Minus One

 The most difficult part of preparing for life without my mother around: reality. 

For as long as I can remember, the way that I have checked my reality is by talking about it with my mom. Good day or bad day, if I wanted to check my roll, I called my mom. This all started way back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in elementary school. Sitting down at the kitchen table after a long day in first grade over a glass of Kool-Aid and a couple of cookies, we talked about my day. 

Eventually, those check-ins became less frequent. Teenagers don't have quite as much to say to their parents, but I found it necessary to stay in touch with mine. All those things that seemed so confounding and torturous in my adolesence were made less painful by having my mother's ear. 

And it wasn't just the ups and downs of being a kid. All three of her sons felt compelled to share all the music, movies and books that we discovered. Pity my mother for having to sit through three separate recaps of the most recent Planet of the Apes movie that we had all attended together. We all felt compelled to share our latest album purchase with her as well. We did come by this honestly, as mom felt it was her job to coach us up when it came to pop culture, showing us all those MGM musicals and all that Beethoven, Brahms and Tschaikovsky. My mother read The War of the Worlds to us. She handed me a copy of Dracula, knowing my predilection for things monstrous. 

Then there was all that writing. Even when I was writing all that dark poetry and obtuse short stories, I knew who my audience was. When I started writing this blog, I was happy to know that my mom was my constant reader. Some days were diamonds. Some days were rocks. When things went sideways in my life, it was a chat with my mother that helped me straighten it out. 

My audience has shrunk ever-so-slightly. But it's huge. The fabric of my reality has been torn apart. Thank you for reading about it.