Mother Lover

Happy Mother's Day to all the nurturing figures in our lives - Mothers, Grandmothers, Aunts, Mothers-in-Law, Step-Mothers, Teachers, People of any gender who provide your primary source of love and support, all y'all.  I don't count myself among you nurturing individuals, and I don't know how any of you do what you do (although I did receive a group text from some former colleagues wishing everyone on the thread a happy Mother's Day...at 5:49 this morning...so I kind of know what it feels like to be woken up at an astonishingly disrespectful hour in the name of motherhood, so where's my breakfast in bed, dammit?)

But especially, happy Mother's Day to MY mom for not just tolerating but actually loving me for all these long years.

Below is the lightly edited transcript of an open mic comedy set I performed last year on a Monday night, the day after Mother's Day:

The sentiment is sincere, the means of expression is questionable

So I’m late...not with my period, ew you guys.  Yuck.  No, I’m late with my topic, which is Mother’s Day.  But it’s cool, because I’m going to be honoring my mom tonight and she’s used to me having no respect for her time.  I was born 10 days late after 24 hours of labor...so fully cooked, in fact, that I actually pooped in the birth canal.   And then I inhaled it.  Not inhaled as in, caught a whiff. Inhaled as in, it was the 1980s, I was born with a rolled up Jackson in one hand and a mirror in the other.  

Fun fact.  I was one of those meconium aspiration babies.  If you’re not a medical professional, meconium aspiration is when a baby defecates on its way down the birth canal, and then while descending that magical shit-n-slide, somehow gets a big ol' lungful of doodoo.  Not unlike a visit to any other water park.  So I’ve been full of shit since the minute I was born.  Before, technically.  

I really love my mom.  She’s pretty much my best friend.  She’s kind of also my only friend, but even if I had others, I feel like she’d still be pretty high up there.  She always laughs at my jokes, even when I’ve managed to alienate everyone else I know with my dumpster fire of a personality.  She’s like, genetically obligated to tolerate me, but still, I appreciate it.  

My mom is inspiring.  She’s an electrician, so she works in a male dominated field.  You don’t want to fuck with a bitch who could electrocute you if she wanted to.  She raised me as a single mom, and she’s also a total badass feminist.  She slapped her boss across the face for sexually harassing her - in the 70s!  She wasn’t hashtag metoo, she was just ME.  Me, and my hand bitch slapping your ignorant ass.

She’s super supportive and caring, which I appreciate now, but when I was growing up I felt like she was being overprotective.  I guess I’ve gotten used to that and learned how to navigate her tendencies.  For example, even though I’m 32, married, and live 10 hours away from her, she still makes me let her know I’ve arrived safely whenever I’m traveling somewhere.  But it’s no big deal to just text her, so I’m always like “Hey mom, I’m still not dead” and then she responds with the crossed fingers emoji and the dollar sign with wings emoji.  I have no idea what that means, but I have been getting a lot of mail about a life insurance policy I didn’t sign up for, so I’m thinking it’s time to ask some questions.

I’d like to think that what I’m doing up here right now is all my mom’s fault.  Not for lack of attention, because god knows I had more than enough of that as an only child.  No, I’m here because when I was 6 years old, my mom taught me a truly life-changing lesson about sarcasm.  

If you’ve spent any time at all with little kids you know that small children are very literal.  That’s why joking around with anyone under the age of, I don’t know, 8, revolves around poop and fart jokes and physical comedy - they don’t understand the concept of saying the opposite of what you mean for comedic effect.  I spent a lot of time with my grandmother as a kid so I acted like a 65 year old woman trapped in a 6 year old’s body, and I guess my mom forgot about my natural cognitive development on this one fateful night.  

What happened was, I got up to pee in the middle of the night and there was a cricket hanging out in the middle of the bathroom floor between the door and the toilet.  I had recently endured a terrifying encounter with a scorpion under similar circumstances, and was convinced all insects were locked and loaded with venom, and definitely conspiring to kill me when my pants were around my ankles.  So I backed away slowly and crept into my mom’s room, shook her awake, and said “Mom, mom, there’s a cricket in the bathroom and I have to tinkle, you gotta kill it!”  To which she replied, “Oh just wet the bed,” turned over, and went back to sleep.

What was a hyper-obedient, literal-minded child with a painfully full bladder to do?

How many of you think this is a tale of courage, and I master my fear of the cricket and use the potty like a big girl?  

Ok, how many of you think I was a complete asshole, and I pissed the bed like I was told to do, and maybe should have been evaluated for Aspergers?

Let’s find out.

So I went back to my bed and was like, Ok, let’s do this.  I dropped trou’ and got on all fours, into what we yogis like to call tabletop position.  I’m really unclear on why I went with that position and not a squat, but I’m not here to rewrite history.  It took a few seconds of willing myself to let go, I guess 6 year olds have surprising strong kegel muscles, let’s never consider that thought again, and then I just unleashed.  

The problem with what I had just done became immediately apparent, as I could no longer sleep in this bed.  So I go back to my mom’s room and shake her awake again, and say “Mom, mom!  You need to change my sheets, I just wet the bed.”  Message received.  My mom has never been a hitter, but she definitely should have beaten the hell out of me that night.  Instead, though, and this is one reason my mom is the best, she let me sleep with her and then the next morning, we changed my sheets and had a real come to Jesus talk about the nuances of sarcasm and saying things you don’t actually mean.  A life lesson that has truly warped me into who I am today.  

That was really the most major talk we ever had, though, like I feel like she thought, well, hopefully she’ll be funny, and no man will want to deal with that, so I’m off the hook for that whole birds and bees mess a few years down the line.   

What I’m saying is, if anyone can explain sex to me after this, there are still a few gaps I need to fill, but don't get excited because I do not mean that literally.