8:00 AM PST April 20, 2025 – Mom’s  BDay

That’s an entry in my iPhone calendar for Momma’s birthday.  I’m not sure how old she is or would be. I’m not sure if she’s alive.  I only know it’s her birthday because I happened to glance in my calendar and saw the entry, flinching slightly and quickly thumbing past on my phone to find the date I needed and had been looking for.  But it’s embedded now, a tiny splinter just beneath the surface, irritating, uncomfortable, requiring time and effort and tools to remove so I simply scratch at it and leave it to swell.  

Momma is slippery.   Trying to draw a picture of her is like scooping a handful of shelled purple hull peas from the bucket of rinse water, the peas spilling out over your cupped hands. The amount you needed to take never meeting the amount you get. So, you dip into the dirty water and try again. And again. Until you finally settle.  “You get what ’cha got”. 

Momma has (had?) all kinds of pithy replies like this. My favorite, because it always shocked to hear it from her a pious devout Christian: “Tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry”.  She can shock you like that occasionally.  Like the time we were playing Trivia Pursuit and the question asked was “What animal only has sex once a year?” and without skipping a beat she replied, “Your daddy”. 

I like Momma.  She’s beautiful, in a Southern way.  Soft like a biscuit, blonde hair like butter.  Always made up to look like “decent people” with blue eyes that reflect your love back at you, refactored and bent. She’s funny, and not in a cutting way.  She’s not afraid to tell on herself, to be the butt of her own joke. I think it’s a defensive measure playing offense against the “fat Pat” jokes that tortured her as a child and that she’ll mention too frequently, belying the “Isn’t that funny?” wink and smile as she says it. 

She’d be the first one to tell you that she asked “Isn’t everybody else mad at you” when I paused live television on the TiVo, her not understanding the concept of DVRs and worried that I had just paused everyone’s TV to fix myself a cocktail.  Which she hates.

My father and both my brothers died from their drinking. The last time I saw her was in 2014 as I visited for Thanksgiving. We were hugging goodbye in front of her trailer that doubles as an office for the RV park she owns and runs, when she whispered, “I’m worried about your drinking, son.”  

“I’m fine,” I say knowing she’s right to be worried and not yet knowing — not worried enough.  

An early memory of Momma is her crying alone in the dark when I was very young.  Something had awoken me, and I heard her from my room. She was on the old plaid couch in the living room where Dad would pass out (fall asleep) each night.  I sensed her sadness, and it felt too heavy to bear. I didn’t go to her but just stood in the doorway, her white nightgown a slight shimmer in the pale light; the moon, like her, just a sliver.  At such a young age, why was my instinct to just stand there in the doorway?  “Let sleeping dogs lie”, she’d say.  

That practicality made me beg her — once — when we lived in the brick house that the tornado jumped, leaving twisted trees in back and front. I had broken my arm, but we were poor and had no insurance (This is something I’ve made up, the poor part.  And the no insurance part. A lie to balm the memory.) Momma kept telling me it was just a sprain. For days my arm swelled and with it my pain, aspirins doing little to dampen either. Eventually she relented and took me to the doctor. Enough time had passed since the injury that my arm had mended, wrongly, and so the nurses held me down and the doctors held my arm over the edge of the gurney as I screamed and Momma watched, unmoving, from the doorway, as they broke me in two. 

She wasn’t afraid of pain. Nor afraid to inflict it. Beating her four children with rope, extension cords, wooden spoons and the occasional switch you had to cut yourself. Large red angry welts turning blue, but nothing compared to the big gun, Daddy’s belt, and if your behavior warranted, the buckle too.  Children are just living scars, raised gristle born from the soft skin of innocence, proof of our parents’ having existed. 

I know the sacrifice she made to carve out a space for herself amid the detritus of Southern patriarchy and Christian subservience.  I feel her abandonment and share her shame of losing a husband and two sons, and me a father and two brothers, to the “devil’s drink”.  I think it’s because I’m so much like her, because I reflected her fear back at her, that I loved her so unconditionally that she needed me to be smaller, needed me swallowable. Words can carve a life into bite sized pieces and the first morsel was being told that I was “unwanted,” what other Mothers would call unplanned. Maybe a different type of child wouldn’t have let those words in, would have blocked the knife causing a minor cut on the forearms.  But being a “too sensitive” child, I pushed forward with my chest and took the knife in both hands and drove it deep into who I am and was to be.

I came out to Momma when I was 19 after an ex-girlfriend lied about Mom already knowing I was gay, just so I would reveal my sexuality to her, the ex.  Momma didn’t know or suspect and it scared her.  I had spent most of my childhood trying to find the healing she found in religion.  I’ve been dunked and prophesied over.  I’ve spoken in tongues and felt the Holy Spirit and been saved and reborn and then dunked some more.   So, when she answered my confession with “You’re possessed by Satan,” I knew the testimony of those words, the rebuke and the casting out and the feel of the warm oil as she anointed me as evil.   I saw the faith in her eyes that could drive a mother to sacrifice her last begotten son.  And I felt the sea part, she on one side and me on the other.  I had no Canaan to escape to.  So, I stayed in Egypt, trapped but dancing and drinking and drugging in a fury of depravity.  I became what she saw and paid a heavy price for it. 

That divide could never really be mended, never closed.   So, our lives were lived on the surface, she on hers and me on mine, bobbing in and out of sight.  I’d visit for Thanksgiving every year.  She’d visit occasionally to see California. Often, years would pass without speaking and then we’d talk weekly, both of us hungry for what was lost. Years growing into decades and the distaste of me always a bitter reminder of yet another loss for her and her alone.

I needed, at 50, to finally put a sheath on to the blade, to begin to piece myself back together one bite sized piece at a time. After a conversation where she told me she was glad I had moved away from home because “really, it’s easier for both of us”, I needed my wounds to become defensive ones though they hurt just as much.  So, I asked her three questions I already knew the answers to.

Can you love me and accept me?  

No.

Can you celebrate me?  

No.

Will you defend me?  

The slow shake of her head as she sawed me in two:  no. 

My calendar reminds me its Momma’s birthday but doesn’t remind me how old she is or would be.  It reminds me of her face and smile, but not her laugh. I can’t remember that.  My calendar reminds me how much I love and miss her, how it’s not necessary to remind me of those things because they are with me every day.  It sits just beneath the surface, felt more than seen.  Something I scratch at daily, but never can remove.  The calendar doesn’t remind me what it feels to be whole and so it’s up to me to remember that the splinter is bone.