An Open Letter to my Mother

The Handmaid’s Tale S2E3 Baggage is the Mother’s Day card I needed.

I have trouble watching The Handmaid’s Tale. There are so many triggers of repression, rape, and societal punishment of rebellion that I brace myself before watching a show. Sometimes, it’s days until I feel centered again.

It does what it sets out to do, which is making me spittin’ mad and heartsick. Episode Three was different. It made me nostalgic and reflect on my mom the way June reflects on hers. SPOILERS AHEAD!

The scene where June is driving with her mom reminds me the most of me and my mom. June’s mom’s face is unabashedly unadorned. She has a huge smile, and her foot is on the dashboard. Her craggy toes are spread wide and soaking up the sunshine. She is singing at the top of her lungs,

“That’s my shit, that’s my shit.”

June is staring at her like her mom has lost her mind. I used to look at my mom that way. I used to police her when she wasn’t acting like the mom I wanted her to be. She gave up a house in the suburbs to start a ramshackle horse farm on 13 acres in the grasslands of Texas. We built a house inside a two-story hay barn. We slept on the floor the first year and bathed in a horse trough. My mom thrived in adversity and my dad loved the ruggedness of it all.

My mom loved to sing in the car to the radio. We sang for years when I was a child, while riding the long bumpy backroads of the country. Then I grew up and became afraid of being judged. One day, when I went home to visit, after quitting college and taking up delivering pizza instead. That day we were driving into Weatherford to pick up horse feed, she started singing and pointed at me to take the chorus. I rolled my eyes and looked out the window at the scrub brush flashing past.

“Really?” She asked.

She sounded like I punched her, but I was too angry to be fun with her anymore. I resented her for not being a conventional mother. For being too crazy to be helpful.

I was a self-centered bitch in my 20s.

My mom is crude, like trucker crude. She laughs really, really loud. She loves Irish coffee and sitting around talking shit with friends, and she has a lot of friends. She and her sister started a holistic center that featured healing energy fairs, yoga and bellydancing classes, and her Zentangle club on Saturday mornings.

In the middle of nowhere in Texas.

In the early ‘00s…

And it was successful!

When June visits her mother’s apartment and it is filled with rowdy women, I recognize those women. They are my mom’s friends: sardonic, passionate, and bruised up from fighting the good fight. Mom’s friends’ bruises were usually from horses and farm equipment. And they could talk some epic shit. Mom and her buddies were total misandrists, and most of them were quite happily married.

Mom’s favorite saying to me was,

“You know why men are so damn stupid? Dick or brain. You don’t get both.”

I would always blanch and yell, “MOM! Gross!”

There is no way my mom would watch this show. She can’t handle anything that is emotionally aggressive. She has a hyper sensitive temperament that is prone to panic attacks, and those kinds of things put her in a depressive spin for days. So, she avoids them.

But I wish she could watch this episode. I recognized so many moments that mirrored ones with my mom. My mom is a belligerent free soul. She grew up in 50s. She was the youngest of five born to a middle class white family in Ft. Worth, Texas (a city that is lovingly known as CowTown *barf*). My mother and my aunt told me many times they never felt loved by their mother, only judged and found wanting.

I admire these women, these first-wave feminists. They lived life on their own terms, even if it cost them dearly. They fought for rights we shrug off as givens. When my mom was in her twenties (in the 1970s) women were not allowed to wear pants to work or have their own checking accounts or get a credit card without their father or husband’s permission. She swam upstream her entire life to be joyfully herself, to not give two shits about what was for dinner, and to not be beholden to anyone else’s vision of her, including her prig of a daughter (me).

Sometimes, I catch myself stomping through the house singing songs that consist only of my dog’s name while he bounces around me barking with joy, or other times when I’m telling a particularly tacky or dirty joke surrounded friends who are cracking up loudly and I catch someone’s disapproving side-eye, I think, ‘oh lord, I’m turning into my mother.”

And in my heart of hearts, that makes me proud.

I love you, mom.

Stay tacky. Stay you.

You’re a boss.