The Broken Piñata

My mom taught me what NEVER to be.

I know, I know. Be happy you have a mom, they say. She's your mother, they say. But as we know, they say a lot of things.

Growing up under Delia's house was nothing short of torture. She never cooked. She would stay all night with her boyfriends. She threw my clothes and my dreams in the trash can everytime I put my childhood ambitions on the line.

"What is this?" my mom said after picking up my first notebook of short stories when I was a kid.

"They're stories I wrote, Mom," I said, hoping she'd be proud of me for at least trying.

"What a waste of paper," she tossed my notebook flat on the white paint-chipped desk in my bedroom with a thud. "Stop wasting your time and go wash the dishes or something."

This was the warning I would get before she took off her shoe and hit me with it. For years, her cruelty taught me to have thick skin. I would never take a compliment with class, and I would always second guess whatever I was doing. Her voice had become the referee in my head that I carried around all of my adolescent life. And whenever it was too much, I'd run to my friends and smoke weed to forget the misery. Even at the age of 40.

"Wow, Annette," my best friend Ginger said, passing a joint to me in the parking lot thirty years later after we started smoking pot in the same parking lot during high school.

I had just come back to my hometown from a 12-year stint in Asia, Europe, and South America.

"All these years and your mom is still -I hate to say it -an asshole," Ginger said, crinkling up her nose.

"Tell me about it," I pinched the joint and put it up to my lips.

"I'm just glad you went to college and became a writer anyway," Ginger rolled down the window. "You would think she'd have a little more respect for you."

I coughed and said, "What do you expect from a wetback that never traveled or graduated from college and worked for the DMV for 35 years."

"You shouldn't call your mom that," Ginger said.

"You should hear what I call her when no one is listening," I laughed. It took years of revelation through meditation and my physical absence to see my mom for what she really was.

The kind of lady that called people the "N" word, hated gay people, thought opera sounded like wailing dogs, and believed anything that wasn't Martha Stewart common was shitty art. She was the kind of person that would land in Bangkok, Thailand and still eat at McDonald's.

"Don't get me wrong, I love my mother, but she's an unquestionably shitty person," I said, passing the joint back to Ginger. "She's wrong about a lot of things, you know."

"Yeah," Ginger said. "But at least your mom wasn't as fucked up as Tonya Harding's mom. Now, that lady was a real cunt."

We had watched I, Tonya a couple of days earlier. And Ginger was right, at the very least I could be grateful that my mother didn't put her cigarettes out on my forearms and throw steak knives at me.

"Wow," I said with a not-so-nice realization unfolding in my head. "Do you think Tanya is famous because her mom was so fucked up?"

"Absolutely," Ginger said and reached for a pack of gum in her purse. It was blue with dots on it. "Maybe your mom should have been more fucked up."

We laughed.

"Today, I was painting and I used a pink bottle of spray paint to add some texture to this experimental piece I'm working on, and she called me a fucking criminal," I ran my fingers through my long brown hair by the roots and pulled on it. "Can you believe that shit?"

Ginger shook her head in shame. Decades earlier, Ginger had been a graffiti queen that made the cover of skater magazines. Her artistic dreams had been squashed like a bug when, her then stepmom, called and reported Ginger to the police. Unlike Ginger, my art started with oil and canvases and had transgressed into mixed media. I used clay, crayons, gold leaf paper, markers, pencils, acrylics, Floetrol, and now spray paint to get a chaotic background before I painted things like bluejays and roses a top layer.

"Play her the songs of the ages and she's deaf," I said, thinking of Charles Bukowski. He was another guy that had a failure of a parent.

Ginger and I went down the list of famous people that had gotten famous on behalf of their psychotic parents: Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie, Judy Garland, Eminem, Macaulay Culkin, Drew Barrymore, Tanya Harding, and of course -the Devil.

"And your mom thinks she a Christian," Ginger said, popping her gum.

I rolled my eyes, "She hides behind clever little bible verses, but those pearls of wisdom go out the window as soon as you put a cup of coffee that is too hot down in front of her. Or if the dishes don't match. Or if leave the lamp plugged in the socket throughout the day. Or if you refuse to eat a processed food out of a box because it's unhealthy."

Ginger and I went down a list of all the broken parts of my mother. How she was only kind when you were angry with her. We mentioned how she thought reading books and traveling around the world was "a waste of time."

All my life, I wondered why I was related to Delia. In my prayers, even though I'm agnostic, I would ask a universal force to grant me the understanding of this person that constantly tested my patience. A person that I wanted to leave and let die and never look back at because she was the great villain in my life.

Is everything bad about your mother, my friends would ask. Often, I'd have to dig through the mental haystack of unpleasant interactions to remember the few kind moments I had with my mom. Like the times in middle school, she used to drive me to my orthodontist and we'd stop for ice cream on the way home, even though I wasn't supposed to be eating it. Or when I was ten years old and she became a ski instructor so that I could ski as much as I wanted because it was too expensive for us.

I knew my mom loved me, she just didn't love herself very much. Her lack of confidence, hobbies, friends, intelligence, appreciation, and patience spilled onto me like hot soup and it burned.

My mom is the worst person I know. I'm sure I would think that about anyone. She just happens to be the person I have known most in this lifetime. I love her, and I will miss her in some mandatory way when she is gone, but fuck, the most important thing I have learned from my mother is what to never be.