My mother and I were women together. Well, okay, I was only her girl child for some of those years, but I quite easily grasped one evening when I heard the plentiful and ebullient family next door having a barbecue that lasted roughly from noon until midnight the summer of my eleventh year the disquieting contrast between those noises and smells and the quiet dusk of our own kitchen. “I’m lonely. I want more,” my sullen gaze telegraphed itself into her awareness. “I understand, one hundred percent,” the squeeze she gave my hand – two short squeezes and a long one that felt particularly sincere and protective – transmitted. So – this was womanhood, was our own version of womanhood anyway – a cloud of dissatisfaction palpable as a self-separate entity, a runty bunny rabbit, white with those gruesome red eyes. originally published 6/4/18
When I was in sixth grade I was still trying to listen to pop music to fit in, but one day my dead mom let me wear her Doors shirt, a bleach stained black t-shirt with Jim Morrison’s mug shot from Dade County Florida on it, and underneath that the words “charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness.” I could have shown up to school that day in a disingenuous outfit of Body Glove gear, but instead I chose to celebrate a moment in history when a sexy rockstar got drunk and whipped his dick out. I’d arrived. Within a few months the Guns N’ Roses albums Use Your Illusions I and II hit the shelves of Tower Records and the Wherehouse Music Store and my mom, who was born with the anarchistic aplomb, the witty or sometimes just brutal anger and the frantic creativity with which an outsider (punks, goths, metalheads, angel-headed hipsters ) learns to deal with mainstream society, was right there with me, choosing...