What's the expression? "Bad press is better than no press"? "Negative Attention is still attention"? "It's better to be memorable than forgettable"? Welcome to the world of Siobhan McDonough Chrisos, because any combination of those would be more than adequate in describing the attitude and attributes of my late mother. It's pretty well documented I can't spell and leave countless typos; however, the spelling of my mother's name is actually right. I can't count the number of times I picked up the home phone in my youth while someone asked to speak to "Sio-Ba-han" or "Sio-Ban" or even the very popular "Su-Hoban". You would have thought my mother was the descendant of Ghengis Khan from the way people butchered her name. So, for educational purposes, it's pronounced "Sha-Von".
I miss my mom, I really do. I have a strange way of showing it considering I never write about her and hardly ever talk about her, but it's hard for me to describe someone with a personality as complex as hers. The phrase, "Just try your best" is normally reserved for seven year old kids who suck at soccer but need some encouragement along the way. Normally, successful parenting requires more than trying, executing is preferred, but most of my mother's parenting approach was trial and error. Giving sound counsel, instruction, discipline, etc requires an organized mind, a systematic long term approach and clarity. Those weren't things my mom possessed in large quantities. Instead, she was manic and fragile, unabashed and brazen. She was funny yet chaotic, loving yet fiercely dependent. She was overwhelmed and under prepared for what it took to be a functional mom, but looking back I truly do see she "tried her best" whatever capacity that may have been in.
It's strange to me that in less than two years, I will have gone a third of my life without her. It will be even stranger when the day arises in which I've lived the majority of my life with her gone. I don't know what the nature of my relationship with her would be now if she was still here, yet I don't really dwell on it or speculate about it much. What I do have is an abundance of memories of her. These are some of those memories, they may come across as if I am painting a negative picture of her, and hell, maybe I am. But to me, these memories make me smile. They are just "Siobhan" in all her glory.
1. I once had a beetle crawl out from the inner cannals of my ear. That sucked. My mom didn't place it in there though; however, that was probably the second most traumatizing event as it relates to my ear. When I was six years old I was getting a haircut from some haircutting chain and as they were trimming around my ear the woman (God bless her) accidently cut my ear with the trimmer. She did not cut my ear off, nor did she perform a "Mike Tyson" and get the urge to bite my ear off. She probably doesn't like the taste or texture of cartilage. She simply nicked my ear a little. At the time it was 1994 and apparently my mother thought AIDS was rampant in inner Boston and that I would contract it from the equipment. Understandable if I was getting my haircut in Nigeria, not so much in the coastal US. When she noticed my ear was cut, she starting screaming "you nicked him! you nicked him!". So, she did what any nurturing and rational mom would do....she pulled me out of the chair, left the haircutting place, dragged me into the local grocery store walked right into the chemical aisle and poured bleach directly into my wound as well as in my ear. Just walked right in, opened a thing of bleach and in my ear it went. If you've never had bleach poured in or around your ear consider yourself lucky. May have been a tad overkill, but damnit I was sanitized. Naturally I use bleach alternative detergent now.
2. My mother loved thunderstorms. I know a lot of people that really feel at ease in the midst of a storm. The rain is soothing to them and provides a calming effect. Other people consider it a form of controlled chaos and relish in that. I remember a few different occassions when it would storm being home with my mom and sister. Looking at the rain is cool. Listening to it is even cooler. Opening up every window in the house, the door and shouting that Jesus is coming back...traumatizing. The left behind books weren't out yet. I didn't know the signs. I thought my mom was a meteorologist prophet. She would just stare outside as the rain came pouring in saying it was the Rapture. Really, because it just looked overcast to me. I just wanted to cover up my Sega Genesis so it didnt get wet. I always wonder if she was disappointed when the storm subsided and Jesus didn't appear in our front yard holding an umbrella.
3. Speaking of rain....one of the fundamental lessons of my youth was "to always wear a raincoat". I think I heard this expression in excess of three hundred times from the time I was seven till I was fifteen. You'd think my mom was really concerned about me getting wet and catching a fever, but this actually was a sweet 90's reference for using a condom. "Make sure you always wear a raincoat!" I think I learned about sex before I learned addition and subtraction. I certainly learned about contraceptives. Hell yeah my mom was about safe sex, but at eight years old I didn't necessarily understand the significance of wrapping my penis in a neon water protectant layer. Even when I was old enough to grasp it fully, she would still urge me on with raincoat references. If I'm ever having sex in a flood I think I will finally appreciate the reference.
