ode to my mother

in honor of mother's day

You are insane. I tell you this, and we laugh, but you are really a nut.

I did not realize until I'd been on my own a couple years, after the post-high school graduation release into The World, that most people's Normal was so different from ours. Now that I've been on my own eight years now, developed my own sense of normal, I go home to visit you and I find things to be hilarious and bizarre and annoying at the same time that I never noticed before... one line from the Jeopardy theme whistled over and over, the dandilion-focused method of lawn-mowing that looks like the path of a fruit fly above a sticky countertop, the stashes of pistachios, peanuts, and almonds in a bag below the coffee table amongst their sacrificed siblings' shells for emergency midnight snacking, the collections of random jars and plastic lids that might find valuable uses someday... when I step back into this life, for some reason I feel insane, too, and want to bulldoze through and streamline, sanitize the whole operation, turn the place, this life into something simple and easy. It might be the same urge that inspires me to want to help out with the yard as it's big and you now get AARP stuff in the mail, or then again it might be the growing fear that as my mother's only daughter, there is a tiny cap-collecting, snack-hoarder inside me; as the sole future inheritor of my family's physical and psychological estate, am I destined to be the keeper of closets of World War II military uniforms, christening gowns, as well as the oral histories of Swedish farmers and the family's characteristic wit? I go home to my apartment in the city, with its stacks of magazines at the end of the couch, and bus and subway transfers from all of my travels filed in legal and manila envelopes in long anticipation of their archiving potential, and I wonder, am I training myself to keep house?

I embrace your legacy of wit; I think I have even come to match your levels of criticism and poignant insight whose harshness verges on cruelty... I scare myself as I see the tendencies I attempted to weed out sprouting up nonetheless. You laughingly joke about all the "nasty" genes that came from my father's side, but I lift my feet and find a thick web of DNA chains linking us, too- "cute," as you refer to your genes, and rotten ones alike.

I am pretty cute, sure. Thanks, mom, even though it is kind of self-congratulatory for you to say this, as we've established.

But Nature or Nurture? My fiercely independent spirit (which you take credit for, of course) used to think it could nurture itself entirely into what it wanted to be. Right.

I love you, Mom. Happy Mother's Day.