October 17, 2001
  madernals

I love my mother. I really do.

Subject: Mother/ Deathly bee sting...
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 19:00:37 -0500
From: "Binky" 
To: yhirata1@home.com

Hey there,

Your mom mention anything to you about getting 
stung by a bee and being taken to the hosiptal
in an ambulance on the verge of death this week? 
Saw her at the dojo yesterday...

Me

It's just that sometimes, you know, I want to smack her.

on 10/15/01 6:29 PM, Yuhri at yhirata1@home.com 
wrote:

WHAT?! 

No, she didn't. I hate that woman. 

It should be a law: parents shouldn't be allowed outside of their homes once their children grow old enough to leave the house. Not without a minder, anyway. It causes pain for everyone. Mostly the children. I bet ol' Dubya would be willing to go in for a law like that. I bet his Dad's doing all sorts of dangerous things, -- cleaning gutters, driving, ACLU meetings -- causing him grief. Of course, Dubya's got the Secret Service watching out for his parents. All I have's a trademark Crap-o-Matic wireless telephone from Radio Shack.

Brrrrrrring. Click. "Herro?"

"Mom! It's me!"

"Oh, Yuuh-ri! Herro."

My personal opinion is that the stress of parenting eventually causes some crucial element in the brain to fray, or bend, or snap in half. I never knew the Firecracker pre-pregnancy, so there's no way to compare, but I've heard that great pain and suffering can change a person; I've never heard that labor was one of those post-lunch walks in the park. Then again, maybe only cracked people decide to have children to begin with. Do you think? There's a thought to screw with Darwin. Centuries of intellectual frailty, reinforced genetically by the best that evolution has to offer. We were doomed from the start. Other species get wings or poison sacs to deal with a hostile environment. We got weak genes: humanity's answer to ultraviolet vision.

Come to think of it, that might be an evolutionary advantage for us, all things considered.

"Mom? Is it at all possible that you were bitten by a bee and almost died this weekend without ever saying a word to me?"

"Oh. Yes, yes. I didn't wanting to worry you. It is nothing."

"You didn't want to worry me. Mom. You make me crazy. Is this a bad time? I mean, you aren't doing anything too important to tell your oldest child about your brush with death, are you?"

Somewhere along the line, my grandmother did something terribly wrong in the raising of my mother. Maybe it wasn't her fault. Maybe one of the bombs being dropped in Japan during World War II actually hit my mother.

On the head.

Hard.

In my family, denial isn't just a river in Egypt. Of course, it's pronounced "ther nairu," which makes it difficult to pinpoint in the dictionary. My family doesn't believe in the existence of denial. Denial implies rejecting a fact. My family never rejects a fact. It just approaches it from a different direction. A parallel direction. In a flat universe. Maybe it's a leftover self-defense mechanism from the war. Or maybe the lure of our collective Happy Places is just so strong, none of us are capable of dealing with the day-to-day crap that goes down out here in the real world.

In my family, there was no disease or suffering. My parents' worldview went something like this: it's all in your imagination.

For instance.

As a fairly inattentive person, I used to fall down the stairs on a fairly regular basis. This is part of that miracle of life called childhood. Naturally, once I'd reached the bottom I would start crying because, you know, it usually hurts to fall down the stairs. Gravity, who is a bitch, and stone floors, fellows of the bitch, will do this to you. My affectionate mother, hearing the thud thud thud BANG CRASH thud and subsequent wails, would abandon whatever she was doing and wander around the corner to stare down at my broken body with interest. "Did you fall down the stairs?" she'd ask. "Why did you do that?"

This melting display of maternal emotion would usually piss me off, because I'm, you know, sane.

When I was in grade school, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She got over it. She moved on. We, -- my sister and I, members of a close-knit family that sort of included her, -- found out purely by accident in college, in the middle of a conversation that started, "By the way, so-and-so told me that such-and-such has cancer," and then abruptly derailed on her unthinking, "Oh, I've had that."

Then there's the whole diabetes thing, which to normal people would be a serious medical condition requiring discipline and strict adherence to dietary and medical guidelines. My mother finds it an outlet for her creative energies. "I cut ther medicine into smarrer pieces," she said, proudly. "I think it is too much medicine, so I do not take so much. I do not rike medicine."