4. Some of my favorite memories of my mom are ones where I think of when I saw her happy. Too often she was somber, locked away in her room for hours sleeping and fighting the battle of depression. If she was up she was often glossy eyed, sipping on some boxed wine or drinking beer, closed off from the world and her children. But there were times she was free spirited and sober, energetic and glowing. I might come downstairs to witness her dancing away in the kitchen, the sounds of the Temptations or Marvin Gay literally blasting away in the background as she stood smiling encouraging me to join in. She would leave me cards randomly on my bed apologizing for her mistakes, promising to get better and calling me "her knight in shining armor". We bonded and connected over TV soap operas and American Idol, cups of strong coffee and conversations about hats as the best accessories. Hats were to my mother what clocks are to Flavor Flav. She had one for every occasion. Cowboy hats? Check. Baseball hats? Check. Dude hats? Check. Wait, what is a dude hat? http://uncrate.com/stuff/kangol-herringbone-cap/ That is a picture of a gay man wearing a "dude hat". That's the name dubbed by my mother, don't you dare tell me that, is not in fact, comonly referred to as a "dude hat". She wore bandanas, big poofy hats, pointy hats. Fuck, my mom had more hats than the Cat in the Hat. It was the simplest of things that are the fondest of memories.
5. My mother had an innate fear of technology. As a result, she didn't get on the whole technology bandwagon. As a result, she had no idea how to work a modern computer. I think she got a sense of pride out of telling everyone she knew that she was "computer illiterate". She always told me that at some point I would have to teach her how to use one. "Well, the first step is you plug it in. The second step is that you turn this thingy on. You see this here? It's called a mouse. No, it's not a real mouse, you use it to navigate the screen." I didn't know how to teach anyone anything because to me it was so simple. But she was persistent and claimed I was the only one with the patience to teach her, we made tenative plans on a number of occassions but never went through with it. To this day, it actually makes me sad to think I never got to teach her to use one before she died.
6. I think it really pleased my mom when I got my first girlfriend, but mostly because it put her at ease that I wasn't, in fact, gay. It wasn't uncommon that my mom would confide in my sister that she thought I was gay. So seeing me with a girl really probably put her mind at ease. Or maybe she was disappointed, who knows. She certainly was no stranger to having gay friends, and wasn't one to judge their lifestyle at all. She was the type of person a gay man loves having as a best friend to go shopping with or gossip to. I think she just always wanted to be the really cool mom of the boyfriend to whoever I was dating. The hip and young mom who could be easily befriended and trusted. She would talk to me late at night asking about my relationship, giving me pointers on the female perspective and always seemingly genuinely interested in what was happening. Going back to the gay thing....I mean, I think I'm just going to have to deal with the fact that I'm one of those guys that people might assume is gay at certain points. I dress nice, work out a lot, spend a lot of time with guys that also do these things, I take a certain pride in personal hygiene. I've kind of just accepted this, but my mom also had some other weird ideas about activities I was involved in. I remember being thirteen and her just telling me I also smelled like pot or her telling my sister she thought I was smoking weed. I thought I smelled of axe deodorant body spray, I certainly had the entire lineup. Maybe I smelled like Tide Fresh Meadows laundry detergent or the smell of thirteen year old boy, but marijuana????? I had a lot of mechanical pencils in my pockets, not joints. I'm in my room playing video games, not packing a bowl. Oh well.....perception sometimes alluded her, or she just assumed the worst.
When I think of her, truly sit and think of her there are so many things that come to mind that I could fill countless pages with. Maybe I will one day, but these are just some. Despite her flaws and quirks, she loved me. Maybe she confided in me too much, relied on me in roles I shouldn't have had as a young boy, but she loved me whole heartedly. It's scary living a life with one parent. Always living in anxiety of losing the other and remembering the one that was lost. I don't know what it means to live a life that would make her proud, but she inspires me. She inspires me to love, and to smile, and to let loose and be free. She inspires me to live up to my potential like she wanted me to and to achieve things she couldn't do, and do it all in loving memory of her.
No comments:
Post a Comment