For Mom

Happy Mother’s Day, to everyone, but especially to all the mothers out there. Remember what Indiana Jones said back in 1957; you only get one.

Almost fifty-four years ago, my mom birthed me into this universe. Please do not hold that against her. You might notice that I don’t talk about my mother much. Well, that’s a very complex and personal issue. And respectfully, the more the public knows about your upbringing, the more they judge you, plain and simple.

Primarily, I don’t like to talk about my mother because doing so makes people sad. When I go into the details of our relationship as mother and son, I feel like I’m trying to score “pity points”. There are millions of people with far more tragic childhoods than my own. In fact, I don’t even look at mine as tragic; it’s just the way things played out. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and my mom got the worst of it.

So where do I begin? I guess at the beginning.

My mom’s name was Dolores. It means “sorrow”. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island in October of 1944, a “war baby”, just like her future son. Her family was full-blooded Italian; I have never, in my entire life, smelled anything as good as my grandmother’s kitchen in Flatbush. Not even the finest Italian restaurant has come close. Mom’s dad worked in the garment district of Manhattan, where I was born. Her grandma spoke only Italian, and did a lot of knitting and cooking, before she unfortunately passed away when I was very young.

I still remember her funeral, my first; someone gave me a figurine of a Smurf riding a bicycle, which I played with on the chair-rails of the hall, having no concept of the event’s seriousness. I was too wrapped up in wondering where a medieval creature would have scored a modern ten-speed. (It even had spokes! In PVC!)

So that would have been around 1979, or 1980, when I was seven or eight years old. I remember the funeral and the Smurf, but I can’t recall if my mom was there.

Mom and Dad were married in 1967. They honeymooned in Bermuda, where a barracuda bit my dad on the big toe. Mom was a New York art student, and I think this was back when Dad worked for UPS, before he became an ad exec on Madison Avenue. I came along in 1972, and the doctors told my parents that having another kid would be a dangerous idea. More on that in a bit.

As much as my dad encouraged me in expressing myself creatively, it was Mom who was the artist. She was the reason I started drawing and reading at the age of two. She decorated my bedroom with a parchment quote from Henry David Thoreau;

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

That was my mom. I saw her painting and making things (including books) and I followed suit. For a few years in the 1970’s, I had probably the best life a kid could ask for at the time. I drew my own books, Dad would have the pages laminated at his work, and the resultant home-made tome would be placed on the shelf by my grade school librarian. At the age of four, I attended a “Young Author’s Convention”, and throughout elementary school, I was formally classified as “gifted”. I took different tests and sat in different classes than most of the other kids. I was bullied accordingly. That’s not a bad thing, it’s part of a healthy educational ecosystem, in the right measure.

My first word wasn’t “mom” or “dad”; it was “car”. Such was the mammoth importance of the family vehicle in the mid-70’s. My dad’s prized 1959 Austin-Healey was in no way a “family car” (even though Dad and I often terrorized the neighborhood with it when I was tiny), so we acquired a sickly-yellow Chrysler 300, with an all-black interior and vinyl bench seats that would fricassee exposed flesh on contact in summer. My dad never forgave me for prying the chromed “Three Hundred” lettering off of the trunk with my four-year-old fingers, and then tossing it into the ivy that bordered our home when I feared getting caught. My boyhood dog (a beautiful adopted miniature collie named Muffin) was so well-behaved that she would poop in that ivy, because nothing ever returned from there.

There was also Atari, dozens of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels, and Chipwiches in the freezer. Once, briefly, I led an absolutely charmed life of snow-covered Christmases, dirt-bike ramps and barefoot pool parties. I would step out the door of my house, stomp one foot on the stoop, and Muffin would race around the boundary of the front yard, a grinning brown blur. She would do this until panting from exertion. We never knew why, and it never stopped being a riot.

I was I think about five years old when Mom started falling down. She had a cane for a while, but her legs kept giving out. Our house was on a hill, with concrete steps leading to the front door, and a winding staircase from the first to second floor, where the bedrooms were. I have an ancient memory of a bloody tooth on the sunroom carpet, after Mom took a particularly bad tumble.

