Remember the Moo

Remember the Moo

From the Spoken Word Event Supershow January 2008

By Sean Hetherington

I tell my boyfriend all the time, “When you find me laying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, curtains shut, raisin pudding and peanut butter dripping off my chin…swimming in the impending doom of my finances…nothing’s wrong with me! I’m just keepin’ it real.”

My mom used to take me to juvenile hall to chase rabbits. It’s still the happiest I’ve ever seen her. She’d jump out of her BMW325ES faster than me, locking the doors before I could even open mine and start chasing strays near the iron gates.

During that first visit at age 7, she said, “I want you to become a professional country music drummer, but if you’re no good then you should be a psychologist. You’re so good at listening to people’s problems and helping them. And psychologists don’t go to school for as long as psychiatrists, which is good for you. It’s better than being a doctor because you’re like me. Bad at math and science and mutli-tasking.”

“What’s multi-tasking?” I asked while I fed a bunny a mini-carrot.

“No more questions, Sean.” She’d whine. “I’m tryin to chase the rabbits!”

My mom worked for medical insurance companies most of her life as a claims adjuster. She’d work about three to six months before coming home in a panic with a vision about her co-workers, “They hate me. Everyone hates me, all because I drive a BMW and they’re jealous.” And she believed it. Paranoia was my mothers version of spirituality.

Her jobs started all the same. She loved them. She loved everyone. Mary sat next to her and is a Christian, and Mom appreciated how generous Mary was by sharing her chicken salad sandwich with her since she didn’t have time to make lunch today because her curling iron burned her forehead. Then there was Joanie who was a doll AND her boss. She was pregnant and Mom was obsessed with this woman and her soon to-be-born baby, whom she called the “half-breed bun in the oven.”

But a mistake on Mom’s paycheck showed up once, and Mom just knew that Joanie fudged her timecard because she was jealous of Mom’s car. She told Mary her paranoid theory in confidence. Joanie heard about it, called my Mom and Mary into her office and a screaming match ensued.

She had picked me up early from school that day. I got in the car with the license plate JANS325 and we went to the mall. Let me remind the reader, I was seven.

“No. Not red, SEAN. You’re too heavyset for red. Black is slimming!” She said fitfully as we walked around Millers Outpost looking for the outfit for my 3^rd grade portrait. “You can’t be in bright colors. I’m a SPRING! and that shirt’s too expensive, anyway. Especially since I just quit my job.”

“What happened?” I asked. Even before I was 10, I knew to ask open and general questions in the beginning of one of her stories, then gradually point my questions more specifically so she could identify her feelings and try to find a pragmatic solution.

She told me about Jackie. Mom told Joanie that she was sick of being picked on for having a nicer car and for being white (Joanie was half African American which my mother explained must be why she took the bus to work) and that Joanie had under-calculated 1.5 hours of hard, miserable work that Mom used to spend on her kids, and someday she’d understand what that’s like if she didn’t spend all of her money on crack, and that Mary was no Christian, but actually a crybaby who was probably possessed. Mom had seen Mary’s drivers license. She was born on June 6, 1966. 6/6/66. An extra 6 for backstabbing. So she was either the devil or a dyke. Then she told Joanie that she was quitting and her attorney would be calling her in 15 minutes.

Just then, Joanie’s water broke and she had to be rushed to the hospital. No joke. And that’s when mom decided she missed me so she came to pick me up to go shopping.

“Your dad isn’t making any money these days. We had to borrow money from your grandparents to pay the electric bill and the house payment. I pray they don’t die before we pay them back.”

I knew our house payment was $1632 a month because she had shown it to me the month before when she asked if she could borrow $300 from my allowance envelope to pay for the remainder. I happily nodded that it was ok and went back to watching American Gladiators.

On the way home from the mall that day that she sent a woman into premature labor, Mom took the long way so we could go moo at the cows. A farm tucked behind the Safeway just outside of Folsom, California was home to all of the cows you could ever want to talk to. We rolled down the windows and Mom mooed and mooed and mooed. This was my mom at her happiest. She loves animals. She was so good with them. She would have been an amazing zoologist, and I would have told her that but compliments made her very sober with self-doubt.

SOO-EY! MOO! A cop pulled her over and wrote her a ticket for speeding while mooing. I wanted asked her if that was what multi-tasking was but knew better. She started to cry. “How am I going to pay for this ticket? We don’t have any money. I guess I’ll have to go get another job I’ll hate.”

I helped her look for a job while she lay in the dark in the living room on a couch covered in dirty laundry one weekday afternoon. “Mom, Chubby’s diner is hiring. You could be a waitress and talk to everyone all day.”

“No! We’re not good at that, Sean because you have to be fast and be a good salesperson. I’m like you. Clumsy and uncoordinated. I’ll go back to insurance.”

And she did for another 19 years. She’s disability retired from stress and a permanently torn shoulder due to years of pissed-off paper shuffling. She calls me a lot because she’s lonely and on meds that make her see rabbits and cows in her sleep. And I have to be careful how often I answer because I realize that her greatest challenge is distinguishing between misery and comfort and mine is recognizing the difference between her feelings and mine.

On a long voicemail that I listened to on a brake from my job waiting tables (in a bright red tie I might add) she said she hoped that I was making the best of my life and didn’t end up like her with a job she’d hated and no friends. I realized that my mother was in her own fucked up way, letting me off the hook for her unhappiness. It was no Maya Angelou poetry or Barack Obama stump speech but that’s because being articulate implies a certain level of adult communication skills. And receiving attention for excellence is her worst nightmare, the problem for my family though, and for me still, is the wide range between incompetence, adulthood, and excellence. But in that rambling voicemail she was saying that she knew I had never harvested the seedlings of what she had been robbed of, a sense of worth.

And on that day, March 11^th, I put in my two weeks notice to the job I hated, dramatized and brooded over. After losing over 100 pounds and becoming a certified personal trainer, I had always wanted to make my living just as my mother had predicted, helping people, in this case losing weight. But I never threw my balls to the wall with this exciting career because I was raised to believe that money comes infrequently, with lots of soapy drama.

So for the first month working in a career that brings me more smiles and cash than I think I deserve, I’ve come this close to having a nervous breakdown about 22 times.

I had constructed a 3-inch stainless steel ceiling with Dolby speakers screaming, “You’re physically incapable, spiritually not chosen, and mentally incompetent to create joy” ever since those days at Joovy Hallz. Realizing the contrary, now, 20 years later, that happiness and security are mine if I’ll just smile and shut the fuck up… has made me absolutely insane…AND THIS, I say to my boyfriend, is why I need my dark, laundry-littered room and my super-sized custard with a straw. Because I will come out of this spell eventually, but until that happens, I need a safe place to chase the rabbits and get my moo on.