My Mother Is a Terrible Person

I know Mother's Day is usually a time when one says nice things about one's mother, but I must be honest: My mother is a terrible person.

I always suspected there was something suspicious about being born eight months after my parents were married. It turns out my mother was a bit of a libertine in her younger days and birth control was against the law back then. Thank goodness my father made an honest woman out of her and saved me from being a bastard. At the time my mother was working as a commercial artist, but once her employer found out she was pregnant, she was fired. There was no such thing as maternity leave back in those days and besides he didn't want someone with my mother's dubious morals infecting the workplace.

But that just gave my mother more time to take care of me and my ten brothers and sisters who followed in rapid succession. Shortly after my tenth sibling was born, my father divorced her because she had lost her figure and took up with a younger woman. So my mother returned to work. It was pretty embarrassing having a mother who was divorced and had to work. Was there no end to the shame my mother brought to me? The only job she could get was as a secretary, since she had been out of the workforce for so long, but she didn't keep it very long. Her boss made repeated sexual advances to her, which she rebuffed, and he fired her. Of course, there were no sexual harassment laws back then so there was nothing she could do. Until she found a new job, money was tight and I couldn't get the new pair of sneakers I wanted because she said she couldn't afford it. I really resented her for that.

Everyday she would wake up very early and get us off to school, then rush to work, then rush from work to take us to afterschool activities, then rush back home to cook dinner and clean the house. Although she never missed a single baseball game, school play or concert, sometimes I would see her in the audience nodding off. Was it really too much to ask for her stay awake for just a couple hours and pay attention to me for a change?

I'm sure if my mother were raising us today she would have been brought up on charges of child abuse and I would have been sent away to live out a much happier childhood in a series of delightful foster homes. I can't tell you the number of times she slapped me, never really hard, but hard enough. I was slapped when she caught me shoplifting candy from the drugstore, when I used a racial epithet like all kids do and once when I made fun of a poor child whose shoes were worn out. My mother was always teaching me quaint old-fashioned values like the idea that it is not poor people's fault that they are poor. I'm not sure where she got these ridiculous ideas from. As she got older, her ideas got even stranger. She became a feminist and joined NOW and started subscribing to Ms. magazine, which she would leave lying around the house where my friends could see them. She even went to protests and political meetings and campaigned for women candidates. I prayed that none of my friends would see her on TV at one of these rallies burning bras. I certainly am glad that so many younger women say they have rejected feminism. It doesn't seem to have actually achieved anything anyway.

Many years later my mother is still embarrassing me. She has her own successful web design business, which is really undignified for a woman of her years. She is quite outspoken about politics and says the most terrible things about President Bush so we usually avoid this subject when I see her. She is even thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton! I often wish that I had a normal mother, but despite the fact that she is such a terrible person, I must admit that I love her anyway, faults and all. She is my mother, after all.
Crossposted, with other Mother's Day wishes, at Shakesville.

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