“I am your mother.” A phrase that means, do as I say because I went through 20 hours of labor to eventually have a c-section, thus, you owe me.
I should have known something was up with her on day 1 of my moving back in when I found my bed covered with TY Beanie Babies.
After finishing university a year early, backpacking through Central America, moving to Atlanta for a series of unpaid internships, sporatic freelance work with a steady job as a front desk agent at a hotel. I made the call I knew I would and, officially, do regret.
“Of course you can move back in, I am your mother.” For years my mother and I played this game where she pretends she loves me and I pretend I don’t hate her; so, the welcome was expected.
After 3 days of cooked meals, knocking on my bedroom door before entering, I was waiting for our hate-hate undercurrent relationship to rise to sea-level. I don’t remember what time it was, but I was well into my James Franco dream when I began to feel warm and a gentle stroke across my face and back. I opened my eye to see my mother’s face. She was lying right beside me, underneath my covers, stroking me. I made no sudden movements.
“Mother. No.”
“Lisa, pumpkin.”
“Mother, you have to remove yourself from my bed.” I try to phrase things as politely as possible because, well, we’re Black. Not the “new hairstyle every week” kind of Black. No. We’re the “we didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he was Black, we voted for him because we’re not allowed to be republicans” kind. Maintaining a respectful tone towards your parents determined whether or not you got dinner, smacked, or kicked out. “Mother, please return to your bedroom.” She rolled herself out and stood over me with her arms crossed. I re-focus my eyes to her new position in the moonlight. “Mother, are you naked?!”
“You know I sleep in the nude.”
“In YOUR bed!”
“Don’t act like you’ve never seen boobs before!” She grumbles as she stomps her 5’4” buxom body down the hall.
My staunch Christian, New Yorker, single parent mother having to raise an art kid in the sunshine state had to be difficult. When I played Danny in my high school’s production of Grease, I was so good, she didn’t realize it was me until the casting call. She didn’t talk to me the whole ride home. I chucked up the midnight stroking situation to the fact that my dog, whom she cared for while I was at university, died a week before I moved back in. I also chucked it up to the fact that she was attending a new church that taught love instead of damnation. She wanted to be my friend, though I’d been tricked before. When I was 17, I’d hit a new low that was so noticeable, even my mother, who had a strict no crying policy, allowed me to tear as she listened to a few of my problems. Once I was done, she leaned in, put her hand on my shoulder and suggested, “Have you tried alcohol?” When she found me sipping some of her White Zinfandel she told me I was going to Hell.
I did my best to stay under the radar. I scrubbed the bathrooms, mopped the floors, cleaned the kitchen, and mowed all 2 acres of our front yard. I had dinner done by the time she got home. I stayed in on weekends to watch the latest bootleg she confiscated from her middle school students. I felt like a housewife or a slave. I decided to have some old friends over, but after being constantly interrupted by my mother who wanted to know whom all they were dating and who I was not, we decided to go out.
“Lisa, you’re going to a club this time of night?” The clock read 10pm. “How can afford going to a out when you don’t even have a job and your living with your mother.”
At this point, I found myself nostalgic for those middle school days when the cool kids nicknamed me, Fatty, or that day when I almost died.
On my way out the door she shouts from the living room, “Lisa, don’t forget your inhaler.”
“What?”
She shows up to the door in a sheer housecoat and places a shoestring necklace with an inhaler attached to it around my neck.
“Wait,” she tucks the inhaler in my low V-neck top. “You don’t want it sticking out like that. It looks gay.”
Oh, my mother tries to use terminology she doesn’t understand, that just so happens to be slightly offensive.
I finally got 3 part-time jobs causing me to leave the house by 6am and return by 10pm due to the Florida bus system (my car broke down 2 months after I moved back in). I woke up on my day off to find a note on my door that read, Now that you’re working, I’d like the rent for the last 3 months you’ve been here. Also, the kitchen is dirty. The note enclosed the water bill. I wondered if this passive/aggressive note was in direct response to the fact that I refused to go to her women’s church convention whom she kept saying her girlfriends and their daughters were going to attend. I told her I had to work. She responded, “What About Jesus?”
This morning I woke up to my mother sitting on my bed offering me a cup of warm tea.
“Lisa, I want to talk to you about something”
I sat up and immediately poured the tea that was in my mouth, back into the cup. She pushed a book between us that had a half naked boy and a half naked girl on the cover.
“I want to talk to you about-“
“Mother, we’re not having this conversation.”
“It’s important. Every parent should talk to their child about-“
I suddenly realized the last 5 years of my life never happened to my mother. Successfully living in an apartment off-campus for 3 years, 4 hours away from home didn’t happen. Paying all of my bills by myself for 5 years didn’t happen. That road trip my girlfriends and I took when we drove the perimeter of FL camping out on all the beaches, didn’t happen. Living in a foreign country for a year, didn’t happen. And this is what my life turned into: sitting in a room with Spice Girl and US Soccer Team posters on the walls, sleeping in Rainbow Bright bed sheets with my 58-year-old mother wanting to talk to me, age 24, about intercourse.
“Mother, I know what… it is.”
“How do you know? Did those god-barren schools teach you?”
“Um…yes? No?” I didn't like this game.
“Did you learn it from those internet shows you watch?”
Yes. “No.”
“Listen, Lisa, if you want to be a lesbian-.”
“What? No...” I violently shake my head side to side. “No…No, please don't do this, Jesus, please make it stop.”
My mother jumps close to my face, “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to you.”
She leans back and crosses her arms.
“I am your mother.”
