twenty-something

Remember: he's fifteen. And he's my brother. So back off.

Tonight I shared a bit of my writing with my mother. Not just any writing, but a bit about her.

Talk about feeling vulnerable. I don't think I've let my mom read much of my stuff before. Not because she's judgemental or anything, but just because. But she's been asking about what I've been writing, and so thus I chose to tell her about my 90s memoir, "90s-Something." She's been full of question regarding the piece, particularly how she'll be portrayed (all this worry, and the woman hasn't even read Running With Scissors). She reminded me that when it's published, I won't be able to prevent her from reading it. (I chose not to mention this blog to her at that point.)

So I shared. She cried. I cried. It was very special.

Here's the piece we read:

"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.