[lit-ideas] Thanks, Mom

Garrison Keilor says that if you're the third or fourth born, you're likely
to be a creature of habit.  Of what I know of marriage, I'd have to agree,
though I'd like to believe I was called forth out of pure love.  None of us,
even old us, feels comfortable contemplating our parents' sexual lives.
Especially that of our mothers.  I say all that with nothing to support it
but my own prejudice, but that's all I ever have to work with.  Whether the
act of coitus that resulted in me was a coition of romantic vision or of
diversion doesn't matter:   Mama gave gamete me womb to grow and nurtured me
for thirty-four years.  Her beliefs were wonderfully at odds with a culture
that values convention.  A resentful feminist long before Betty Friedan.  A
lover of argumentation, dinners (at her instigation)were debating sessions.
She gave all six of us womb and later loving, liberal room to become
ourselves.  I remember (though I could not have been more than four) her
telling me after some dramatic event in my childhood that there was nothing
I ever do that would make her stop loving me.  "All right," I thought, "I'm
set."
Thanks, Mom.

Mike Geary
Motherless in Memphis

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