AFTER ALL
“Well,” she purses her lips over telephone static, “just promise me you'll make it home for Mother’s Day next year, alright?”
Holy shit; we’re talking in years now.
Next year?
Twenty-four ago, I exited this woman’s birth canal, and now I'm lucky if I see her once per season. How is Indiana in the springtime? Why can't I seem to remember it clearly; I was there, wasn't I?
Yes, yes, you were busy getting lost behind the wheel, adrift in all those flat, flat fields— I don't care what anyone says; that Indiana is the most beautiful state in the country. It taught me to take things slow, slow, slow: some may call it naive, but I consider it a gift to be charmed by just about anything, especially in a world like this one. It frees up more room for novelty.
The time I fucked some girl right on the roof of my silver car, right there on the side of some equally silver country road wet with rain, for example:
—What if somebody drives by?
[Between obnoxiously horny sequiturs.]
—Trust me, they won't. And if they do,
[A hand down her jeans. A bit of an awkward angle, I recall, but that didn't end up mattering much.]
—I hope they enjoy the show!
Oh, and the time I had to pull over, completely spellbound by what I still consider to be the most gorgeous sunset I have ever seen:
To say it was out of a painting or movie simply wouldn't do it justice; no, this sunset was full of beauty specifically because it redirected me to Life itself over and over again, like a bit of broken code that kept returning the same error message on my thoughts:
YOU ARE HERE.
I dare not describe it in terms of color; all I can say is that it was there and I saw it, and I very well may be the only witness those moments ever had (save the cows, eyeing me in their absently curious way that they have).
And I don't think another living soul could possibly understand the sky above my mother’s house (except for maybe my siblings). I swear, you can come up with two entirely different cosmologies just from looking up while standing in the street versus standing in her driveway. Many nights’ worth of stolen cigarettes (does it even count as stealing if she always knew I stole them?), the shitty kind she buys by the carton, were spent just looking up, up, up. Later, the carton would inadvertently become my meter stick in college:
I'm not that bad. [I was.] I mean, it's not like I'm buying' em by the carton like Mom does.
Actually, buying them by the carton would've saved me a lot of money at the time, what for how much I was smoking and how broke I always managed to be. Strange the hills we choose to die on, aren't they?
The mother of my youth was never exactly “a hugger”, I remember that much. My childhood mind’s eye almost exclusively renders her facing away from me, face pressed tenderly against our chunky grey house phone, twirling some cigarette, laughing sweetly. She's always had the most wonderful laugh. My favorite part is when it gets towards the end and she's catching her breath, her pitch slowly lowering like a train pulling into a station.
When she cries, I can't even look at her; I don't know where to put it. Truthfully, it scares me: if the woman who brought me into this world can brim with such pain, such fear, what can be said of her firstborn? That parents are even capable of producing the same emotions as I am feels incredibly disconcerting, to say the least. To say the most, I'm not sure if I'm even meant to withstand that kind of torture. I just don't want to bear witness to it. But she cries, sometimes, as if to grab me by the jaw, turn my gaze to hers and remind me that this, ultimately, is what I was put on earth to do.
My first time driving, then:
I am thirteen, maybe twelve years old. Mom has had a couple poolside vodka cranberries, emphasis on vodka. She talks kind of like she’s my age, walks like she’s a toddler. I have never seen her like this, don’t even know to call it “drunk” yet.
She’ll be fine, mom’s friend reassures me.
You guys live just right down the road. I glance over to the passenger seat. For some reason, her incessant giggling doesn’t put me at ease. The rain speckles back up.
I don’t understand how to put the car in “drive”, or that this is even a necessary step in the driving process. I get an almost literal crash course before rolling down the driveway and vanishing into the rain, which has picked up considerably.
C’mon, Laurennnn, let me drive the damn car! Mom laughs as the beast lunges forward.
No, no, mom, I’ve got it, I’ve got it! I don’t know what else to say. My brother and sister are sitting wide-eyed in the back seat.
I tell them to put their seatbelts on.
