some hideous clothing emporium

and selected two tropical shirts for me.

She ordered me to go into the changing room and try them on.

When I came back out wearing the first one she said,

“You didn’t like the other one? Why?”

I cracked up laughing.

She’d slipped.

My laughter clearly disturbed her

and she demanded to know the reason for it.

I told her that the buy-two-shirts-you-didn’t-like-the-other-one dodge

was a cliché example of maternal guilt-mongering

that Jewish comedians and memoiristes

had beaten into submission in recent years.

What I didn’t tell her was that

the overall maternal stereotype they had evoked

had never been even close

to how savagely malicious and unlovingly inhuman

she had always been to me.

Understandably unappreciative of my silent discretion,

she huffed and puffed

and plotted revenge.

                    Grape-Bunch Outrage

My mother was determined to control me as much as possible,

and one of her many sicko methods

was by expressing outrage

that turned into just plain rage

in response to any deviations

from her bizarre sense of how people

– particularly, but not only, me –

should do various inconsequential things.

My mother was easily outraged and offended;

she seemed to love it,

and she also had a tendency

to inflate her capricious taste preferences

into serious and universal moral truths.

One of these involved the correct way to eat table grapes,

which was by plucking a small bunch

off from the larger one,

eating the grapes thereunto attached,

and then daintily disposing

of the remaining truncated stem into the bin.

Plucking a grape or three off the main bunch

and leaving their stems protruding from it

was a crime against nature,

as far as she was vehemently concerned.

She couldn’t fucking stand it!

Damn, it pissed her off.

I’ve been plucking grapes off the bunch

one-by-one

ever since I escaped

her immediate supervision

many decades ago.

                          The Hot Rod Club

When I was fifteen,

and about to get my driver’s licence

I thought it’d be a good idea

to acquire some basic knowledge and skills

in regard to simple auto repairs and maintenance.

The problem was that I had no one to teach me.

Then one of my neighbours

had the bright idea

of having the school

sponsor a club

for kids who wanted

to learn some skills,

or to sharpen ones they already had,

in regard to fiddling with car engines.

To sex it up for the kids

he called it the Hot Rod Club.

Of course my mother wouldn’t let me join.

No son of hers was going to race hot rods.

It didn’t matter how carefully I explained

that I wasn’t going to race cars,

I just wanted to learn how to work on them –

No dice.

When I became an adult, of course,

from time to time,

when the occasion offered itself

or the mood struck her,

she indulged herself in savage put-downs

of my hopelessness

when it came to

working on cars.

    Too Old, I Guess

I must’ve been four

when my mother decided

that she wasn’t going

to tuck me in at night

or sing me lullabies

any more.

I felt lonely and unlovable,

but I had to accept it.

I had no choice.

                          Deep Fashion II

My mother, responding to the first signs of senile dementia

with as much dishonesty as she could muster – which was plenty –

decided that she wanted a pied-à-terre in the city where I lived

for motives too ghastly for me to contemplate.

She bought a ridiculous hand-carved Chinese

fold-out home entertainment bar

and then began obsessing on buying new linens.

Everything seemed to be linens-this or linens-that.

So I took her to a retail outlet I’d once sold ads to,

explaining on the way that they sold designer sheets and stuff –

what we call manchester

and my mother called linens –

at cut-rate prices after their designers

had come out with newer lines.

She came out of the place fuming,

huffing and puffing in outrage

because that excuse for a store

didn’t have the latest fashions in linens.

How dare they!

She was obviously just taking advantage of an opportunity,

however flimsy, pointless, and unjustified,

to drive home my basic worthlessness to me,

or else mistaking me for her newly acquired to-the-manor-born

(or so they claimed)

upmarket condominium friends –

me!, who’d been brought up listening to her boasting

about her killer bargain-negotiating skills

in automobile showrooms and third-world markets,

in addition to enduring her from-out-of-nowhere character assassinations.

As I compose this the sheets on my bed in the next room

are almost a quarter of a century old.

Her example had taught me well about values.

                  Well …

When my hideously inhuman

horror of a mother

discovered that I had

something of an aptitude

for the written word,

her first thought,

or so she told me,

was of course the grossly egocentric notion

that one day I would write

a book about her

and what a remarkable person she was.

Well yeah,

remarkably abusive, destructive,

and just plain nasty.

                  Mama Mia!

I think that it’s enormously unlikely

that individual souls

retain their identity

after the people they inhabit die,

but if they do,

I’d rather not run into my mother’s

when that time comes.

If that should happen, though,

I suppose I might welcome the opportunity

to give her evil soul

all the vituperation

that it deserves.