By Drew Adamek
My mother is a true character.
You need only meet her once to know her for the rest of your life. She is an utterly unique piece of work: lively, touchy-clingy, wild-haired, eccentric, compassionate, generous to a fault, funny as fuck and, um, well, an “unique” dresser. To point her out in a crowd, I’d say, “Look for the laughing lady in leopard print and poofy hair hanging on to someone she doesn’t know,” and you’d find her easily.
She is cut from entirely different cloth: 52-yards of a leopard-patterned velour that she bought at a yard sale 10 years ago for a quarter, but a different cloth nonetheless. Mom is a straight-edge punk rocker without knowing what that means; a tough-as-nails, sweet-as-pie, goofy-as-hell contradiction wrapped in a pair of zebra-striped pajama bottoms, a construction company sweatshirt and a ball cap with a dirty joke on it.
As I get older, I’ve really come to appreciate how unique Mom is and just how lucky I am that she raised me. More and more, when I find myself asking, How did I end up okay after all that?, I find that the answer is my Mom.
You couldn’t have convinced me at the time but having a free-spirited and eccentric, deeply moral and compassionate mother was exactly the background that allowed me to survive my best attempts to destroy myself.
I would have surrendered to the demons that stalked me for so long without her voice of right and wrong echoing around my head. Without the firm – but sometimes deeply buried – emotional belief she instilled in me that I was loved, and worth loving, I would have given up living more times than I care to count.
To be certain, we’ve battled over the years. We struggled with each other, in part, because we are so much alike. We each have our own set of rules that we follow; we are both stubborn as mules, and we are both easily injured. We knew which buttons to push.
The wilderness years of the late ’80s and early ’90s were a particularly tough time for us, fueled by my addictions and angry dysfunction. Our relationship was touch-and-go for a while but in the end it all worked out right.
(Sure, Mom isn’t perfect, but the things I saw as her flaws are between me and her, my therapist and the editor of my tell-all memoir. I am leaving any of that difficult shit out and just putting in the cool stuff about my Mom. It’s my list and I can do whatever I want.)
Our relationship is great now. I don’t get to spend as much time with her as I would like; marriage, geography, ever-changing career choices keep me away for longer stretches than I would like. But I think about her and what she’s given me every day.
My mother instilled in me an appreciation of chaos, a love of being different and of being yourself, and a love of creative risk taking. She showed me the rewards of being kind and compassionate, of treating people with care and the blessings of an honest life (not that I always held true to these ideals).
She’s taught me that laughing is better than crying; trying is better than not; having your heart in the right place is most of the battle; loyalty, humor and generosity are more important than wealth and achievement; the only limits are self-imposed; and that no matter where you go, you always come from where you were before.
But most importantly, she taught me over a lifetime of example, that it simply does not fucking matter what other people think about you.
Momma, thank you for being you.
Here, then, is a list of reasons why my Mom rules:
Read More
Posted on June 15, 2010
