Mother, Dear

For most of my life, I have made a point not to come close to anything like “hero worship.” This decision started early. In middle school, we were all required to enter an essay contest and write about a person we considered a hero. I wracked my brain for a week or so, thinking hard about who I could write about, knowing full well that most kids would be writing about their parents or some celebrity or athlete they loved. I decided on Cassie Bernall– the seventeen-year-old “who said yes” to believing in God during the Columbine High School massacre. This option checked every box for me and my parents.

I could get into the myriad issues with this particular choice of mine and how it fits into a larger problematic narrative of religious zealots to this day holding on to a truth that has since been debunked and pushing their narrative instead of the facts, but I won’t. That’s not what this essay is about.

I rode that religious fanaticism and martyrdom mythology to the final selection round. I didn’t win or place, which I’m sure I blamed on religious intolerance, but I felt good about how far I had taken Cassie’s story.

I didn’t care about God. I wasn’t a believer. I’m still not, but my parents didn’t know that then. The essay competition seemed the perfect opportunity to win some points with them and cover my tracks. I was a closeted lesbian and atheist, and it was getting harder to hide. Not winning isn’t what made me decide I shouldn’t have heroes; instead, it was the disingenuous way I felt about Cassie and God and how people responded to such blatant blather.

My mother told me she was proud of me for that essay. Despite my many efforts to elicit the sentiment, I don’t remember her telling me that very often.

My mother, my dragon. The person who has informed most of my decisions for better or worse.

Here is the essay I should have but couldn’t have written back in 2000. The truth about the most influential and eventually inspiring woman in my life.

My mother was my greatest critic. Constantly seeking perfection in me and telling me what I was missing so I could correct it for the next attempt. On the other side was the person at every choir concert, musical production, theater competition, and gig night. The person who worked with and built close relationships with all my teachers so she had a finger constantly on the pulse of my development. The one who signed me up for writing camps, community theater, guitar lessons, pottery classes, and everything else whenever I showed an aptitude for anything. The mother who said, “You have to learn how to play and sing five songs on the acoustic guitar before you can have an electric.” The dragon who would ask me to perform for her friends, only to pull me aside after and tell me where I fell flat or when I messed up a chord.

“Praaactice, praaactice, praaaactice.” She would imitate the old dance instructor from On the Town, madame Dilyovska—a humorous tool to soften the blow of learning my imperfections.

She did it all for me. Supported, showed up, pushed, stage-mom’d me. She did her best to make me, in her reformed image, someone radically different than who she was as a child and young adult. In this way, she influenced my decisions about coming out as queer. I never told her I wanted to take testosterone. I never said to her that one day I would get top surgery. She would have come around to it eventually. After several years of awkward and hurtful comments, she would have changed her ways. However, at that moment, I wasn’t sure that I would have a few years with her to adjust. She was sick, and I didn’t feel like spending that time with her in a place of resentment or discomfort. I waited.

Five months after she died, I started hormone replacement therapy. The dragon beside me was a shield and a barrier: protector and withholder. Fiercely guarding me from all that might harm me, but also some of what would help me grow. I am kind and gregarious because of her. I love to read and write because she shared her love for it with me. I follow my passions because she taught me it was good form. Much of the person I am is because of her guidance, but her imperfections are what I cherish most. Reminding me we’re human, all of us, imperfect and fallible.

She may have lived a flawed life, but she died perfectly–surrounded by family, old and new.

And I’m pretty sure she would be very proud of me now.