Doing What Moms Do

My mom drove me nuts, but that's what moms do, right?

She was my teacher in elementary school, so I couldn't get away with anything. She knew my homework, she knew the phone numbers of every teacher in the school, hell, she INVITED the other teachers over to our HOUSE! Drove me nuts.

In 1976 she and my dad bought a house in the country, an old, dilapidated, smelly, isolated house in the country. No drugstore on the corner, no library across the street, no friends within walking or even cycling distance. Instead we worked to renovate that house, plant gardens, clean up the debris from the previous owners. The photo above is from this era, right after we moved in. Don't we look like disadvantaged waifs in some tenement? Okay, waifs with fabulous 70's hair, but still. Drove me NUTS.

One of my chores as a kid was cleaning the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters and so on. Naturally, I could not be expected to do this directly after mealtimes; there were books to read, games to play, and Hogan's Heroes wasn't going to watch ITSELF, right? My mother had different ideas and would call me to my task. But she wouldn't just yell "Jeb! Sean! Clean the kitchen!" Instead, she would call out three syllables that were a bastardization of the word kitchen, as if spoken with a French accent but then drawn out into a sing-song: "KIT--SEE--OWN!!" I hated that word. It. Drove. Me. Fucking. NUTS!!!

She never slowed her mind long enough for her mouth to catch up, so she often spooned in spokerisms. Once she pointed at a songbird, rare in our area, that sported red wings on its black body. "Look!" she exclaimed. "It's a rat-wing bedbird!"

Everything was a "sign" to my mom. Any time she saw a robin, it was "the first robin of spring", even if it was September. She could never get the names of me and my brothers correct on the first try. Any time she rode in the car while I was driving, she would flinch and gasp at every movement ahead of us--even if it was a leaf blowing in front of the car.

But that's what moms do, right?

God knows what she would have made of today's world. Would she have become one of those Facebook moms who constantly forwards glurge and urban legends? What would she have done with Twitter? She could barely handle a VCR; I can't imagine her navigating an iPhone. More importantly, what would my life, and the lives of my children, have been like if she was still around? Would she still be driving me nuts?

I'll never know. Mom died in 1995, ten years after first being diagnosed with breast cancer. Maybe if it had been found sooner, maybe if today's treatments had been around, maybe maybe maybe. What happened was, she worked as hard at life as she did at anything she loved and crammed a lot of it into those ten years. If she were still alive, she would be doing the same thing--living, working, enjoying herself and her family. Driving us all nuts.

Because that's what my mom did.

The Amazing Adventures of FINDERMAN!!

As a superpower, it's not much to brag about (but I'm going to).

My abilities are strictly limited. They only work inside my house, and only on my family. Don't come running to me if you've lost something important; in fact, my abilities don't seem to work on myself.

You see, I have the power to find stuff that my family members have misplaced, ESPECIALLY if they have left their belongings in an extremely obvious place. Why? Because I am...

FINDERMAN!!!

Can't find your keys, honey? Here they are, on the kitchen table next to your purse!!

What's that, child? Your homework has gone missing? Why, there it is, on your bed!!

You say you've looked all over for your other shoe, and it's nowhere to be found? Did you look right here, where you took it off last night?

Thanks, Finderman. (Note the lack of enthusiasm. But FINDERMAN doesn't notice; he's already off to his next case!)

Eerily, FINDERMAN can sometimes lend his powers for a short time, allowing the victims to help themselves.

Finderman, have you seen my glasses? They were...oh! Found them! They were on my nightstand all along!

Does anyone know where my saxophone went? Ow! Never mind, I just tripped over it!

I don't know the origin story of Finderman; it often seems like I've always had these powers, but I didn't want to acknowledge their existence. All those times I found cat puke by stepping in it? Just bad luck. And as I mentioned, my uncanny ability does not function on myself. If I lose my phone, I have to call it so I can hear it ringing under the sofa cushions, just like normal mortals. I am my own Kryptonite.

But take a word of advice from FINDERMAN: It's always in the last place you look, so why not look there first?

#cartoon #family #life

Of Larcenous Squirrels and Social Media

Suppose you’re at a gathering, a party or whatever, and someone says to the group at large:

“There was a squirrel in my car this morning!”

Or, “I’ve decided to stop wearing underwear!”

Or even, “Today I used my kids to get out of a speeding ticket!”

This isn’t a stranger, it’s someone you know, so you would respond, right? “Hope he didn’t have the keys!” or “TMI, dude!” or “Glad your kids are good for something!!” So then this person says: “Ha ha ha!! You should not have commented! This is the 2016 breast cancer awareness game! Now you have to pick some idiotic announcement and tell it to everyone! Don’t be a spoil sport, just choose your poison and fool everyone in your circle of acquaintances! Sorry I fell for it too, but it all goes for Breast Cancer!”

If you’re like me, you’d want to punch that person in the face, but at the same time you’d feel like a jerk because hey, it’s all for breast cancer awareness.

Except that it isn’t.

This chain post found me on Facebook recently, and I felt exactly as described above. (Sorry, Rich. You’re a great guy and I don't blame you, but I still wanted to punch you.) I agreed to play along, which is something I normally don’t do, because my Mom suffered from breast cancer and eventually died when it metastasized into bone cancer. But before I went and made other people angry, I googled “breast cancer awareness game”, because this is 2016 and you should check the veracity of anything you find on the Internet, and guess what?

This is a hoax. You probably saw that coming. But it’s a hoax that’s been circulating for YEARS, possibly since 2010. Every year it gets a facelift and goes around again, to the point that there are articles saying, “It’s time again to debunk the breast cancer game!” It's a hoax, because it does nothing to actually raise awareness, it includes no facts or figures, has no connection to any organization that fights breast cancer, and doesn't even suggest that you donate money to help. I don't know why anyone started this thing (or why anyone starts any kind of chain post, for that matter), but it ain't for awareness.

Needless to say, I don’t think much of this “game”.

My mom was diagnosed in 1985, during my freshman year at college. Nobody told me because they didn’t want me to worry; I didn’t find out until I came home at Christmas and by then she had undergone her first mastectomy and was in chemotherapy. I don’t remember too much about her struggle because I distanced myself from it with friends, college, summer jobs and the like. Most of what I know comes from the book she wrote with my younger brother, “Moms Don’t Get Sick”. After her treatment and reconstructive surgery, Mom lived until 1995, dying just a couple of weeks before we relocated from North Carolina to be near her, and about a year before we had her first grandchild. The last time I saw her, we were talking about my new house and how close we would be, and I got impatient because she didn’t know exactly where it was. I’m not sure, but I think her last words to me were, “Please don’t be angry with me.”

This is what it means when I think of breast cancer. Not a stupid Facebook chain post.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to post a very clear status update on social media, with this blog entry included. I’m going to post one every day during Breast Cancer Awareness month, which is October. I’m going to include links to the American Cancer Society and the National Breast Cancer Foundation so that people can find facts and figures and donate money if they have a mind to. And in no uncertain terms I’m going to remind people to do self-exams and get mammograms. And YOU are going to forward this post and this blog to people you care about. (Just once is fine. You don’t have to do it every day.) This will raise awareness about breast cancer without making anyone feel like a jerk and without making it some kind of cute game.

Because it isn’t.