por tu madre

Flowers. A phone call. A meal out. A card. A clock tower and a rifle. Cheap consolations for the permanent disfigurement you have caused your mother.

For those of you who celebrate Mother's Day, this is the day! Get out there and let your favorite mom know just how much you care. This is your only chance to do so. Even if your mother has passed on or hasn't talked to you in twenty years because you're a lesbian, this is the day where, if you wanted to, you could reach out to her.

I am not as close to my mother as most people. I have never known that close bond or the warmth that others tell me they share with their mothers. My mother and I pretend, but at the end of the day - she just doesn't like me and I don't like her. I guess we try to be pleasant in some hope that perhaps something could come of it, but at this point in our relationship we only seem to be regressing.

I used to think it was me. Was it something that I had done or something I could change that she didn't like? I wandered the earth always feeling that I had done her wrong for most of my life until I figured out that she was the problem, not me. That didn't take the sting out of it, but it helped me realize that it wasn't my fault and I should just let it go.

Here's the story.

She was born several months after her own father had died. Her mother was destroyed by his death. My mother entered the world surrounded by as much emotional turmoil as one child could. She would spend her childhood as an afterthought to her mother's need to find a husband. Her mother remarried four times and had three more children. My mother was left to her own devices and she found peace in the pages of books. She never reached out to the rest of her family and therefore she never grew close to, or become a part of, the family. To this day, I have only briefly met one of her sisters - once.

My mother grew to be a very smart, but also very shy girl. She grew up lost in a world of books and an active imagination. She had huge aspirations and she could see her future laid out before her. Then she met the man who would redefine the course of her life - My father.

She was pregnant at 17 and a lock for a college scholarship when she dropped out of high school and forced to get married. Her childhood dreams were dashed and for the first time in her life, her future was out of her control.

He was an unsightly looking little baby and the family and friend response to him was shrouded with shame and scandal. If it was his looks or the sentiments of a more conservative generation causing the shame and scandal, we'll never know. However, for a normally shy and self-contained girl, this was just the blessing that she needed to keep the world away from her. She regressed even further, but now she had a partner she could share it with. Her husband was a stranger in his own marriage and he could have cared less. However, mother and son - They were completely inseparable.

An ugly, shy, quiet little boy and his understanding mother. Her marriage was a farce and there was just as much physical contact between her and my father as there was distance. They didn't have much to say to each other. He was looking for a different world, and she didn't want to be in it. So, it's by some miracle that a second son was born just a little over two years after the first. Neither the father nor the mother could explain the second child. Miracle or not, I didn't enter the world a wanted baby. Sadly, the scandal that shrouded the first child's birth and kept the relatives away was lost. This time around, family was everywhere and there was nothing but praise and acceptance for the second child from everyone. Everyone, that is, except the parents themselves.

I was a big baby. 11 pounds, all lungs, and I was louder than a Banshee loaded up on caffeine. I had a full head of blond hair in a family with a two hundred year history of brunettes. A charming yet devious smile and my relatives couldn't stop doting on me. I was an extremely social creature and this didn't sit well with the established calm, private and reclusive nature of the world I entered. From the start, I had an uphill battle. The phrase "I just gotta be me" was created for me, and it would be a refrain that would echo through my life forever.

My mother never got that well deserved college scholarship, but she did finally go to college. She got her GED and then worked very hard to put herself through pharmacy school. Her marriage ended and she found herself in a new one in no time. This marriage was a complete departure from the first and the two men couldn't be more opposite. This time around, she went with the grain and married a more stable, more acceptable, extremely anxious and shy man with a promising future as a doctor. He also happened to be ten years her senior. She had high hopes that things were going to work out this time.

I grew to resemble my birth father in both appearance and behavior, which caused a lot of friction in the family. My birth father was the man she silently blamed for her early misfortunes and a being reminded of him on a daily basis burnt her toast on both sides, if you know what I mean. It also didn't help that I didn't share any of her interests or appreciate her dreams. We were at odds and she expressed her sentiments often.

We kept our distance from each other and we never found a balance with each other. Eventually the second marriage ended and it was decided that I should leave too. It took me barricading myself in a basement for four days with a gun before she sent me packing.

That was the last time we were ever a family. On the flight south, I cried in the bathroom the entire time.

I moved to the south and she and my brother moved out west. They found new digs and isolated themselves even further from the world. At 30 she finally realized that she was running out of time to live out her life long dreams, but through her son all dreams could be achieved. So she redirected her passions and focused all of her attention onto him. No one would ever come between them again. Not the military, not marriage, not the law or even another son.

I moved in with my grandmother and my birth father. Life moved on and I didn't notice that I had never called my mother or that she never called me. I went to visit her three times, every time the visit ended so poorly - once in violence - that the distance between us only grew wider until finally we just stopped talking to each other altogether. Even when I had a heart attack at the age of 17, she didn't call or come to visit. She thought it was a ploy to get more attention.

I got married and she appeared several months later for a visit after much prodding. Upon arrival she told my wife to leave me and that I was a shit. I'm not sure, but maybe that's why my marriage fell apart...Who knows.

My brother and I have never been close. We tried, but it just didn't work either. Who knows why. We were trying when he went to prison and again when he was trying to find work, but all our efforts were meaningless. I think he views me in the same light that my mother does.

My birth father died and suddenly the need to be a family came over all of us. I reached out to my mother and she reached out for me. For the next six years efforts were made, but just when things looked like they were going to show promise, something happened and it all ended. The setbacks began to outweigh the strength of our willpower and now the only thing that remains is just forced pleasantries and little else.

That brings us to today. Do I call and compromise my ethics, or do I just forget this day and continue to tell myself that she's dead? Do I owe her anything?

Happy Mother's Day to all of you out there who have earned it and deserve it. I have never sent a card, made that call or sent flowers...And I doubt that I ever will.