For Mother

I was going to avoid this. I know how you are about cards (waste of trees and money) and flowers (the cats eat them) and holidays like Mother's Day and Father's Day and anything that involves vast expenditures on little pieces of paper. And it isn't as if we're so bad at communicating that I have to set a special time of year just to say how much I appreciate you, because I sincerely hope that is clear every time we talk on the phone or come home. But among the myriad tributes to mothers I've seen on the internet today, there was one that galvanized me to write this. It wasn't for a good reason.

The tribute (a facebook status)  in question praised the mother for being a wonderful mother and teaching the girl in question to be a good wife and mother, to cook and clean, and to be a lover not a fighter, among other things.

Mama, this is something you most certainly never did.

And I don't think I can begin to describe exactly how incredibly grateful I am for that. You have never taught me how to be a 'good wife' or a 'good mother'. You taught me how to be a good person. You did not teach me how to cook or clean or say yes to the man I marry or to be a housewife. You taught me to be a fighter and a scholar and a vicious bitch. You taught me to stand up for people who are being picked on, to help people, to defend myself and to do what is right no matter how hard it is. You taught me that there were things more important than I was. You read me stories about tetanus and smallpox and leprosy and taught me how to channel my outrage at the injustice of the world so that I could actually do something about it. You taught me, unlike what that status said, to be a fighter, not just a lover, because that was what you were. You taught me how to deal with my own demons, guilt and self-hatred and blame.

You also taught me most of my dead baby jokes, and how to deal with a sucking chest wound and how to break into the house.

There's a reason I still think of myself as a girl. It's not because of the demeaning cultural norms that seek to disempower women by referring to them by juvenile terminology. It's because you've given me such an idea of what a woman is that I know I am not there yet; I do not have the confidence or the gravitas or the competence, not yet. But thanks to you, I will one day. Regardless of marital status or children.