I can’t see anything; I drive painfully slow. The whole time, she’s laughing, laughing, laughing, intermittently shouting, jerking the steering wheel, laughing again.
She woke up the next morning with her swimsuit stuck to the passenger seat.
My main takeaway from that day: laughing isn’t always happy. Coming in second place: driving’s not so bad.
In mom’s Suburban, basically a mythological site, she would sing harmonies that I could scarcely even register at first.
Is that really in there? I would ask, incredulous.
Uh-huh! Listen, Lauren! Right here— right here! See?
I can only assume that learning how to cast spells is a similar if not identical process.
Enter: Grace and I, shoulder-to-shoulder, 20, stoned, and barreling down gravel, probably laughing hysterically or singing at the top of our lungs, or maybe we were stunned in silence by the music or just the night air. Sometimes we’d run into other teenagers out doing the same thing we were; despite our best efforts, we always tended to end up in the same places, those same stretches of road, psychic ruts, I think.
Plop me anywhere in Indiana, I could find my way back to that cemetery (although for once it wouldn’t be with words). Mom took us there first, actually— probably not too long after the vodka cran incident. I don’t remember much except that it was the most magical place I had ever seen.
As a general rule, I don’t remember much. My sister has always been better at that. Anytime the two of us get together, she fills in the gaps for me, of me. She holds onto things the way that any good mother would; it reminds me that we were both mothers, in our own ways, for a time.
Another (hopefully redeeming) memory, if you can even call it that: when I told her that I couldn’t live at my dad’s anymore. In all honesty, this is less of a memory and more of a good-faith reenactment.
I was fourteen years old.
—Mom? Do you think that you could maybe afford for me to live here, like, all of the time, and not just on Mondays and Tuesdays?
[Mom barely looks up from lighting her cigarette, I’m guessing. She doesn’t yet understand what I’m trying to tell her. The dryer probably rumbles behind her, questionless. Answerless.]
—I don’t know, honey. I mean, that would depend on a lot of things… And you would have to really start pulling your weight around here-
[I start crying somewhere inside of this sentence.]
—Honey, what’s wrong?
I want to tell her everything and I don’t want to tell her anything and crying somehow seems to achieve both of these goals— which is fortunate, because for a long while, that’s the only answer I’m able to give. Eventually, I’m assuming she realized that she should probably put out her 17th Edgefield of the day to console me. Although I can’t imagine her actually initiating a hug, that must’ve been what occurred; the only dialogue I am 100% positive of, the core of this so-called memory, takes place buried in the darkness of her chest:
—One of us is gonna kill me, mom!
One of us is gonna kill me!
It would be another year before I stepped out of his house for the last time. Lots of legal stuff to take care of, Mom said. Fine by me. I didn’t care how long it took. I just wanted out.
That fateful day, I took several sad long looks at things before sporting my overstuffed backpack into his car for the last time. Visibly terrified after school, I waited with my friend in the car rider area. I thought about asking him to pray with me but chickened out at the last minute.
Mom and I hung out at Olive Garden until we were sure that her house was safe to return to. She gave me a valentines day present: chocolates or something, and a card that I wish I still had.
These days, our actual mother coos and cuddles and coddles two animals, a dog and a cat, about twenty-four years too late for my liking. Secretly, though, we are all relieved, I think, just that she was after all able to love something at the right place and time and in the right way. She has all but sworn off men, she believes her job to be important work, and is thankfully over her phase of ‘accidentally’ calling all of my partners ‘boyfriends’ when she really means to say that they are girls with short hair.
Recently, when I told her I was polyamorous, she had this to say:
—Man, you should’ve been around for the 70’s!
So we’re making progress, at least.
Just the other day, actually, I was working at the coffee shop, and I saw her at the front door— well, I saw her doppelgänger, anyway— and for a brief moment, the sight of her filled me with a joy that I myself was surprised to find.
I guess I really do love her after all, I thought to myself at the time.
Writing all of this has made me realize that after all is perhaps the only way you can love a person.