My dad built a bathroom on the first floor, with its own shower, so that Mom didn’t have to use the stairs. Briefly, he installed hand controls in the Chrysler, so she could still drive, but this came to an end after a minor fender-bender in town. I still remember being on the floor under the dashboard, having slid there off the smooth bench seat with all the Chips Ahoy cookies (Mom’s favorite; I actually hated them). I was the only one who thought it was funny. No one was hurt, and the damage was negligible, because the Chrysler 300 is a battleship with wheels.

(We couldn’t take it to Safari, though, because the baboons would tear right through the vinyl roof and mutilate us.)

Mom did her best to be a mom after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her teeth became so damaged that they all had be pulled, and replaced with dentures. She started slurring her speech, talking more and more slowly, until finally she was confined to a wheelchair, as they used to say. They don’t say that nowadays, to protect the feelings of the wheelchair-bound. Niceties like that did not exist in the 1970’s. Everything was about acceptance and perseverance.

Once we made a family trip out of taking Mom to Florida, to see a man there who squeezed venom out of snakes in front of a crowd. This created a serum that cured my mother’s MS for short periods of time, but it would come back worse, and the serum was prohibitively expensive anyway.

Mom would have extreme leg spasms from sitting in a chair all day, even though she could no longer walk, so the doctors said that for her comfort, they would sever the tendons at the backs of her legs. This meant that even if a cure for MS were found, Mom would still never walk again. Mom was basically mentally retarded by this point, so she couldn’t really argue.

But that was it. That was when Dad and I knew that Mom was gone, and never coming back. Mom was now stuck in the house, in a wheelchair, chain-smoking, and pissing into a catheter bag. The sunroom was converted into a first-floor bedroom, Dad started coming home later and later from his work, then not at all, due to his increasing alcoholism. Sometimes there was a nurse; sometimes there was just some lady that answered an ad.

See… that’s the funny part in all this. When those of you who are young in 2026 think of the term “latchkey kids”, you probably assume it refers to children with parents who are frequently absent due to work. I grant you, that is often the case.

I was a latchkey kid because my mom turned from an indefatigably affectionate young woman into a miserable, slurring, shouting, addlepated, chain-smoking paraplegic with a catheter bag, who eventually had to be placed in a long-term care facility. My dad descended into full-blown alcoholism; once a cop who pulled him over told him “you should be dead” after seeing his breathalyzer results. He was usually either passed out on the couch or just not around. I was sent to therapists, both in school and private, a practice that would continue until I left for college.

That was my late 1980’s.

When I moved from New Jersey to Georgia in 1990, my dad and I were barely speaking. He came to my wedding in 1992, and from there we patched things up, but not without hiccups. He ended up crashing on the couch in my house, which was on the rural South Carolina property of my then-ladyfriend, this being after my divorce in 1995. He was, at the time, incapable of getting a job (for myriad “summer reasons”; summer valid, summer not), so we would visit local dumps and hunt for box fans to repair and pawn. This was around the time I published FINK, and started working in regional theatrical productions. Unfortunately, my dad relapsed, and I had to kick him off the property after I caught him with a plastic gallon of vodka. He’d also been keeping miniature bottles of Scope in his car, for consumption rather than freshness. This is the monster I have to constantly control. True alcoholics find a way. So I had to kick my own father out and send him packing back to Jersey, my baby sister whom he had bailed upon, and what they call mega rehab.

Before all that, when I was married, I experienced the onset of a personal attack from my mother’s sister, in the form of a series of typed letters. In the first of these letters she explained that because I abandoned my mother by moving to Georgia, I would never know real love from a woman. My relationships with women would always end in tears. I wasn’t aware that she felt anything like this. I thought we got along fine under the circumstances. I was off at college, becoming the person you see now. But as it turns out, she hated my guts, because in her view, I should have been the devoted son, by my mother’s side no matter what.

It really fucked with my head. It still does, to this day, over thirty years later. I told my dad about it, and he took the letter and said he’d handle it. Some time later I get another nasty letter, chiding me for “running to daddy”. Describing how I’m not a real man, and never will be. I think I was maybe twenty-one at the time. Dad told me just to send him any future letters unopened and not to worry.

