|
This is a pure vanity post, but it does relate to the true black heart of Republican politics. Pardon me for publicly venting.
***
My mom is a fundamentalist evangelical - one of the right-wing wet dreams of Bush and Rove. A "true believer" all the way, living a life unexamined in the heartland of America. She's been this way for about 15 years now, more or less, since she got sober and substituted Jesus for cheap wine.
I have great respect for my mom - she raised me pretty much alone, a single working mother with a young child during the 70's. She's owned her own business as long as I can remember, moving and rebuilding it from the ground up at least twice. She's been married four times: three jackasses who need to die face down in ditches and the decent guy she's married to now. Out of respect for him, for what he had given my mom - the stability of a good spouse, one who didn't emotionally and physically abuse her - I had him serve as a groomsman at my wedding.
She waged war on me for a good year or two after she saw the light, several times keeping me up until 3 or 4 in the morning attempting to indoctrinate me to her view, often with the willing aid of a like-minded accomplice. I defended myself as best I could until she finally realized one day that, if anything, her attempts to "save" me were pushing me further and further away, form her and her faith. I didn't speak to her during 1991, living on my own for the first time and trying to detox myself from two years of constant mental battle.
She got the message. One day early in 1992, she knocked on my door and we had our first dinner together in a year. We reached an agreement that night: we simply wouldn't talk religion any more - it was too destructive. I was never the one to talk religion anyway, so in reality the agreement was that she wouldn't talk it.
In the past dozen years, she's broken that agreement - small incursions into the DMZ - time and again, but I always let it slide. In truth, she had come around to the idea that she wasn't going to be able to break my will. An odd turn, given that her tenacity was one of the character traits I most emulated - that which I most admired about her was now her biggest problem in arguing with me.
I aquiesced to her religiosity in certain ways. I went to church every Christmas. I kept my views about her faith utterly under wraps. I remained silent when she was kicked out of two different congregations because of her affiliation with AA. Because I'm her son, and through the divorces and all the tumult, it had always been her and I, alone. I respected her, both as my mother and my friend, enough to meet her half way where her version of Christianity was concerned.
Last night, I went over to her house for some computer related issues. As I was leaving, she saw my "I voted today".
"Oh darn, you already voted?"
"Yeah, this morning."
"Well I was going to strike a deal with you - I saw those Kerry stickers on your car and I thought I'd tell you I won't vote if you won't vote."
"Well, I wouldn't have gone for that anyway."
"Yeah, but I was going to make that deal with you and then go vote anyway behind your back".
And that was that - the face of "moral America" peeled back to reveal the ugly truth. Willing to sell out, screw over and betray her own blood.
She had been rejected by husbands, churches, even some members of her own family. I had always been there, willing to meet he half way, no matter how hard it was for me to do it. I was the one constant in her life. And her response was to try and betray me. For a fucking vote, for loyalty to some imbecilic paradigm of Godliness that she believes has come to reside among men in the White House.
Why was it that she was the Christian yet I was the one with morals, ethics and scruples?
She reveled it all to me in that plan. My presence in her life for the past 15 years was little more, to her, than a project. I was to be either won over to Christ or used for whatever purposes she could manage. I was no longer her child, no longer blood, no longer a friend. I was a dupe, some ridiculous liberal to be tricked and hoodlwinked, disenfranchised for my own good. In the absence of having converted me, she was perfectly and completely willing to trample on my rights, invalidate my views, discount my passions and beliefs in a way that I had never, would never have done to her. I could not have conceived of anything even remotely resembling her plan - I had never even occured to me.
As I had visited her time and again over the course of this election season, I had seen the "Bush/Cheney" signs and stickers bloom like weeds on her lawn and cars. And I had never said a word to her, never once even broached the subject. The idea of trying to bamboozle her had never even occured to me. I simply bit my tongue and sighed heavily with the knowledge that my vote would do nothing more than cancel hers out. And that was good enough for me.
My relationship with my mother changed irrevocably last night. In future days, people will wonder why I have become so abjectly unconcerned with the fate of America. How will I explain to them that America is a place overrun by people like my mom, and how could I possibly give a shit about a place like that?
Mostly.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(738 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
