Mom’s Gotta Have It

Tavarus Blackmon ©2020

With many things that can be said about the relationship with my mother, one certainty is that it is complicated. As a beautiful woman, she is married three, maybe four, times and courts many lovers when I am young. I say ‘maybe,’ because she doesn’t talk much about her relationships but I find a marraige liscence online, in addition to the confirmed husbands. As a professional she never settles, working long hours, a Doctor of Education and, carves out a place for herself as an advocate of Special Education. It is this notion of never settling that creeps into her love life, no partner lasting for more than a few years. The time with her children and grand-children is the one constant that can be suffered.

Find her with a long, cigarette, pursed lips, hair-did, make-up tight and wearing a sharp dress. She adorns an ethnic wardrobe, though is Irish-Italian and, must dress business chic for work. That’s Liberal bullshit, she says confounding me, the woman who flip-flops from Gospel Rap to Reggae to suit her lover’s taste, rattles anti-government dialect and practices Bi-Sexuality with a Commie Dyke bumber sticker in her office. But she is not only complicated, she is rife with contradiction. I learn duality from a woman who drops out of high-school, employs herself as a Madamé, serves time for Pimping and Pandering and goes on to become the Special Education Administrator of the Washington Unified School District.

She is a mother who, face-deep and off-and-on in cocaine, expects the best from a son who isn’t born with the luxury she has been afforded. We would go to NA meetings, shopping sprees, movies at the Art House Theatre and, we often volunteered during the holidays for toy and food drives. She quotes Einstein, Jimi Hendrix and the bible, whenever there is metion of marijuana in the holy text. Life in her home is interesting though, I can’t help but to want more from a woman who demands so much from me.

I have not been afforded the same priveledge as my mother, her, a white woman and myself, a multi-racial child in America. Despite her politics she is able to slide freely through society where sometimes I feel the first thing people notice about me is that I am non-normative in a histrorically, patriarchal sense. I do not have her credit score, her ability to appear complicit with White America. Her son, both cradled and cultured by Marx and Malcom X, is a subject of identity-politics where agenda meets the body, putting doubt in my mind as a child when I look to the woman who used-to change my diapers.

“Is she really my mother?” I wonder, questioning not the care in her wrist but the way the lips hold the face, the way a Sicilian nose juts softly from the brow and, the way her white skin scorns those who hate but virtues in the benefits of power.

But at every turn of racist hatred she is there, guiding me toward resistance, putting power in my hands to be a man of virtue and to assume a rightful place of respect in society.

You can do anything, be anything, you set your mind to,

She tells me, condoning my fist on intollerance and paying my predatory debts; working ten hours a day and studying at night, volunteering at the Women’s Center, she nurtures my love and respect for women.

She confides in me about her lovers; she asks me,

“Should I choose the young and wild one or the wise and boring man?”

I tell her to be sensible and, when she is old enough to head her young child’s insight, she takes my advice. But it is her advice that, had I headed in my youth, I might have avoided alot of trouble and pain. I took to her drugs, well, meth not coke, but when I went crazy instead of simply getting off, she did not understand how my mind can go sideways, instead of simply, up-and-down.

But mothers and sons do not always see eye-to-eye. Like a fool, when I could have leaned on her more I pulled away. But even when I come back around she is still there to help lift me up, dust of my pants and point me in a lean direction.

Maybe I too, will grow up to be a middle-aged, smoking, white woman?

I hold a cigarette in my mouth. I feign middle-class attributes. In the long shadow of better judgement I listen to the words she tells me when I am in need of knowing. After her trip to Italy she comes home more proud of her heritage. She talks to me about Pinocchio, migration.

“See, we have always been Black,” she says, referencing the Mor conquest.

But I am the Black one, mother, I would like to tell her but somehow only muster a poised silence. I don’t think hard to know that it is her disavowal of everything white that makes her align with a struggle. Something in a past, she never shares with me, colors her resolve into a purple, anti-establishment. She never, ever, even mentions the Beatles.

Now who is this mother? She looks like Mom’s from television, those from social knowledge. But there is no context for her true identity. Except to say that she is my Mom, ripe with Marlboro smell, cooking up Stir-Fry every night after a long day, buying me a Cadillac and teaching me how to put on a condom, using a banana, awkwardly role playing with a blushing, embarrassed, teenage son. Too blind in my youth to see how she looks like me: out into a world with questions for authority, ingrained doubt and, the courage to expect more from a world where people must look alike to love each other.