"Did you ask your doctor?"

"Oh, no. He wirr worry. He thinks too much about ther medicar science. I wirr try this way first."

"Mm. I am teaching. Can I carr you rater?"

"You promise? You're not going to, like, forget or anything, are you?"

"No no, I wirr carring you rater."

"Fine."

click.

How do normal families do it? I really want to know. Is it strange to expect a mother tell her grown-up, independent children about trivial things like brushes with death? Is there some unwritten rule that nobody bothered to share with me? Is this one of the universal balance things that my mother's always talking about, when children worry more about their parents than their parents ever worried about them? Why didn't anybody tell me? I could have gotten even with them back then. I could have jumped off of bridges for fun like my sister, or taken up with a bad crowd, or learned clog dancing. Instead, I wasted my opportunity, my precious, vulnerable youth. My mom failed me. She neglected to give me a manual on this whole Parent-Child Vengeance thing. I want a Do-Over.

Re: Mother/ Deathly bee sting...
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 1904 00:17:57 -0700
From: Binky 
To: Yuhri 


Oooh. I wonder if she started telling me the story, 
knowing that I would ask you about it. What a great 
way to put a guilt trip over on you for not calling 
your mother more often!!!  

She seems to be fine now. She had an extremely severe 
reaction, and was found on the floor after calling 911 
on the advice of Len at the dojo (she called for 
guidance).  He had gone to the hospital only weeks 
before due to a severe reaction. It was extremely 
painful for the emergency people to touch her, so 
judging by her reaction when they touched her legs, 
they thought she might have broken a hip....   She 
now gets to carry around a bee sting antidote in 
case this happens again. 

On the good side of life, this month's fresh, in season 
oysters are keeping your mother's blood sugar in check. 
She doesn't have to take medication as long as the 
oysters keep having this effect. 


:) 



Subject: Re: Mother/ Deathly bee sting...
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 20:58:42 -0700
From: Yuhri 
To: Binky 


I'm talking to her now, damn that woman...! 
  

When I was younger, my worst nightmare was that someday my parents would die before I did. No child wants that. Parents have nightmares that their children will die before they do. No parent wants that. What we have there is an unnegotiable detente, where both sides cling to the other's lives with white-knuckled fingers of panic. That is, until the child starts to think, "Well, if one of them has to die first, I hope it's...."

Of course, we pay for that later. That's another story.

The Emergency Medical Technicians got to my mom's house in the nick of time. They broke in the window; she collapsed while on the phone with 911. She had almost no pulse, and almost no heartbeat. Five minutes more, and she would have been dead.

I would have been an orphan at 28.

I'm too old to accept change in my life. Mom will just have to not die. Tough shit.

"I was on the head, sting, by yerrowjacket. I do not knowing I am arrergy," she marvels. It's a matter of newly discovered pride with her: she's allergic to yellowjackets. Great. I'm allergic to Yanni, but you don't see me going around risking my life to prove it. She's ready to laugh it over with me. Ha hah, there was this duck and he walks into a bar, ha hah, and I almost died, very funny story. "It is very nice for amburance worker, that they are coming when they do, or maybe you wirr be pranning funerar now."

In California, I busily start kicking my foot against my desk, trying to share the pain with the rest of my limbs.

"That's not funny, Mom."

"It isn't?"

"No, it isn't." thud thud thud thud thud.

"...Oh." She sounds disappointed. "I thought it were funny."

My foot gets pissed -- this isn't her problem -- and starts to turn black. "Mom. Please don't do that anymore. I shouldn't have to find out from Binky that you almost died."

"Oh, but I didn't die," she assures me.

"That's not the point. I mean, it is the point, but ... it's so irritating when you do that, Mom."

My mother sounds sad. "I'm sorry. I didn't wanting to worry you."

I start smacking my other foot into the desk. A terminal case of TMJ is coming on, and little fragments of my molars are being ground into dust.

"Okay, Mom. That's fine. Just ... worry me, next time."

There's a little silence. And then the evil, manipulative twig woman pulls out The Card.

"I rove you."

Well, that's good to know.