“I promise, Mom; I won’t forget to take off work next year.”
Holy shit; we’re talking in years now.
Next year?
Twenty-four ago, I exited this woman’s birth canal, and now I'm lucky if I see her once per season. How is Indiana in the springtime? Why can't I seem to remember it clearly; I was there, wasn't I?
Yes, yes, you were busy getting lost behind the wheel, adrift in all those flat, flat fields— I don't care what anyone says; that Indiana is the most beautiful state in the country. It taught me to take things slow, slow, slow: some may call it naive, but I consider it a gift to be charmed by just about anything, especially in a world like this one. It frees up more room for novelty.
The time I fucked some girl right on the roof of my silver car, right there on the side of some equally silver country road wet with rain, for example:
—What if somebody drives by?
[Between obnoxiously horny sequiturs.]
—Trust me, they won't. And if they do,
[A hand down her jeans. A bit of an awkward angle, I recall, but that didn't end up mattering much.]
—I hope they enjoy the show!
Oh, and the time I had to pull over, completely spellbound by what I still consider to be the most gorgeous sunset I have ever seen:
To say it was out of a painting or movie simply wouldn't do it justice; no, this sunset was full of beauty specifically because it redirected me to Life itself over and over again, like a bit of broken code that kept returning the same error message on my thoughts:
YOU ARE HERE.
I dare not describe it in terms of color; all I can say is that it was there and I saw it, and I very well may be the only witness those moments ever had (save the cows, eyeing me in their absently curious way that they have).
And I don't think another living soul could possibly understand the sky above my mother’s house (except for maybe my siblings). I swear, you can come up with two entirely different cosmologies just from looking up while standing in the street versus standing in her driveway. Many nights’ worth of stolen cigarettes (does it even count as stealing if she always knew I stole them?), the shitty kind she buys by the carton, were spent just looking up, up, up. Later, the carton would inadvertently become my meter stick in college:
I'm not that bad. [I was.] I mean, it's not like I'm buying' em by the carton like Mom does.
Actually, buying them by the carton would've saved me a lot of money at the time, what for how much I was smoking and how broke I always managed to be. Strange the hills we choose to die on, aren't they?
The mother of my youth was never exactly “a hugger”, I remember that much. My childhood mind’s eye almost exclusively renders her facing away from me, face pressed tenderly against our chunky grey house phone, twirling some cigarette, laughing sweetly. She's always had the most wonderful laugh. My favorite part is when it gets towards the end and she's catching her breath, her pitch slowly lowering like a train pulling into a station.
When she cries, I can't even look at her; I don't know where to put it. Truthfully, it scares me: if the woman who brought me into this world can brim with such pain, such fear, what can be said of her firstborn? That parents are even capable of producing the same emotions as I am feels incredibly disconcerting, to say the least. To say the most, I'm not sure if I'm even meant to withstand that kind of torture. I just don't want to bear witness to it. But she cries, sometimes, as if to grab me by the jaw, turn my gaze to hers and remind me that this, ultimately, is what I was put on earth to do.
My first time driving, then:
I am thirteen, maybe twelve years old. Mom has had a couple poolside vodka cranberries, emphasis on vodka. She talks kind of like she’s my age, walks like she’s a toddler. I have never seen her like this, don’t even know to call it “drunk” yet.
She’ll be fine, mom’s friend reassures me.
You guys live just right down the road. I glance over to the passenger seat. For some reason, her incessant giggling doesn’t put me at ease. The rain speckles back up.
I don’t understand how to put the car in “drive”, or that this is even a necessary step in the driving process. I get an almost literal crash course before rolling down the driveway and vanishing into the rain, which has picked up considerably.
C’mon, Laurennnn, let me drive the damn car! Mom laughs as the beast lunges forward.
No, no, mom, I’ve got it, I’ve got it! I don’t know what else to say. My brother and sister are sitting wide-eyed in the back seat.
I tell them to put their seatbelts on.
