as small as a world and as large as alone, My Mother Is Badass My mother is tough when she...

9:18pm October 24, 2014

My Mother Is Badass

My mother is tough when she needs to be. She used to stand about five feet seven inches, but a spinal condition has made her shrink down to ordinary height, maybe a little short. But I have seen her, with sheer force of will, face down a man who was not only much taller and stronger than she, but also a smooth talker and clearly used to getting his way. He wanted to talk to a friend of my mom’s, who didn’t want to be talked to. My mom walked right up to him, looked him in the eye, and told him that under no circumstances would he be talking to my mom’s friend unless my mom’s friend decided she wanted to. he eventually left, and the confrontation rapidly became legendary. Because nobody stood up to that guy, normally. Nobody could. But my momma could.

My favorite story, though, comes from when she was backpacking in the woods alone. I think this happened before I was even born, but I’ve heard the story so many times I can almost picture it A group of men came up to her and started talking. It began to dawn on her that they had more than talking in mind. They kept trying to close in on her. Whenever they did this, she didn’t say a word, or didn’t make a break in the conversation at all. She just ever-so-slowly moved her hand back to rest on the hilt of her Bowie knife. Every time she did this, the men would back off. So this lone woman, in the middle of nowhere, miles from any help, managed to fend off a would-be rape gang with subtle nonverbal threats alone.

My mom isn’t just badass because of the people she stands up to in sticky situations, though. She’s also badass because of the way she’s able to get along with just about anybody. When I got my breast reduction, she stayed overnight in the hospital room with me. I normally have trouble getting along with at least some of the hospital personnel. But my mom didn’t. And I watched how she did it. No matter who came into the room, she made small talk with them. She had worked in a hospital before, so it was easy for her to fall into the lingo, and to understand what happens there. She’d ask people questions about themselves: How was their day going? When was their shift going to be over? How long had they been working there? Did they enjoy their jobs? Did they have children? Pets?

And the key wasn’t just that she asked the questions, but that she sincerely listened and cared about their answers. She has the rare gift of making her conversational partner feel like they are the center of the universe for the duration of the conversation. She’s not quite Momo, but she’s up there when it comes to listening to human beings in particular. I have done my best to emulate her, with mixed results, but I notice already that nurses in hospitals treat me a lot better if I ask them how their day has been, sympathize with them about difficult shifts, and so forth.

This isn’t just “mindless chit-chat” the way many autistic people believe. This is how nonautistic people signal that they care about each other. And when you’re in a hospital facing life and death medical decisions and you’re someone who gets discriminated against a lot, you want people to care about you. So this can be an essential survival skill if you can pull it off.

Once I had this van driver I was having trouble with. She drove the wheelchair vans that took me to most of my medical appointments, so I saw a lot of her. One day she was driving me to the pain clinic. I go to the pain clinic four times a year to get nerve block injections into my face to treat my trigeminal neuralgia. Anyway, she asked where I was going, and I said “The pain clinic.” She said “Oooooh get me some of the good drugs while you’re there!” I knew she was joking, but even as a joke it made me uncomfortable. Then, on the way home, just as if she hadn’t already said enough, she referred to her dog as a ‘ree-taaaahhhd’ and laughed. Again, the fact that it was a joke didn’t make it okay.

When my case manager heard about all this, she was furious and insisted on filing a complaint. She made it clear to them that the fact that these were jokes did not make them appropriate to say to a pain patient or a developmentally disabled person. The response she got? “We talked to her and she said she was only joking, so it’s really okay."

From that time on, for months, I got the silent treatment. The driver would gleefully – it’s the only word even approaching the amount she loved doing this – strike up conversations with everyone around me, and refuse to listen to a word I said or respond to anything I said at all. She wouldn’t even ask me where I was going. And she was really happy about this, the more frustrated I got, the happier she got.

That time I was in the hospital, she happened to be the one assigned to drive me and my mother home. My mother talked to her the entire way home, saying all the things she usually said to people, with no idea of my history with this woman. The driver really liked my mother, and really liked getting the opportunity to talk about her life, I guess. The weirdest thing was that after that, it was like the months of silent treatment never happened. She went back to talking to me like she always had, only much friendlier than she had ever been. And she never made drug jokes or said the r-word in front of me again, all the way up until she retired.

To this day, I have no idea what my mother did that made that woman treat me like a human being. I mean, even before the silent treatment, she never had treated me as human. But somehow fifteen minutes making small talk with my mother changed everything around. And that’s the other way my mother is badass.

Anna, in case you’re reading this, badass is a good thing. It means you’re tough, and strong, and competent, and courageous. There are so many things I look up to you for. And dealing with Ron’s impending death makes me realize how little time we have to say things like this to the people we love. How often do we tell them what we admire them for? How often do we say we love them, and really stop to think about the meaning of love? I know that Ron doesn’t have much time left, but none of us know how much time you have left either. And I want you to know the things I’ve always admired about you.

One thing I could not possibly appreciate more is the way that you and Ron didn’t raise our family with strict gender roles. I had no idea how unusual that was until I started getting to know other people’s families. Families where the mom cooks and the dad takes out the trash and the mom cleans the house and the dad changes the oil in the cars. When I moved out on my own, I found these amazing books for people who are just moving out on their own and don’t always have the life skills expected of adults. Books about everything from how to plunge a toilet to how to do laundry.

But two of the books really took me aback: Where’s Mom When You Need Her? and Where’s Dad When You Need Him? The way the tasks were separated into genders confused me, because that’s not how it was around our house. Around our house, people did what they were good at. If that happened to go along with a gender stereotype, they weren’t going to stop doing it just for that reason. But if it didn’t go along with a gender stereotype, they weren’t going to let that stop them either. And most of the household chores were shared equally among the genders, it was just a matter of who happened to be home and available to do them at the time. I can still remember my dad changing my diapers, in fact I remember him doing it more than I remember my mom doing it. I remember when my mom discovered power tools and loved them.

That’s not to say our household was free of gender-based restrictions. We’re not talking utopia here. But we are talking about something totally different from what most kids in my generation got. I had no idea how lucky I was, because this was normal to me. And that’s exactly the beauty of it – this was normal. This was just the way things should be. I didn’t question it, because what is there to question? It’s not like there was any valid reason, at all, for things to be other than they were in our household.

And my mom wouldn’t stand for other kids bringing their sexism into our household without comment, either. There was a little boy next door who was playing with our Fisher Price toys. He put one of the male dolls into the ambulance seat and said "The ambulance driver has to be a man, of course.” Anna was a respiratory therapist at the time, and she’d worked in plenty of ambulances. So she asked him, “What makes you think the ambulance driver has to be a man?” I forget how the rest of the conversation went, but my mom told the story a lot, rolling her eyes about how sexism gets to children so young. She blamed cartoons. I don’t know that it’s cartoon-specific. Sexism is all around us in all the media. But he certainly watched his share of violent macho cartoons and acted them out regularly.

Of course me and my brother watched the same cartoons when our parents weren’t around to tell us not to, and we turned out okay. I worry about that neighbor boy, I’m certain he joined the military, it was his lifelong dream. And we went to war right around the time he’d have been old enough to enlist.

That sentence I just typed brought me up short, though: “…when our parents weren’t around to tell us not to…” Because now that my father is dying and my mother has a potentially fatal illness that has already landed her in the ICU before the physical and emotional strain of taking care of my father. I would do anything for my parents to be around to tell us not to, forever. But whatever happens, my mother is badass. And that’s a high compliment.