April 9, 2008
I thought I could bang out
a column today—a regular column, a column about my readers' problems and
their freaky fetishes and all those asshole politicians out there. You know,
the usual.
The day my son was born, I
managed to slip out of the maternity ward and write a column; I wrote one the
day I was indicted by the state of Iowa for licking Gary Bauer's doorknobs. (I
was actually indicted for voter fraud—on a trumped-up charge, your
honor—but Bauer's knob needs all the attention it can get.) I've written
columns on days that I was dumped and on the morning of 9/11. So I figured that
I could bang out a column today.
I opened my laptop and
started reading your letters. I love reading your letters—I do. But I
couldn't get into it. I just don't have a column in me this week. I'm
disappointed in myself. I write this column at Ann Landers's desk, for crying
out loud, and the old lady banged out a heartbreaking, truncated column when
her marriage collapsed. If Landers could bang one out under that kind of
emotional strain, then I could damn well bang one out, too. Just do it, right?
Just fucking do it. But I just fucking can't.
My mother died on Monday.
Perhaps a sex-advice
column isn't an appropriate place to eulogize an articulate, elegant woman, a
practicing Catholic named for the patron saint of hopeless causes and, perhaps
consequently, a Cubs fan. I mean, really. Eulogizing my mother in the back of a
paper, alongside the escort ads? So let's not think of this as a eulogy. Let's
think of it as a thank-you note, the kind of nicety that my mother appreciated.
Forgive the cliché: My
mom gave me so much.
She gave me life, of course, and some other stuff besides: her sense of humor,
her bionic bullshit detectors, her colossal sweet tooth. She also gave
me—she gave all four of her children (Bill, Ed, Dan, Laura)—her
unconditional love. Long after I came out, she told me she always suspected
that I might be gay; I was the quiet one, the boy who liked Broadway musicals
and baking cakes and shared her passion for Strauss waltzes. When I asked my
parents to take me to the national tour of A Chorus Line for my 13th birthday,
that should have settled the matter. Your third son? Total fag, lady. But my
parents were Catholic and religious, and it somehow still came as a shock
when I told them. My mother came around fast and she came out
swinging—rainbow stickers on her car, a PFLAG membership card in her
wallet, and an ultimatum delivered to the whole family: Anyone who had a
problem with me had a problem with her.
But the real reason I feel
compelled to thank her in this space is because I wouldn't have this space if
it weren't for her.
My mother, as my brother
Bill likes to say, made friends like Rockefeller made money and George W. Bush
makes mistakes—and she was that friend you confided in and went to for
advice. I was a mama's boy—hello—and I spent a great deal of time in
my mother's kitchen, listening to her tell her friends exactly what they needed
to do. Sometimes gently, sometimes brusquely, always with a dose of humor. My
mom liked to say that her son got paid to do something that she did for free—and
isn't that the way the world works? Women cook, men are chefs; women are
housewives, men are butlers; she gave advice, I got paid to give advice. (And for
a few years, she did too; my mother and I wrote a joint column for a couple of
websites in the 1990s.)
So I want to thank my mom.
I wouldn't be writing this column today if it weren't for her gifts and her
ability to find the humor in even the most serious of subjects.