Happy Birthday, Mom. We miss you.
Writer's note: I know the word 'president' is supposed to be capitalized, but I don't care. I'll start capitalizing it when I start respecting him as a commander in chief.
If you haven't noticed, I tend to be very passionate when it comes to politics. What our new president is doing disgusts me. But what disgusts me even more than the president himself are the people that support our president and his hateful rhetoric and mandates. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic bigots in this country disgust me and confound me.
Until I took a step back.
The woman pictured above is my mother. She passed away 6 years ago. Today would have been her 74th birthday. I've been thinking about her a lot today (as should I) and I've come to a realization. My mother would have been one of those bigots that I so frequently rail against. She was a Bible-thumping, conservative Republican through and through. I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating; My mom grew up on a farm in rural West Virginia that instilled in her a predilection towards subtle racism. She never even met a person of color until she moved to Florida for a brief time in the early 1960's.
My mom once told me that I couldn't run for President because I'm a girl and girls can't be President. She believed that Jews ran the media and that the blacks were given too many handouts by the government. She had black friends, but those individuals were exceptions to her finite rules on the races. I wasn't allowed to date anyone of color. I wasn't allowed to go to a friend's bat mitzvah (though my dad put his foot down on that one and took me so I could experience another culture). Although she wasn't outwardly hostile to gays (her hairdresser was a gay man) she had plenty to say about them when it was just our family hanging out at home.
I don't know whether or not my mother was ever sexually assaulted, but I know she was physically and verbally assaulted by men all her life, starting with her father. I'm almost positive that she would have written off the comments the president made to Billy Bush as 'boys being boys'. She never knew that I had been assaulted so she would never understand how that line of thinking destroys a piece of my soul that I've spent years bandaging and healing.
I'm almost certain that my mother would have voted for our president and would stand by his hateful Executive Orders and plans for the future of this nation.
But that wasn't all there was to her.
She worked full-time while raising two children and still made sure to make dinner from scratch most nights of my life. She won the church's Bake Off every year. Everything she made was homemade. Nothing came from a box. She made her own noodles and dumplings. She made her own pie crusts. She made her own minced meat, though I fail to see how anyone can accept meat as a desert. She never used recipes. She kept them all in her head. She was a firm believer in fat and sugar and everything she made was delicious. Maybe that's why I'm fat. One more thing to blame on my mother.
My mom loved Halloween. I think she loved it more than Christmas. We were too poor for store-bought costumes so my mom made costumes from things around the house. She was incredibly creative. One year she painted the box an appliance had come in, attached lids from various sized jars, and sent me out as a boombox. But she didn't just dress me and my sister up. Oh no. She had to get in on the fun. She worked on a military base and they had a costume contest every year up until 9/11. Every year she entered the contest and every year she placed in the top three, but could never seem to win. The last year she participated she decided to go big with something no one else would EVER think of. She went as an outhouse. Her friends helped attach poster board around her for the walls, she made a little triangle roof with a moon cut out of it and cob webs intertwined. She attached pages of the Sears catalog as 'toilet paper'. It truly reminded me of an outhouse from the early 1900's. I was mortified when I saw it, but gosh darn it, that year she won.
She took care of us when we were sick. When I was 3 I contracted Scarlet Fever. My temperature was 105. She held me day and night and sat in cold baths with me until my fever finally broke. I once asked her how does a parent deal with that? How does a parent hold their child, not knowing if that child would survive, and keep it together so calmly. She told me that when you become a mom, you stop mattering. The only thing that matters is that child and doing everything you can to protect them. That was my mom. She did everything that she could to protect me.
So...That's one of our president's supporters. Heck, if the president is right about all this voter fraud, I'm sure my mom was the first to climb down from heaven to cast her vote for him.
Trump supporters may be racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic bigots. But they are also mothers, fathers, daughters and sons doing what they feel is right in order to protect their loved ones, however misguided they might be.
I will still continue to take a stand. I will wear my pussyhat and my safety pin. I will write essays and speak out for what I believe in. I will support women's rights and Muslim rights, and Black Lives Matter. But I will never forget the things that my mom sacrificed in order to protect me and raise me. And I will remember that my opponents are just doing the same.
Happy birthday, mom. I love you.
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