Two days ago I shared a part of an old essay here. I don’t think the essay is going to see print (total honesty: I submitted it to a collection edited by some friends from graduate school and I think the project bottomed out when they had to search for work, something I totally understand). I wanted to share another piece of it, since it is likely to ever see the light of day otherwise.
This piece has a great deal to do with worth. I haven’t ever made a secret of where I came from. My mother graduated from high school mid-year as a senior so she could marry my father and leave her hometown, also my hometown, also the town where we live now. My father was a drop out who got his GED later, was a Marine and later a cop. He wasn’t a smart man, and his family were all a generation or two removed from fleeing relocation, so we didn’t have deeply planted roots. My mother was essentially adopted, raised by a family she wasn’t a part of. So my stock, as far as it can be traced, were deeply blue collar poor folk with little education.
The pressures of raising me as a single mother and surviving as a single woman in the 1980s took a physical toll on my mother, as did my father. He was not a good person. But my mom always worked as hard as she could, always did everything she could for me. Her efforts are the reason I was able to do the things I’ve done and the reason I have my education. She’s also the reason I get absolutely furious when someone puts me down because of something that is either part of me being from a poor family, being native, or being first generation. I happen to work at a University that has scholars who are generations deep in the schooling game, with degrees from Yale and Cambridge and whatnot. I do my job as well as if not better than they do with my one-step-from-community college base degree and my state school PhD. That’s not arrogance. They often think-even say- they are better than me. That’s fine. I actually pity them, as they seem to need that.
But if any of you talk trash on my mother– as one colleague once did when I mentioned that she went back to college in her 50s while I was finishing my BA– I will rain the fire of a thousand hells upon you. I will fuck you up.
My mother thinks she embarrasses me, or that I am ashamed of her. Quite the opposite. I see very clearly how difficult it was to be her and to live the life she lived. She did everything she could, always worked her hardest, until life just ground her down. I’m still proud of her, though, even if all we get to do is converse about the news and TV and play with our dogs and such. I’ll always be proud of her.
As evidence of that, here’s that segment of essay I mentioned. I wrote it during the brief portion of my PhD studies where my mother tried to live alone– disabled and poor–because her piece-of-shit therapist told her she had to “butt out” of my life. It’s a memory of the time at the end of my masters degree studies, right before she had the first of the two surgeries that left her more disabled than before.
I’ll let the story do its talking.
–first segment–
My mother used to tell me this story.
When I start an anecdote like that, people tend to expect to hear something about wolves or spiders or nature or great warriors with tomahawks—seriously, someone said to me “will there be a tomahawk in this story?”—but that’s not what is coming.
You see my mother is a storyteller, but she’s also a savvy rhetor. She knew her audience. And a three-year-old Phill Alexander, even if he was starting to ask pressing questions, didn’t want to hear about spiders that carried fire on their back.
The story, which had numerous small revisions and permutations over time, went a little something like this.
There was this fellow, his name was Chrono the Time Stealer, who was leaping back and forth through time, changing reality and messing up people’s lives. I realized, months ago, that JJ Abrams stole my mother’s story for the FOX series Fringe, but I doubt we can get residuals. Because Chrono was such a problem, the Super Friends (audience awareness!) came to stop him, but using his dastardly powers he’d move them several days into the future and yank them back to the present, so they were now tired and weak from hunger. That’s when our hero burst onto the scene, and lil’ Phill would quickly cook up a batch of his patented hot dogs—it would be much later when I’d learn to cook food that wasn’t meat in tubes—to feed the Super Friends and save the day.
As far as stories go, it’s not my mother’s best. Were we to sit around the campfire, it’s not the one I’d pick to represent her to you. Even if, years later, a Sci-Fi show did basically steal its premise. But that story is maybe the most valuable piece of my childhood. Wherever we were, whatever was happening, if we had to live for a week in someone’s sun porch while looking for a new home, or if we had to live in the car, that story would surround me in comfort and warmth. It’s the greatest home I’ve ever known.
–then, another segment later—
My mother, her whole life a craftsperson and at one point a master seamstress, took up a new art several years ago, when we were evicted after her second divorce, something to make our gloomy little shack feel more like we actually existed there. She restores Norwegian troll dolls, which she then either sells on eBay to support her hobby or adds to her collection. Some might find it odd that a fifty-something collects the same toys she collected as a child, but one glance at the action figures that litter my computer desk—okay, my computer coffee table, since I don’t actually have a desk in my new place— serves as a reminder about glass houses and black kettles and other clichés that my instructors have told me not to invoke in text no matter how appropriate they might be.
It’s odd, over the years, how Mom’s developed these sort of living-leather fingertips. I can vividly remember the first time she made a mistake with the Xacto knife and the consequent hour of clean- up, the general fright, the overwhelming fear that comes from that much blood being spilled on a coffee table –the same one that is now my “desk,”—and the lengthy discussion about Tetnus shots and how clean a hobby knife actually is. You could apparently eat off one, but I really don’t recommend that. There’s probably still a white line scarring the middle of Mom’s thumb pad. It’s the thumb she broke as a child, the one that pops out of socket and can lay across her palm as if it was meant to disappear when she closed her hand, the one that has freaked me out since I was a little kid.
She has no fingerprints. It’s strange.
She names the dolls she creates, giving them short backstories so that when she sells them, she can create a little certificate of authenticity with the name and a poem—the story they take to their new owner, their new life. Their stories are as varied as their looks, identities drawn from a life of observation and of entertaining, challenging, and probably sometimes begrudgingly “handling” life with a child who is as stubborn as the day is long and as curious as the sun is bright.
I wanted to both support her and be a part of her hobby, so I started collecting troll horses. I name the horses, and mine get voices and attitudes to go with their new names, so they can sit around and tell stories or do little skits for my amusement. Sometimes when mom is working I’ll converse—as one of the horses, of course— with whatever she’s restoring at the time, her printless fingers gliding across the surface of a face, through woolen hair, over glass eyes.
I am never more comfortable, even as an adult, than I am watching my mother work. I could sit for hours, falling asleep on the couch, regardless of the circumstances of my life at the time. Or the location of the couch. Or the nature of the work. Just watching her hands dart here and there, watching as something was formed from nothing, or new from old. It is beautiful in a way that even my words are weak to describe.
—
Go hug your mother after you read this.
And think about what constitutes worth. I’m willing to bet the people you envy most are actually worthless at the end of the day. What do they have that can’t be bought? My mother has something that’s never been for sale, and most people wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.