So maybe that’s when my mom died, and my aunt was just lashing out in grief. I have no idea when my mom died or where she is buried or if she even is. My mom’s side of the family never told my dad. When he was in mega rehab, mom’s care was reorganized, and her folks moved her someplace where she later died. They all stopped speaking to us sometime prior.

When you visit a hospital in 2026, notice how prodigious the distractions are in the form of smartphones, in waiting rooms and all places wherein distraction is sorely needed.

Okay. What do you suppose we did in the 1980’s, while stuck waiting in hospital rooms that reeked of boiled chicken, stale cigarette smoke, and infected bladders? For hours, every Sunday morning, for years? As you stare at either what used to be your mom, or an ancient 14″ CRT television that only picks up two channels, with a remote that doesn’t work, even though it’s bolted to the nightstand? And you can’t leave, and if you act up, you will be beaten? Like, smacked around by a nurse, and not even your folks? (Dude, none of that never happened to me. I’m sure it happened somewhere, though.)

What would you do with yourself?

What would you do if the most precious person in your existence, your own mother, through no fault of her own, became someone you literally couldn’t stand to be around, literally couldn’t breathe around, literally became someone you couldn’t stand the sight, smell, or sound of? What if this happened during the first years of your life, and then sometime at the start of your adulthood, your mother vanished from your life altogether?

Have you ever smelled hot, fresh urine in a catheter bag, mixed with never-ending Marlboro smoke, in a closed room? How long would you want to linger in that space? What if the air outside smelled of honeysuckle and cookies baking, like my hometown’s did, due to its proximity to the Nabisco building? What if you’re a teenage boy, and your teenage crush lives only a few blocks away, and she smells delicious and has the biggest boobs in the whole school? For real, you should have seen these succulent beauties in a prom dress? We’re talking what, three decades and counting of exquisite jack fodder?

What then?

I did have a Game Boy, a gift for my confirmation at sixteen. That was one way of dealing with long visits with Mom in some awful facility a two-hour drive from our house, where no one says anything and everyone just silently waits until it’s time to go. I hated school for the most part; I never wanted to talk about it, nor did I have the wisdom to understand why. I just wanted to get away from people and make comics and video games. Later on I just wanted to fool around with girls. I got into theater specifically so I could kiss them. I got into art specifically to impress girls, and because they let you draw them naked.

My mother wasn’t able to be there for me and teach me about girls/women, and my father was only occasionally forthcoming while I went through puberty, so I had to work everything out myself regarding females. It’s all been trial and error. Nobody taught me how to dress (other than functionally), what to do with my hair, or how to cook food. I didn’t know how to cook until my forties. It carries a flavor of shame much like not knowing how to read. I was never able to admit it to a woman. Why would I? That’s like saying you don’t know where the g-spot is. Yeah, women totally hate it when you prepare food for them. Women hate being dazzled by exotic and/or spontaneous dining experiences. It gives them “the ick”, right? Didn’t Charlize Theron say something to that effect recently?

Where was I? Oh yeah. Mom.

It is impossible to put into words either spoken or written how it feels to miss a mother as much as I miss mine. If your mother is alive, count yourself among the luckiest stars in the sky. The void left by the loss of one’s mother, exacerbated by a lack of any and all closure, is something you must never experience. Your mother is irreplaceable. You began inside her, and blasted out of her hoo-ha into cold hard reality like a Honey Baked Ham. I myself would not exist as you see and know me without my mom blasting me out of her capooch looking like the got dang Michelin Man. Our life together shaped me as a person, but the circumstances of our parting have caused me a lifetime of pain and anguish.

I got to tell my dad I loved him before he died. I didn’t get that privilege with my mom. Whether or not that’s my fault, it doesn’t change its reality. A lot of people like myself, black sheep who casually abuse substances, are trying to dull the pain of a hurt like this at their center. A hurt so lethal, all they want is to keep it at bay for another 24 hours; a gaping wound they don’t want anyone to notice. Because if anyone did notice, they’d have to relive the origin of the hurt. And that takes time, effort, and a desire to relive it in the first place.

Tell your mom you love her. Happy Mother’s Day. And to my own mom, wherever she might be:

Thanks for literally everything.