twenty-something

"I remember Mama." What is that from? he thinks. It's something, he knows, from something. He hopes its Maya Angelou, or something else with cred, with balls, and not some old X-Men comic book -- which, deep down, he figures it probably is. But he does remember Mama, his Mama, even though he's never called her that before. But whenever he reflects on that woman, those three words pop into his head. He always sees himself saying it in a southern drawl, his hair a Golden Retriever blonde, his vehicle a red pick-up truck, and his mother one of the Designing Women. He doesn't like this fantasy one bit.

His Mama -- the real one, alive and well today in 21st Century Vermont -- would say that this was probably a repressed memory of a past life. See, his mother died on the Titanic before she was reincarnated as the daughter of an Ex-Communicated Divorcee who named her after herself -- Martha Sue. She whole-heartedly believes this because she can't watch more than five minutes of the Leonardo DiCaprio love story without crying. Apparently, her tears were different than those of the theater full of sobbing women her son had seen the film with during high school. She was a Parochial School Ex-Pat, pregnant at 18, and now she watched John Edwards every day -- and she believed.

Her son grew up Godless, or at least mostly so. Raised by two women -- the two Martha Sues, who'd both been rejected by the Catholic Church and their men -- religion hardly had a place in the Harvey home. Harvey, her father's name and, for then, her son's. It was a Godless, manless, house, and he was the center of the universe.

He remembers Mama. She was his best friend, and he was hers. They would take roadtrips to Burlington to see his aunt, her sister, in their baby blue Dautsun hatchback. In that car, he learned to love music, how to sing along. John Cougar Mellencamp. Phil Collins. Huey Lewis and the News. She would always get quiet during Mike + The Mechanic's "Living Years." One time she cried and, when he asked, told her son that she was thinking about her grandfather.

He remembers Mama. He remembers hating her. She would promise him things and then renege. He'd make her mad and she's say, "I don't have to like you. I have to love you."

He likes having a young mother, always has. He likes that he can say his mother is 42, especially when most his peers have parents in their 50s, 60s now. But most people can do math. Quick, in their heads, they subtract 24. They come up with 18 and questions. He hates when they ask.

She hasn't been herself for two years now, but then again, neither has her son. She's admitted it, though. That something's been wrong, that she's been crazy, been "a bitch." She apologized. She doesn't know what's wrong, exactly. But it's something.

She's sick, too. She told him today. Melanoma, they say. "A very serious form of skin cancer," says the Internet. She thinks, maybe, that's the cause of everything. That tiny little mole, that piece of cancer, maybe that's what's been making her nuts. Maybe her whole body, his mother thinks, has been working on that one little thing and she didn't know it.

His crazy mother, the hypochonriac, went to the doctor, having convinced herself she had Lupus. And she comes out diagnosed with cancer.

Her distant son doesn't want to admit it, but he's scared.

[This post's picture is oddly the only one I could find of my mother and I together on my computer. It's from my high school graduation in '98 -- a rare posting of a self-picture here.]