Remembering Mom

Thinking about my mom is always a complicated business.  There is no doubt that she tried her best as a parent, and that I wouldn’t be the person I’m glad I am today had she not raised me the way she did.  But there is also no doubt that her best parenting also involved an unhealthy dose of emotional blackmail and abuse alongside a general narcissism which burdened both me and my sister with way too much to deal with from an incredibly young age.  She didn’t know any better - her own mother raised her with similar baggage, and there was little help and support to be found from our father who basically tapped out on raising us until we were teenagers and he decided to grow up - but it was clear that she only wanted what was best for us and all too often the arguments, the unreasonableness and the bitterness makes it too easy to forget all the good stuff.  Because mom may have driven me crazy, but there is also no doubt she was a great mother.  In fact, she might have been great because she drove me crazy, as part of what did it was her constant refusal to be anyone but herself.  Unashamedly and loudly.  She taught me without even trying that the world wasn’t worth changing yourself for and that sometimes it was the world that had got it wrong, not you.  That opinions mattered and fighting your corner was a worthwhile thing to do even if you ended up losing.  

A journalist, she was always coming up with clever angles and ways of looking at things no one else had thought of and this skill is another inheritance I have gained from her.  Looking with a fresh perspective and asking the questions no one else is asking.  More importantly, she showed me you could actually earn a living by doing something you enjoy like writing.  I haven’t quite been able to do that yet, but I’ve never stopped trying.  And I write every day.  The clacking of a keyboard will always be a comforting sound to me.  The nights mom was up working to meet a deadline were the nights I slept best, drifting off on the rhythm of her fingers drumming on the keys of her computer late into the night.  Mom was pure hustle.  If we wanted a holiday she would come up with as many ideas to pitch to her editors as it would take to pay for it.  If I wanted the latest toy or faddish consumer items she would find a way of being sent one to review.  When I started getting into wrestling, we got tickets to the Royal Albert Hall and Madison Square Garden through her press connections.  When I became a punk she somehow organised a meeting with Jello Biafra (and ended up flirting with him all night).  My writing hero is Stephen King and I got to meet him too because she fought to interview him and took me to his book launch.  As a kid I would often wake up to celebrity autographs left outside my bedroom door if she had bumped into anyone she knew I admired at some BBC event or posh party she was attending.  She had no problem disturbing someone like Elton John as he was eating an expensive lunch at the Ivy if she thought her kid would get a kick out of having his signature scribbled on a scrap of her lined spiral notepad.  Like I said: pure hustle.  You can take the woman out of New York but you can’t take the New York out of the woman.  Nor would you want to, even if it meant being burdened with horror stories of drug-pushing strangers injecting you with heroin at the movie theatre and junkie rapists jumping out of the shadows to make you “street smart” despite living in a dull bucolic village where nothing ever happened.  At least it made our nightmares interesting.

Mom’s generosity is something I hope I have also taken from her.  Not that basic generosity of buying things for people, but a generosity which goes deeper - taking an interest and being generous with time and energy.  Bringing others in despite the cost rather than putting up barriers.  Inviting friends to join us and paying their way if needed.  Lending money and never charging interest.  Giving rather than loaning and asking for nothing in return.  Even when times were hard for her, my sister and I never wanted for anything.  When I think of the parents I knew who counted every penny they spent on other people and kept their balance sheets like Ebeneezer Scrooge I am so thankful to have been raised in a world where it never mattered who paid for what only that everyone was having a good time.

And then there’s the creativity.  Mom was a writer, as I have said, but she encouraged creativity of all kinds.  When I first picked up a guitar and started playing punk music, it was mom’s guitar that was there to pick up.  The one she used to sing us to sleep at night - not nursery rhymes but “House of the Rising Sun” and the best of Bob Dylan.  Whether it was the cartoons I drew which she got framed, the poems I wrote which she adored or the songs I wrote which she encouraged, there was never a sense in our house that expressing yourself and playing with your imagination was a waste of time.  When I said I wanted to study philosophy at university there was never any discussion about whether it would be useful on the job market to have such a degree, only the question of whether it would hold my interest for three years.  If I think of mom it is of a woman who understood without needing it explained to her when her son and his best friend made-believed a Cornish dining room was a late-night punk venue called “Pete’s Mackerel” and put on imaginary gigs there.  We were never told to shut up our racket - mom simply became another punter at the Mackerel.  

Mom was a hero.  An immigrant to the UK who hustled her way to a decent life with nothing but her New York street-smarts, her mind and her pen.  She had no idea what was going on in this weird new country she had ran away to, chasing her love of Shakespeare, and had to figure it out enough to live a life, all while never losing the essence of who she was.  Even when it turned out she’d married an asshole and life was a lot tougher than she’d dreamed it would be, she persevered, basically raising us both single-handed while trapped in a miserable and broken marriage, putting us first and doing her best.  And when she did, at last, find happiness, she went for it even when it was difficult, believing enough in what she wanted that even an ocean between her and her new partner didn’t get in the way.

So yes.  Mom and I had a lot of fights, and there were many things we each said to each other that we regretted. Our relationship was imperfect.  But this Mothers’ Day I find myself remembering the mom I miss.  The one who stayed up all night with me when I suffered from asthma attacks and spent days sleeping on a chair in a hospital ward when I was hospitalised with it and scared of being left alone.  The one who taught me to follow my dreams even if everyone said they were insane and not give two shits about what other people think of you.  The one who drilled into my head the motto: “only boring people get bored” and raised me to ensure I was never bored.  The one I wouldn’t be me without.