My Mother Will Always be a Mother

To be perfectly frank, I believe my mother is mentally impaired. At times I see her staring off into space, slurring surreal things underneath her breath, and I fear she is losing touch with the objective world around her. In layman’s term that means she doesn’t know up from down, left from right, or shit from fuck.My mother is the prototypical Liberal Arts Major. She has no viable skills and lacks even the most basic idea of how the world really works on a purely mechanical level. All of her life she has coasted by on faux intelligence and paper shuffling. She repeats catch phases from literature, like a highly intelligent parrot, gauging the worth of the ideas more from the reactions of other people than from their own internal merit. Which leads me to the two men I hate most in all of philosophy: Emerson and Thoreau.

I don’t really hate these men for any reason other than the hell they put me though as a child. I have read their works as an adult and found them at times to be fairly reasonable. Still I cannot bring myself to not hate them. The ideas these men held about nature nearly got me killed.

Listening to my mother explain Transcendentalism will leave one sorely disappointed in the American educational system. “Umm… you see… everything outside is just so ‘beautiful’ and ‘harmonious’ and you can really see how it all fits into ‘God’s will… and uh… stuff.’” There’s nothing more I hate than hippy assholes who think they can go out into the wild and remain unscathed simply because they “understand” the animals more than others. My mother, however, truly believes that if she just “believes” enough then reality will warp itself into something kinder.

I was seven. Watching the movie “Bambi” was the sum of my experience with deer. It was early September, and I was wearing my winter jacket, looking like the plump little boy from “A Christmas Story.” I was just about to go outside and play when my mother looked out the back window and said “Oh lord… Brandon! Come look! Deer! There are DEER in our lawn!”

Not particularly excited, I went over to the window to see a doe and her fawn eating the expensive flowers my grandmother had bought for my mother as house-warming gift (we lived next to a large forest). “Can I go play now mom?”

“No… Brandon… this is magical. Go get your sister. She needs to see this too.”

Already preparing for a hair-tugging and a face-scratching I went and got the demon I would later call Thunder Cunt, and told her that our mom wanted her. My sister had the enormous master bedroom at the top of the house. I slept in the bathroom that my parents had converted upon my birth. When I was little I could put my arms out in a circle and spin around. Today? Not so much.

With her Neanderthal-like brain, my sister crammed a gram cracker in her gullet and asked, “What does she need me for?”

“There are deer in the back lawn.”

In between wide, open mouthed chomps on her sugary meal she asked, “Who gives a fuck?” For a nine year old she had such a lovely mouth.

Knowing that Rachel’s refusal to come downstairs would somehow become my fault I tried one more time. “I don’t know, Rachel. Mom wants you to see it.”

After I made mention of the fact that there was more food downstairs that she could eat, we both headed toward my mother at the back window. All the way there my sister stepped on the heels of my shoes, and poked me in the back.

“Look honey!” my mom said putting her arm around my sister, pushing me to the back, and blocking my view. “Look at the deer! Aren’t they majestic?”

My sister agreed that they were.

And this is when disaster struck. “You two should go out and pet them. They won’t mind little children like you!” In her view, since both the deer and I are “innocents” of nature the animal won’t mind me getting close to it. No one who has read a science book in the past four hundred years would feel this way.

However, as I was seven, unaccustomed to the law of the jungle and still sadly wanted my mother to love me as much as she loved my sister, I opened the back door and went outside. Given a chance to go back in time I would have just head-butt my mother in the vagina and taken a nap.

With my sister pushing me forward like a high ranking German officer testing for land-mines in WWII and my mother making emphatic “shove gestures” at me from the doorway, I put my hand on the flank of the fawn.

Biggest.Fucking.Mistake.Ever.

The fawn did just two things. It turned its head from its meal and looked at me like it was Samuel L. Jackson and I was a Snake on a Plane. Then it lifted its hind legs and kicked.

Thankfully I was tall for my age, or I imagine I’d be telling you about the deer that permanently deformed my jaw. As it was, the fawn’s hind legs hit me square in my coat-protected chest and I flew backward in a majestic, chest crushing arc.

I hit the ground with a thud, tried to breathe, and could not.

My mother rushed out to me and told me that I was going to be okay. Then asked my sister to go inside because “you shouldn’t have to look at him this way.” I laid there on the cold September ground. The two deer ate their hundred-dollar flower meal and my mother tried to comfort my sister. As I struggled for breath, I realized one thing:

I really need a new family.