Mother's Day

My antipathy towards men has been especially acute today.  Even I have been troubled by the things I’ve been saying today about all the unfortunate victims of testosterone poisoning .  But I realized I was channeling my mother.

My mother was very attractive and incredibly intelligent.  She was also very troubled.  She was a paranoid schizophrenic and was committed twice for it.  Yet the courts decided that it was a good idea to let her raise my sister and me alone.   It was at times like being raised by Caligula.  But there were some advantages to it.  Being raised in two different realities (Mom's and everyone else's) you become an expert on passing between worlds.  You have to in order to survive.  

My mother’s hatred of men was legendary.  My father told me once that during the short time that he and my mother were together, he felt like a stud.   She only tolerated his presence when she was fertile and as soon as she got the babies she wanted from him, he was out.   She never remarried and preferred to live in the dark the rest of her days like Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations.  Until the end of her life she blamed my father for ruining her life, even though she hadn’t had any communication with him for forty years.

She never understood my being trans and insisted that I was gay.  In her defense, she was always very supportive of her gay son and even tried to set me up with male nurses from the hospital.   “Mom,” I would say, “why are you doing this?  I’m not gay. I’m a transsexual.”

“Sweetie,”  (she always called me “Sweetie”,) “how could you possibly be a transsexual and not be gay?”

“Because I’m a lesbian?” 

“Jimmy, you aren’t a lesbian.   Just because you haven’t like any of the boys I’ve picked out for you…that doesn’t mean you’re a lesbian.  It just means I haven’t found the right boy for you.”

I suppose that technically speaking I was gay.  I just wasn’t gay the way she thought I was gay.

She never attended any of my marriages and always thought I was wasn’t being true to myself (since I obviously liked guys.)   After 20 years of marriage, my mother still had not learned my wife’s name.  She was always “that girl I married.”  Even went I presented her with grandchildren, her response was, “they’re gorgeous.  But tell me, Sweetie.  Who’s the father?”   She did adore those kids, though, in her own peculiar way.

We were not close when I grew up.  Every time I tried to reach out to her, things would go well for a time.  Eventually, though, she would start talking about the teams of people that followed her whenever she left her apartment or the woman that called her up every year on her birthday to say that she was going to kill her.    I tried to be patient, but I knew that eventually she would start to accuse me of conspiring with her enemies.  That’s when the arguing would start anew.

My mother died seven years ago.  My sister said that she died only when she ran out of people to torment.  She said she wanted to be cremated and to have her ashes spread out at the second hand store which was her favorite place in the world.  She didn’t want any sort of memorial and wanted her ashes distributed in secret because she wanted all traces of her existence erased from the world. 

 I didn’t cry at her very small funeral, but I would give almost anything to sit and listen to her paranoid ranting just one more time.