mothers – Stories That Are All True

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

Diet Coke.

Diet Coke is my least favorite diet on the market, but I’ll still drink it like water if it’s available because it was my mother’s favorite. She flirted with Dr Pepper, but Diet Coke was her one true love. One year, Lindsay got us Diet Coke sweatshirts and we wore them to the cemetery to sit with mom and take a picture. It sounds weird, but the things you do when your parents die are all unique to you. You’ll have your own weird things.

For instance, maybe your mom baked.

My mother made my birthday cakes every year and she made a point to go all out on the decorations. From the pictures, I remember Holly Hobby when I was either one or two. Others included Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan, and a Milky Way cake that she somehow messed up that made it even more delicious than it would have been otherwise and because it was a mistake, I couldn’t recreate it if I tried. Guess you had to be there.

I wouldn’t say that my mother was a cook, because she didn’t enjoy it the way I do. She didn’t take pleasure in looking at recipes or finding new ways to use flavor. I think if there’s anything I miss about our future, it’s all the things I would have liked to do rather than the things that already happened. She was only 65 years old when she died. She had retired the last May, and died October 2nd. So, she basically died before the shock of not having to go to work every day even wore off.

So, anything I would have been able to teach her after she retired regarding what I’d learned in my makeshift culinary school (my ex-wife and all the other chefs who “raised me”) became a one way communication after that date. I still tell her all that stuff, she’s just challenged to reply. I talk to her when I’m cooking the most, because that’s our traditional time to talk.

I’d be doing my homework at the bar that looked into the kitchen while she was prepping the food. So, now I am both prepping the food and doing my homework (writing) in my head. It’s not the system for teaching my mother to cook that I would have preferred, but it works. She’s getting better every day. Turnabout is fair play. She has always and continues to remember to teach me to use English when I forget. It’s efficient. Just because she can’t talk back doesn’t mean she’s not here. She very much talks back. It’s just responses I’ve made up in my head based on my 40-ish years around her. I cannot remember how old I was, really.

I don’t remember anything about that year. From October to October was a complete blur. I leaned on Supergrover a lot back then, because I didn’t want to be seen in public in pain. So, I wrote about my pain instead. I internalized all of it, and yet I didn’t keep it inside my own echo chamber, either. I just grieved very, very quietly. Grief for my mother had to come in stages, because it took seeing her in her casket for me to believe that she was really dead.

I had just talked to her for two and a half hours two days ago, so it just didn’t seem possible logically (it absolutely was possible very logically, I was just a grieving child.). We also didn’t really have an on the ground relationship. We visited each other a few times a year except for the few times I lived in Houston as an adult, which was not a lot in comparison to how old I am now. I wouldn’t even take back my most current move to have more time with her if I could, because more time with her wasn’t necessarily better. We found our groove by not living in the same city. She liked talking on the phone and hearing about my life. I am not sure she liked coming to my house. I think my partners made her uncomfortable, and I am being very kind to both parties. It wasn’t dislike on either my parters’ or my mother’s part. It was fear of doing anything wrong, so let’s just not say anything at all.

To me, this is genuine, true homophobia. The fear of doing something wrong in front of a queer person, so you don’t do anything. You isolate them by not willing to just be scared and show up. Or ask questions so that your next interaction isn’t as awkward. Homophobia is not loud. That’s just people being angry bigots in the streets over nothing, and the people it “affects” the most are people who don’t know any queer people and have only been taught the party line. To be homophobic is to know you have fears and discomfort. To be homophobic without being a bigot means being willing to tell someone you’re uncomfortable and hopefully learn more until you’re not.

I don’t know how my mother would have felt about poly, but it doesn’t weigh on me because I didn’t live up to her fairy tale for me in the first place, and that VHS tape had been running in her brain since 1972, when she first started thinking about having a child and wanting a daughter. By the time I was born in 1977, I had a Beautiful Memory Picture I was tearing down before it even got built. It fucked up her program when I came out as gay, and I can’t apologize, but I can empathize.

This happens less and less frequently now, but I came out in 1990, and that’s just communication from me. It’s not like other people didn’t have eyes.

I don’t have hatred for homophobia. It took me quite a few years to accept the fact that I was gay, and I still have moments of internalized homophobia because that’s the world we live in and continue to make small progresses towards changing. I do have hatred for bigotry. Come at me with anger and I’ll tune you out.

Show me that you’re scared, and I’ll respond.

I will listen while I pour you a Diet Coke.

Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you.

My Chucks have taken me most places in life for the last 10 years because I discovered I could stay upright in them. Not only that, they look good with everything, as Kamala Harris has shown you for many years. However, I cannot do an entire entry on one pair, because I don’t have enough memories. However, I do remember all the days I’ve worn Chuck Taylor’s.

I always had knock-offs from Payless as a kid, which always threw me off and not because other kids made fun of me. All my friends were also obsessed with Payless, more so when they got Airwalk (I won’t wear any other brand of flip-flop).

It was that I’m a stickler for design.

The fonts weren’t right, the lines weren’t right, the rubber vamp was too large, etc.

As an adult, my first pair was brown leather. I got them at Ross when they were the last pair in another woman’s hands. She was buying them for her nephew and didn’t think they’d fit. I asked her if I could have them, very nicely even though I would have cut a bitch. She said, “sure,” and I got shoes that made me look like I was in a very famous old basketball movie…….

Eventually, I wore through the soles, and I got some brown canvas Chuck 2s. They had more padding and better tread, but they didn’t look the same as the original.

And now we’ve arrived at a moment I hadn’t thought of in a long time. It took my breath away.

I had black Chucks with black rubber so that they weren’t noticeable as sneakers. Therefore, I was wearing them at my mother’s graveside service, because it was muddy and I didn’t want to wear my good shoes. Mud got all over them.

I never washed them again. Mud sat in the cracks of my tread for months, and stained the sides. Eventually, it wore off. I’d like to believe it chose the moment it knew it could leave.

I wore my mother’s sneakers to her funeral. The only reason I changed into my own was that those were my good shoes, worthy of protection. I wore them in honor of our close connection to Oprah Winfrey.

One of the classic stories from the Oprah Winfrey show is a woman who went to some sort of rummage sale where celebrities had given things away. She bought a pair of Oprah’s shoes because as she said on the show, “I wanted to stand in your shoes until I could stand on my own.” Not a dry eye in the house. Everybody went into the ugly cry for a second, even Oprah.

When I did my mother’s eulogy, I stood in her shoes. At the graveside service, I could stand in my own. I’m sure it looked a little ridiculous because they were too big. I didn’t care. I kept them until the tread wore off because they were useful when I was wearing extra layers of socks in the winter. But you don’t wear shoes without tread in the winter. I fall on my ass enough.

For new readers, the setup is that my mother was a preacher’s wife, and after the divorce, a choir director and pianist/organist until she died. The first line of the eulogy was, “this is the first funeral Carolyn Baker’s ever been to where she wasn’t working.” The crowd broke up, and it was my intention to bring some much needed levity into the room.

I could do that because I stood in her shoes.

Besides, if she’d watched a video of the funeral, she would have laughed until she cried and thought, “accurate.” It was problematic, but luckily I got it right, that her last name was Baker. It wasn’t hard to remember that she took her husband’s name. It was hard to remember that she gave away mine, the name I’d called her since I was born.

And bought me my first pair of shoes at all.