I can’t see anything; I drive painfully slow. The whole time, she’s laughing, laughing, laughing, intermittently shouting, jerking the steering wheel, laughing again.
She woke up the next morning with her swimsuit stuck to the passenger seat.
My main takeaway from that day: laughing isn’t always happy. Coming in second place: driving’s not so bad.
In mom’s Suburban, basically a mythological site, she would sing harmonies that I could scarcely even register at first.
Is that really in there? I would ask, incredulous.
Uh-huh! Listen, Lauren! Right here— right here! See?
I can only assume that learning how to cast spells is a similar if not identical process.
Enter: Grace and I, shoulder-to-shoulder, 20, stoned, and barreling down gravel, probably laughing hysterically or singing at the top of our lungs, or maybe we were stunned in silence by the music or just the night air. Sometimes we’d run into other teenagers out doing the same thing we were; despite our best efforts, we always tended to end up in the same places, those same stretches of road, psychic ruts, I think.
Plop me anywhere in Indiana, I could find my way back to that cemetery (although for once it wouldn’t be with words). Mom took us there first, actually— probably not too long after the vodka cran incident. I don’t remember much except that it was the most magical place I had ever seen.
As a general rule, I don’t remember much. My sister has always been better at that. Anytime the two of us get together, she fills in the gaps for me, of me. She holds onto things the way that any good mother would; it reminds me that we were both mothers, in our own ways, for a time.
Another (hopefully redeeming) memory, if you can even call it that: when I told her that I couldn’t live at my dad’s anymore. In all honesty, this is less of a memory and more of a good-faith reenactment.
I was fourteen years old.
—Mom? Do you think that you could maybe afford for me to live here, like, all of the time, and not just on Mondays and Tuesdays?
[Mom barely looks up from lighting her cigarette, I’m guessing. She doesn’t yet understand what I’m trying to tell her. The dryer probably rumbles behind her, questionless. Answerless.]
—I don’t know, honey. I mean, that would depend on a lot of things… And you would have to really start pulling your weight around here-
[I start crying somewhere inside of this sentence.]
—Honey, what’s wrong?
I want to tell her everything and I don’t want to tell her anything and crying somehow seems to achieve both of these goals— which is fortunate, because for a long while, that’s the only answer I’m able to give. Eventually, I’m assuming she realized that she should probably put out her 17th Edgefield of the day to console me. Although I can’t imagine her actually initiating a hug, that must’ve been what occurred; the only dialogue I am 100% positive of, the core of this so-called memory, takes place buried in the darkness of her chest:
—One of us is gonna kill me, mom!
One of us is gonna kill me!
It would be another year before I stepped out of his house for the last time. Lots of legal stuff to take care of, Mom said. Fine by me. I didn’t care how long it took. I just wanted out.
That fateful day, I took several sad long looks at things before sporting my overstuffed backpack into his car for the last time. Visibly terrified after school, I waited with my friend in the car rider area. I thought about asking him to pray with me but chickened out at the last minute.
Mom and I hung out at Olive Garden until we were sure that her house was safe to return to. She gave me a valentines day present: chocolates or something, and a card that I wish I still had.
These days, our actual mother coos and cuddles and coddles two animals, a dog and a cat, about twenty-four years too late for my liking. Secretly, though, we are all relieved, I think, just that she was after all able to love something at the right place and time and in the right way. She has all but sworn off men, she believes her job to be important work, and is thankfully over her phase of ‘accidentally’ calling all of my partners ‘boyfriends’ when she really means to say that they are girls with short hair.
Recently, when I told her I was polyamorous, she had this to say:
—Man, you should’ve been around for the 70’s!
So we’re making progress, at least.
Just the other day, actually, I was working at the coffee shop, and I saw her at the front door— well, I saw her doppelgänger, anyway— and for a brief moment, the sight of her filled me with a joy that I myself was surprised to find.
I guess I really do love her after all, I thought to myself at the time.
Writing all of this has made me realize that after all is perhaps the only way you can love a person.
“I promise, Mom; I won’t forget to take off work next year.”