mom

i remember the first time i called my mom a bitch. i was in grade six, which puts me at about eleven, maybe eleven and a half years old. it was 1997, the spice girls were on the radio, titanic was in theaters. a movie, i was for some reason allowed to see twice without any adult present, either time, and during which i realized that, deep down, kate winslet's breasts, albeit very nice, were never going to do it for me. i was heading back to school after having come home for lunch that day. the lunch, incidentally, would have consisted of way more food than the average eleven year old could possibly have eaten, which is a sentence that could describe most meals i ate between 1994 and 2003. by this age i was already hovering around the same height as my mom, which for most of my life, and her adult life, was believed to be 5'9'', though more recently we've learned is really about 5'7''. a fact that, she will tell you, is absolute bullshit. i also probably had about 10 to 15 pounds on her, 5 of which were probably the entire rotisserie chicken i had probably just eaten. it must have been just before christmas because, david maxwell, my elementary school, was doing some sort of fundraising drive, collecting used winter coats that were still in good condition to donate to some charity or another, and really, this type of thing only happens just before christmas...

anyway, as i was leaving there must have been some dispute by the front door about me not taking the coat i was going to donate into school that eventually resulted in my mom throwing it at me. the coat, which was to be eventually donated probably to some wonderful son who appreciated his mother, could not possibly have done and did not do any damage to my oversized frame. i'm pretty sure it was a coat of mine from a couple of years earlier that was some god awful, pullover mess made from black nylon on the bottom and a green fleece across the top and shoulders with a 1/4 zip mock neck. i guess really not that bad an item at the time, very practical... the kind of thing i wouldn't be caught dead in now. it hit me right in the face, and i immediately called her a bitch. i assume this would've had to have been surprising for her to hear since i don't really remember cursing being a thing in our house growing up. my parents never swore about anything in our house, or at the very least, not ever in front of connor or myself. i, however, have had the mouth of a sailor since october 1996 when i was 10. i had gotten a small part in a small windsor production of "the best christmas pageant ever" and was suddenly exposed to hanging out with kids that were in high school and who knew all the curse words. all of them. always having been pretty big for my age i easily got away with telling them i was 14 and in grade 8, which maybe made them more comfortable with having me around and cursing endlessly in front of me. more likely though i was actually getting away with nothing and they didn't believe my lie, but just thought it was funny to get a 10 year old to say "fuck" all the time. this is also how and when i started drinking coffee. having a small role in the play meant being sent out with another kid, who was actually 14, to occasionally grab coffee for the adults running the show. he got one for himself the first time and the second time and eventually asked me, in a really condescending tone, "do you not drink coffee man?". of course this brought me to the immediate realization that the older kids might be seeing through my charade and that, as the grown up 14 year old i was pretending to be, i was going to have to take action now, or forever be relegated to hanging out with the losers who were actually the same age as i was. i decided to order a large coffee and i drank it black, staring into the other kids face the whole time so he wouldn't see me flinch. that first time, i think i was bouncing off the walls at home until 3am on a school night, but from that moment onward i don't remember my parents ever saying i couldn't have a coffee if i ordered one when we went out for breakfast...

anyway, i knew i had done something wrong, calling her a bitch, a fact that was swiftly reinforced by my mom taking a few steps towards me and slapping me hard across the face. it was, at that moment, my turn to be surprised because much like the swear words,  i also don't really remember spankings being a thing in my house growing up. i remember being aggressively "shoved" by my dad twice, and i remember the 2 times my mom slapped me across the face. that's right, this wasn't even the first time she had done it, having given it to me once before when i had acted up in some way a few years earlier that led to me biting her and her giving me something to think about. that time though had ended with me running off crying and, i think, her eventually crying through an apology to me. a decisive victory in my favour. this time though was different, we had both aged a few years and we were both, and still are, quite stubborn. she held her ground, i held mine, both of us, potentially 5'9'', but apparently 5'7'', glaring into each others eyes. it wasn't turning out as i would have hoped. she wasn't turning into a crumbling mess about what a terrible parent she had suddenly become by trying to strike down her poor, innocent, giant, foul-mouthed son. part of me doesn't know why this would have surprised her though, as this technically wasn't even the first time i had cursed at her. i had once given her the middle finger in 1993 at age 7 after seeing robin williams do it to pierce brosnan in the cross-dressing classic, mrs. doubtfire, a movie during which i realized, deep down, i appreciated seeing a man dress up like a woman and dance. not that i knew what it actually meant, giving someone the finger, but i must have just sensed that it meant you didn't like that person. i don't know why i didn't like her at that moment and she wasn't even supposed to see me do it, as i did it directed at the closed bathroom door while she was on the other side. needless to say she opened the door and found me there, giving her the finger. my suspicions were confirmed, it was in fact something you did to someone you didn't like...

anyway, after standing there staring at one another for what seemed like an eternity but was probably 4 seconds i dramatically yelled, "well that proves it!" and "i hope i still have your hand print on my face when i get back to school" as i stormed out the front door. i made it past about 2 houses when i started crying, blaming my puffy, watery eyes on the wind when i eventually got back to school so as to not be made fun of by the other terrible children who i assume i had taught a lot of swear words to throughout the second half of grade 5. you grow up fast in windsor...

anyway, i don't remember what the aftermath would have been at home. i would guess that she wouldn't have told my dad right away, because i can assure you he would not have been okay with it at the time and i would have remembered him telling me so. we probably iced each other out for a few days, as was our way, me always trying to hold out longer than her before giving in and talking to her again. i always "won" because she was a grown up who probably thought it was pretty funny to watch her son try and out-stubborn her and teach her a lesson about how she was an unfit mother by denying her the pleasure of my company around the house.

fast forward a little over 17 years and i honestly can't count how many times i've called her a bitch. the beyond casual relationship i have with my mom is something some of my friends think is pretty odd, that as a grown man i can get away with joking around with her about how i think she was a whore in the late 70's (who wasn't), and her joking around with me about how she thinks i was a whore 5 weeks ago (she's not joking), or when i text her during a walk of shame home at 6am on some random weekday (this most recently did not happen only 5 weeks ago, but i'm pretty sure within the last year). this relationship i have with her, where we can lovingly slut-shame one another, didn't come over night. i slowly had to work in the occasional curse word during a phone conversation, talk about some small detail about some creepy date i had gone on, progressing my way slowly up the curse word ladder from hell to bitch to shit to fuck, to eventually being able to use the word blowjob. something that was definitely a more difficult adjustment for her than when i came out to her at 18. back then, if she had to have made a choice, i know she would have picked gay over foul-mouthed 10 times out of 10.

i know i'm lucky to have a cool mom, not a regular mom. a mom that i can call at 2am when i've had maybe one drink too many and i'm upset about something, and she'll make me feel better just by talking to me, and then make me feel like an idiot for being upset about the same thing once again and she'll tell me to get my shit together, and i'll agree with her. a mom that i can overshare with, even though she pretends she wishes my brother and i didn't, when deep down she knows it's one of the main reasons she is a cool mom. a mom i can bring over to my friends place to hangout and they're more excited to see her than they are me, and that's fair because she's nicer than i am. a mom who, when i was 16, passed out drunk on the tv room floor in the middle of the afternoon while making a sad attempt to play mariokart with me after 2 "glasses" (bottles) of wine. mostly though, my mom is a cool mom because she let's me be the foul-mouthed, crude, gay, judgmental, tired, lazy, sarcastic, snobby, funny, cynical, cranky son of a bitch that i am and because she loves me unconditionally for it. 

and she gives the best hugs.