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I Can’t Show My Mother This Essay
Lots of people keep their self-loathing a secret from their parents. I’m not lots of people.
My mother is turning 70 tomorrow. In my mid-twenties, I started getting into the habit of writing her a letter on her birthday.
The first year I did this, I can remember sliding the #10 business-sized envelope along the lengthy battlefield commonly known as the dining room table, and she looked at me with a thin-lipped, guarded suspicion (fun fact: my mother invented side-eye in 2002) as if the envelope contained a ransom note or anthrax confetti. The next year, when she spied a similar-looking document encased in an identical envelope, with her first name non-threateningly penned in elegant cursive to mitigate the expected hostile reception, she simply looked over at me and asked, “Oh, is this another Bad Son Letter?”
I took a sip of tea before answering, “Yes.”
The Bad Son Letter, while stark, is as good a moniker for these missives as anything. They were, if memory serves, pretty self-flagellating in nature which, I guess, is a marked upward evolution since, in my early twenties, I just ran around flagellating everybody else in the family. Therapy was, evidently, paying off.
I went from being mother’s angel to…
