Let's talk frankly about you and your mother
Garrison Keillor
April 26, 2006
I'd like a word with you about your mother, and I want you to read this
column all the way to the end, otherwise I will slap you so hard your
head will spin.
I realize that Mother's Day is a fake holiday perpetuated by the
greeting card industry and the florists, but it's here to stay, so make the
best of it. The president is a fake, too, but we still pay our taxes.
And it's time you did something nice for your mother.
I bring this up well in advance of Mother's Day so you can plan a
little bit and not roll out of the sack on SUNDAY, MAY 14, and fritter away
the morning and then dash over to Mom's and on the way pick up a cheap
box of chocolate-covered cherries at the gas station, or a gallon of
windshield cleaner, or whatever you were planning to give her.
Cheap chocolates are not appropriate for your mother, nor is a bouquet
of daisies marked down 50 percent at the convenience store. What you
owe your mother is a sonnet. A 14-line poem, in iambic pentameter,
rhymed, just like Shakespeare's "When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes, I all alone beweep my outcaste state." Look it up. You can do it, if
you try.
Your mother loves you, she has loved you from Day 1, she loves you on
your good days and your bad. She was on her way to Broadway, and
Hollywood was taking a look at her when your father got her in a family way
and she put glamour and fame behind her and had you instead. Think about
it. All that pain, and then out you came, not the high point of her
day, believe me.
She changed your poopy diaper when the stench was such as to make
strong men dizzy. And when you hopped up and ran off, leaving a brown trail
behind you, she mopped that up too. At a certain age, you put
everything into your mouth--dirt, coins, small toys, cufflinks--and when she
stuck a finger down your throat, you refused to vomit. Nothing would come
up. All she could do was pour Listerine in you and hope for the best.
But if she tried to coax you to eat green leafy material, then you would
throw up quarts of stuff. And she'd clean it up and take you in her
arms and comfort you although your breath was rancid.
You were not a bright child. I realize that you think you were in the
accelerated group, and that was your mother's doing. Her great
accomplishment was to protect you from the knowledge of your own ordinariness.
The rest of us knew. You didn't. Nor did you realize the extent of your
bed-wetting. Three a.m., you sat in a stupor while Mom changed your
urine-soaked sheets, tucked you in, and sang you to sleep with "If Ever I
Would Leave You" from "Camelot."
She loved you through the dark valley of your adolescence, when you
were as charming as barbed wire. You surrounded yourself with sullen
friends who struck your mother as incipient criminals. Her beloved child,
her darling, her shining star, running with teenage jihadists, but she
bit her tongue and served them pizza and sloppy joes, ignoring the
explosives taped to their chests.
When you were 17, when other adults found you unbearable and even your
own aunts and uncles looked at you and saw the decline of American
civilization and the coming of a dark age of arrogant narcissism
unprecedented in world history, your mother still loved you with all her heart.
She loves you still today, despite all the wrong choices you've made.
Don't get me started. Go write your mother a sonnet.
It costs you nothing except some time and effort. Do not buy her
chocolate. She doesn't care for it. She only pretended to, for your sake. Do
not take her out to dinner. She has eaten plenty of dinners with you
and one more isn't going to be that thrilling. She might prefer to
snuggle up in a chair all by herself and watch "Singin' in the Rain" and have
a stiff drink. (You do know your mother drinks, don't you? Ever wonder
why?)
Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. Here's an idea for a first line:
"When I was disgraceful and a complete outcaste." You take it from
there.
