My Mother. Oh, My Mother…

I get a forwarded email from my mother. She got it from her friend Racist Homophobette (who hasn’t yet figured out why her oldest son is unmarried at 45 and doesn’t date).

It purports to be a screed by Andy Rooney. It’s not – Rooney’s quoted on Snopes saying he’d like to sue whoever started this nasty, racist piece as he feels it’s damaged his name.

The gist: why can’t white people have things for themselves if black people have special things like magazines and TV networks – isn’t that reverse racism? Followed hard upon by no girls in the Boy Scouts, guns don’t kill people people kill people, homosexuality is bad, why don’t those immigrants speak English and why do they get any social services, tattoos and piercings are bad (it’s pretty wide-ranging) and wraps up with, “since 86% of Americans believe in God” (which one?) we should tell the other 14% to “shut up and be quiet.” It concludes with “If you agree, forward this, if you don’t, delete.” Ah yes – speak up and be heard, unless you disagree, in which case shut up and be quiet.

And me, I can’t let it lie.

I address the misapplication of non-specific pseudo-statistics, point out that my brother is gay and my friends (I avoid the words ‘lovers’ and ‘clients’, tee hee) are black, mention that I’ve been beaten (briefly) by cops so maybe they’re not always right, and ask if Andy Rooney really said this, or did someone else throw his name on it and start sending it around?

I get personal:

…naming a majority as a reason for rightness reminds me of "well, all my friends are doing it..." …I'm a little embarrassed that my mother, who taught me to stand up for what is right instead of what is convenient and popular, would send me this…Up to you whether you forward this back to Racist Homophobette.

I, of course, cc it to all the family members my mother cc’d it to.

My brother points out it’s not Andy Rooney. My aunt replies back that it doesn’t matter who wrote it, it’s their opinion, “some valid points, some invalid.”

And you know, it occurs to me that it does matter who wrote it. If it's a
public figure, we weight their words more heavily than if it's just some internet nobody taking advantage of not having to spend money to spread around their words. Would Homophobette have sent it to all her friends if it was from Joe Blow she'd never heard of?

My mother is from a generation where the internet is a way to do business and a fun toy, but I get most of my news and information in this way. It personally benefits me to call people on lies, misrepresentations, and lack of accuracy in the emails they forward to all their friends, because I'd rather have an internet that's more of a library and less of a bathroom wall.

More importantly, it matters who forwards it. Would my mother – or even her friend – write in a public newspaper, with their name attached, the same sentiments? It’s safer to mass-forward an email supposedly written by a funny columnist without thinking very much about the subtle hate speech involved. When you forward an email, you endorse what it says. In this case, explicitly, as per the last line of the email. I'm not comfortable letting my family think I'm willing to go along with gay-bashing, immigrant-bashing, and racism, and "just delete."

I write to my aunt (cc-ing to everyone, why withhold the potential for family drama?)

…casual hate speech is worse than deliberate hate speech, because we take it in without thinking when it comes in a funny email instead of from a guy in a white hood. Maybe I'm one of the horrible PC people the original writer alludes to - but if he had the guts to sign his real name and stand up for what he believes, his polemic would carry a lot more weight.

Which leads me to think, am I the pot? You are, after all, reading an anonymous blog. But there is a difference, not only in that I am not claiming to be someone more important or more established to give weight to my opinions, but also that I have a persona you can use for context. You may not know Mandy, but you know “Mandy”, and she accepts comments, answers emails, and engages in dialogue when people disagree.

Feel free to forward...the name is Mandy Muse.

On Parenting

At the end of White Oleander, both the book and the movie (which I recently re-read and saw, respectively), Ingrid Magnussen admits to her daughter Astrid that when Astrid was a toddler, Ingrid left her with a neighbor for a year, “give or take a few months.” She confesses what a relief it was to be free,

To go to the bathroom by myself. To take a nap in the afternoon. To
make love all day long if I wanted, and walk on the beach, and not have
to think, where’s Astrid? What’s Astrid doing? What’s she going to get
into? And not having you on me all the time, Mommy Mommy Mommy,
clinging to me, like a spider…

Ingrid tells Astrid that she felt like a hostage. Astrid retorts, “That’s what babies are like.”

Fitch commented in an interview:

A child will take up 100 percent of you if you let them. It’s only
natural for them to want that, to try for that. So motherhood’s a dance
between individual needs and the needs of your child…Ingrid’s failing
is that she had a child but refused to dance with her.

When Janet Fitch originally wrote the short story that was the genesis for the novel, Ingrid was the protagonist. Everyone hated her, thought she was a monster, said you couldn’t possibly tell the story through her eyes, no-one wanted to empathize with her as the main character. And so the book took shape as Astrid’s story.

It’s a great book. And a lot of bad stuff happens to Astrid in a series of foster homes. But even after reading about the shooting and the foster-mother’s suicide and the blowing juvenile delinquents for weed and the eventual growing to adulthood without her mother, when Astrid confronts Ingrid at the end of the book, I think, well, yeah, no wonder Ingrid needed some time alone. She’s an artist.

I think it’s worthwhile to do reprehensible things for the sake of making art. That’s why art must be good, why we cannot settle for average in our work. It must be worthy of the time spent cheating on the spouse, avoiding the friends, half-heartedly grading the students’ papers, ignoring the crying child kicking at the locked door of the room of one’s own.

I suspect I will not be a very good parent.

