i swear on my mother's life

"Yeah, that's definitely my mom." I answered her.

"She said they were shitting on her walkway," the girl continued. "So, it's understandable."

"Yeah, I guess."

It was inside that same travel agency that I spent my last several days before Costa Rica, preparing and planning and perusing her brochuers. We sat at separate desks across her small, lonely, one-woman office as she smoked and told me, in regards to my scary, upcoming trip to Central America, "Mike, I'm really afraid you're going to fuck this up."

It didn't phase me cause all my life she's tried to put me out with that same attitude. My interest in music was a waste of time. My good grades weren't good enough. To her I was a scummy little punk even though I chose to let go of all my friends rather than do drugs with them, and then sat in my room all the time playing shitty guitar and listening to her berate me for chasing all my friends away. I graduated college with a 3.0 and went on to write for a top-ten newspaper and when my parents would come up to Tampa to visit, and I'd talk excitedly about my great new job, she'd answer my wide, happy eyes by changing the subject to something like, "When was the last time you had an oil change in your truck?"

I've always been a fucking slacker about oil changes.

But instead of accepting defeat, and turning into a scared little failure in the face of her opression, I ran the other direction and now, no matter who tells me I'm gonna fuck up, it affects me not. I somehow managed to cultivate a blind idealism, and a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Negative criticism never sinks in.

Still I felt like a traitor piece of garbage when she told me my book upset her; the things I'd written about her. Man, she not only grew up in a 14-child household, but when the 14th popped out, their father died, so my mom's mom went off to work and the oldest daughter, my mother, was forced to raise 13 children at the age of 15. I'm smart enough to realize that my mom is the product of that. I studied the concept of 'determinism' in college English and I know that the severe poverty of her childhood is why she's so obsessed with her car and her house and making sure people know she's got a little money. I know why she's controlling. I'm imaginative enough to picture my mom at 15-years-old, screaming for control of her siblings, crying for a moment of quiet and permission to really be fifteen for one motherfucking day. That hell of responsibility reverberates in her still, it's not her fault. And what kind of monster am I to put out a book out that makes her look bad without explaining the ways determinism shell-shocked her?

But then the strangest thing happened; the book made her change. She's hasn't changed since I've known her. But I stepped off the plane from Costa Rica and her hair was no longer dyed to hide the gray; something I criticized her about in the book. She had even allowed my dad, whom she'd forced to dye his hair an unnatural brown for the last ten years, to let his hair go natural white.

She hates her own mother, and maybe the book hit it home like, My kids are going to hate me if I don't… And so she was tender when I returned home from Costa Rica. One night when I was up too late lying in bed writing emails on my lap top she crawled in in back of me and against me, spooned me, and I kissed her on the arm; the first kiss we'd shared perhaps since I was a child in freezing cold Gary, Indiana. I didn't see a glimpse of the old mom in the entire month I was back. Until the other night at dinner.

She quit playing BINGO (as detailed in the COMMONPLACE book) and dad tells me her abstinece drives her crazy. I have little sympathy because I don't think gambling is a disease. Diseases change your body chemistry. So when she came home from work the other night scowling, clomped loudly up the stairs slamming doors, and my father warned me, "She wants to go play BINGO and she gets really mad at me when she realizes she can't. Like it's me holding her back." I told him, "Well, she's just being a baby and you shouldn't patronize her."

After a while she came downstairs still scowling, and began describing to me how I would fail in New Orleans, how I would be mugged straight off, how I would lay around jobless until I'd wasted all my savings and then come back and mooch off them.

"Do you remember your last words to me before I left for Costa Rica?" I asked her.

She didn't answer.

I continued, "They were, 'You're going to fuck this up, Mike.'"

And before the word "up" made it past my lips she was screaming, "Never! I never said anything like that…you liar!" She turned to my father, "He's insane, making things up! I never ever said anything like that! I swear on my mother's life! I swear on your life, Dan! would never ever…!"

I walked up to my room, laid in bed feeling conflicted. I suppose that, after all the change she'd exhibited since my return, I should have obeyed my father when, right after the incident, he gently creaked open my bedroom door and commanded, "Go into her room and apologize to her." But I didn't.

"No, no way. She definitely said that."

"Just do it to appease her. So she's not upset. You really upset her."

"No, I didn't upset her; her own words upset her. Maybe hearing them will make her stop saying that kind of discouraging bullshit to me."

He shut the door, and from then on, things were pretty much back to normal for me and mom.

Maybe I didn't apologize because I thought it would be bad for her if I let her think she was right. Maybe I honestly believed Now she'll definitely never say any stupid shit like that again. Or maybe I've just learned from her, how to, when gorged with idiotic pride, hold my apologies in my mouth like a near-vomit-experience on a hangover morning.

Had I apologized, I wonder if her last words to me before leaving for New Oleans might have been something other than, "I hate you, you little son of a bitch."

I've heard that same phrase from her a thousand times over the years, but when we were spooning I swear I never thought I'd hear it again.

It was just her and I in the car on the way home from Target today, not four hours from my departure time, and tension choked me anyway cause I have no idea what I'm doing and I'm not prepared for any of this New Orleans business and I'm directionless and confused and I wasn't about to let her say things like, "It makes me sick that you've already spent half the money from your truck."

They bought me the truck for graduation.

"You're gonna spend all that money," she continued. "And then come back here."

This is a fucking ridiculous thing for her to say considering I only come down to Ft. Myers to visit once every six months and when I do, after the first day, I usually make up a big lie and say I have to go back to Tampa; their house is the last place I want to be.

"That's not gonna happen mom." I said.

"Well, it better not." She said, sounding like she might be finished but no such luck. "You don't wanna work and you're not gonna get a job."

"Where did you read that?" I asked.

"I know how you are and you're.."

"Actually, you don't know how I am at all." I corrected her.

"Oh yeah I do, you don't wanna work and…"

"Since I've been staying at your house I've been working nine hours a day."

I've been busting my ass sending out books and writing stupid fucking queries to publishing companies and trying to get published in literary journals and even in disgusting men's magazines on TOP of trying to figure out how to survive once I get to New Orleans.

"Well, we don't want you back at our house when you spend all that money from you truck because we're…"

"That's not gonna happen. I'm gonna get a job once I get to New Orleans."

"Yeah, well I just hope that you don't spend all the..."

"You realize mom, that youre telling me I'm gonna fuck up, just like you swore you didn't do before I left for Costa Rica."

"Costa Rica was different," she said, as if I wasn't even there in her car with her defending myself. "That was like an adventure, but now you're doing nothing and we don't need you back in our lives when you spend all that money and…"

"That's not gonna happen."

"Well, we'll see…and when it does happen…we're old now and we don't need you coming into our…"

"It's not going to happen. Enough!"

"We have our own lives and we don't need…"

"Enough!"

"When you spend that money and…"

"Enough!"

"You need a place to stay and…"

"Shut up!"

"Don't you fucking tell me to shut up you…"

"Shut up."

"You little mother fucker, don't you dare tell me to…"

"SHUT UP!" I lost it. I screamed.

"You fucking little…"

"SHUT UP! STOP!"

"You don't tell me to shut up you fucking, stinking, don't even wash your hair you fucking…"

"SHUT!…UP!"

"You're the biggest disappointment of my goddamned life you mother fucking…"

"JUST STOP! SHUT UP! STOP!"

"You know what?" She sizzled and hissed quietly. "I hate you…you little son of a bitch."

"I'm your son mom."