In fact, I strongly suspect I’m not really fit to be a parent – I’d rather make great art than a great person (I think). I also don’t believe in an ideal childhood, and I actually hope I can settle for average in that field instead of frustrating myself by reaching for the unattainable. Everyone I know is, to some extent, fucked up by their parents. Not that they were beaten with coat hangers or burned with curling irons or molested in the kitchen while the rest of the family sat down to Sunday dinner, but that no matter how much love we receive, it’s never the amount we desire. The yearnings of unfulfilled desire are what make us discover and seek and create, in an effort to attain the recognition and love we feel we deserve. Survivors are a lot more interesting than the protected, and probably contribute a lot more to the world.

If you like who you are, you have to be okay with what you’ve come from. Bad times make us tough. We know we can survive. And if we’re inclined to making art, they give us subjects for our work.

My mother is a lovely woman. Pleasant, pretty, nurturing, handy around the house, cooked lovely meals, made some of the kids’ clothes, mostly a stay-at-home mom. But it’s my dad about whom I blog…

What I Like About You

The best kind of money is money I made myself, on my own time, that doesn’t count. It’s not for the house or the groceries or the bills, it’s not share and share alike. It sits in my purse and buys each little caprice.

Getting off the airplane and buying a chai latte and a water right there at the airport instead of choosing one or the other and then buying it at the convenience store thirty minutes later to save 75 cents.

Going into Target and choosing five things from the travel size and sample aisle, Kleenex in a purse pack (not the store brand), lotion that I might not even like, contact lens solution, ibuprofen, handiwipes for my purse, not buying more because there’s nothing that catches my eye.

Sitting in my first choice restaurant and ordering what my body says it wants, extra side of vegetables, maybe I won’t even finish, won’t even take it home (though nothing’s great like cold steak at breakfast).

Trashy checkout magazines even though the newpaper’s cheaper.

Not driving across town to save 35 cents a pound, not caring too much if the “regular” pump is out of order, an extra pack of mints at the checkout, not worrying and saving and hoarding every last penny because good people save up for what they want for twenty-five years and bad people call home from the airport, “I’m in Reno, Atlantic City, the Bahamas, I’ll be home in a few days, honey.”

Once she packed us up and took us to her parents, two babies on the plane must have been a nightmare, God only knows what last-minute tickets cost back then. Perhaps if she’d come back after he did, something might have happened.

On my first big road trip, he gave me $100, two fifties, in case of emergency. I didn’t use them when the alternator went, when the head gasket went, when I took the bus from Cleveland to Buffalo and then hitched to Syracuse. My brother flew me home. I still have the fifties, they’re the older kind.

As long as they sit in the back of my planner, I know…something. Maybe someday I’ll know what it is.

That’s why he gambled. That’s why I whore.

Family Tree

The last time I saw my sister, I didn’t recognize her. We hadn’t grown up together, she was really my half-sister and seventeen years older. Every year, my family drove to the state where my mother’s family lived, four households within three blocks of each other, a week at each house, all together out to the cabin with every bedroom full, kids on the living room couches, kids in tents on the lawn, bonfires, games of catch, skipping stones, the year the tree was struck by lightning, old home movies, the Bear Story, don’t tell when you’re taking a shower or you’ll get a bucket of lake water thrown over the top. Then we went to my father’s parents for two weeks. Then we went into the city and saw my half-sister and brother for one day. One lunch. Then we drove back home. I did not think this was weird until I was nearly twenty.

At thirty, I had not seen my sister in ten years. Or maybe I had for a lunch or two – I saw my brother as often as I could, we’re a lot alike, and I think he hosted some lunches when I was in town that included her, but I more remember his boyfriends and his nine-thousand-dollar-sofa (made in Italy, fabric made in France, both shipped to the US, then shipped back to the UK for putting together, then shipped back to him). They were trust-fund babies, from the first marriage.

My father arranged a little reunion – by coincidence, we were all in the same city, and we met up at a little steakhouse, an independent place with a private dining room. There was a patio just outside to smoke, though everyone but Husband and me smoked inside anyway, including my 15-year-old cousin. Husband and I were the first to arrive. Second. There was a heavyset woman, at least sixty, bloated, overweight, shiny-skinned, sitting with a dumpy older man in an ill-fitting shiny suit. Friends of Dad’s…?

“Hi…”

“Hi, long time no see, yeah?” And the voice is my sister’s, what is my sister’s voice doing in this stranger’s body?

There was dinner. It was irrelevant, saving only that I would have ordered a slightly more expensive dinner had I known my father was paying. My brother told the waiters to stop bringing my sister Bloody Marys, but she wasn’t far enough gone to miss the change in taste. It was only a small scene. After dinner, Husband and I were very quiet, both on the same page.

A year later, I went to the city to be the family member who was close enough to be family but untouched enough to deal with details. My sister’s estranged-but-not-divorced husband fought us for an open casket and won. Her boyfriend showed up in the same dumpy suit, the family cutting him as much as possible as he drifted around describing what she looked like when he found the body. At least we closed ranks. I arranged my father’s plane ticket and hotel room, I can’t remember where I stayed, it wasn’t with him despite him asking, at the end of the drunken night where he told me both that he didn’t think my other brother (still at home) was his child and that, had it been my face the lid closed on, it would have killed him. I couldn’t stand the smoke.

What’s the difference between a Muse family wedding and a Muse family funeral?

One less drunk.

How's that for Half-Nekkid Thursday?