Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "mothers"

Two days before the release of my debut novel, What Binds Us, this waiting is what I imagine being pregnant is like: for thirty-eight weeks you carry this child and for those thirty-eight weeks everything is possible; he could be president, he could be beautiful. And then he’s born and what he is is real, flesh, yours.

Waiting, I find myself trapped by two fears—equally paralyzing—what if the book sucks? what if no one reads it? What if it doesn’t suck and I never write again? I went to bed.

I awoke at 4 a.m. because the words were coming, would not stop coming, were shouting to be heard, written down, not forgotten, wouldn’t in fact stop until pen hit paper. (These are the words that came—part of my next book, I think.)

Then it struck me: I got the words. I am a writer. Nothing more, nothing less am I. I got the words. Will continue to write them down.

After, when that rush of words, released in the writing down, quieted, I began to write this blog entry, to admit this writer’s fears.

Sunday at midnight, I bought the book on Amazon. At 1:30 a.m. I held my Kindle in my hand and did what I suppose every mother does—counted the toes, the fingers, the ears, the eyes, in this case I read the words, studied the commas (when you write really long sentences, commas are important). Again, I guessed what I felt was a feeling like that of a new mother: despite the preparations, despite what you know to be true, he doesn’t seem quite real, this child. Not yet. Not until you can hear his sound in the world will he seem real.

And then you hear his sound in the world and you don’t care if he’s president, if he’s beautiful because he is, above all, yours.
What Binds Us

My mother and I share a difficult, strained relationship. Lately, she has taken to ending our rare conversations with “I love you.” I dutifully respond, “I love you, too,” when in fact I want to ask: Do you? Do you love me? Do you even know who I am?

One Christmas a few years ago—one of the last we spent together as a family—my mother suddenly blurted, “You know I’ve only ever told one person you were gay.” Her words, like a sniper’s bullet tore a hole in my heart, all feeling draining away. That she said this without apparent malice did not lessen the hurt.

I know from my own experience, the relationship between mothers and their gay sons can be tricky, and painful. I’ve mentioned before that my experiences, emotions, and relationships often form the basis for my fiction. So, I thought I’d look at how my own mother has influenced my work and the way I portray mothers. Not surprisingly, the mothers in my writing all contain an element of my mother’s personality.

There are two different mothers in What Binds Us . Thomas’s mother is loving, and supportive, and means everything to Thomas, while Mrs. Whyte is so distant and formidable even her husband and sons call her Mrs. Whyte. Thomas’ mother becomes by default a surrogate mother to Dondi and Matthew in much the same way my own mother used to mother whoever we hauled home as she mothered us.

“In what alternate universe?” my friend, having met my mother, asked when I mentioned that Thomas’ mother was based on my own mother. “Thomas’ mother was not at all like your mother,” she insisted.

I was confused because Thomas’ mother was loving and supportive, just like my own mother. And then I realized, my friend only knew this newer, other mother, this changeling who’d replaced the mother of my youth.

The mothers in Damaged Angels cover a broader spectrum of motherhood and mothering styles, from the indifferent, absent mother of the hustler Jordan in “2 Rivers”―

It was as if his pregnant mother, feeling the pains of labor while out for an afternoon stroll, had simply squatted behind a bush, pulled up her dress, and birthed him. Then, the delivery made, had stood up, smoothed her hair, straightened her dress, and continued her walk, leaving the infant Jordan where he lay.

―to the domineering, overprotective mother in “Spam,” who, when her adolescent son attempts to escape her influence by descending into madness, simply follows him.

“Spam” was based on an incident involving my older brother and his best friend at the time, a boy named Angel. The incident has always intrigued me. I simply exaggerated it and took it to an outrageous conclusion. What I wanted most with writing “Spam” was to capture the insularity of Billy’s experience. He eats cereal with boiled milk and thinks nothing of it. My mother always boiled milk for our cereal; I was a freshman in college before I learned that cereal was meant to be eaten with cold milk.

The mother in “Chance’s Hand” is actually an amalgamation of main character Chas’ mother and father, merged into a single nagging, disappointed voice at the other end of the phone. Chas, slowly collapsing under the weight of his mother’s demands and expectations, describes his childhood:

Growing up seemed less a preparation for adulthood than a slow chafing away of childish desires (I want to be an astronaut, a painter), a flaying of the ego…a learning to do what was expected, be who you were expected to be.

Most telling of Chas’ relationship with his mother is a scene in which she questions whether or not he intends to leave his fiancé:

“Well, you can’t mean to abandon her. You gave her your grandmother’s ring!”
“No, Mother. You gave her my grandmother’s ring.”

In “The Seduction of the Angel Gabriel,” Gabriel frames his childhood for Malcolm by telling him the story of his mother’s attempted suicide.

Malcolm can see it now: a mother’s desperation; a child’s fear; and everywhere red blood, the color of loss. Although it was a man that he held in his arms, it was a child whose tears he wiped away.

Here, too, like Alfred Hitchcock, my mother makes an appearance in the form of her prom picture, which sits on a shelf in my office and which, in the story, Gabriel finds in Malcolm’s pristine white apartment:

He is holding an old black-and-white photograph of a slender young girl in a strapless gown with voluminous skirts leaning against a stone wall. Both girl and wall are drowned in moonlight.

In rereading these stories I can pinpoint the exact nature of my relationship with my mother at the time the story was written. Perhaps through writing mother-son relationships, I hope to understand my own relationship with my mother. Or maybe I just find mothers interesting characters because they are different, other, unknowable. Child birth seems to change women. In the farcical, “Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” Billy writes:

“I once met a woman who had three sons, all of whom she named Pablo―Pablo Jose, Juan Pablo, and finally Pablo Pablo. Something must happen to women when they are carrying children.”

“Howdy Billy, Cabbage Ma’am,” was inspired by a single extraordinary sentence my mother once spoke. In fact that exact sentence appears in the book and baffles protagonist Billy as much as it baffled me:

“The Jews,” my mother announced, “love hard-boiled eggs.”

Later when Billy’s mother’s secret is revealed in a semi dark room, he says:

I confronted both my mothers at once.

Quite often in speaking to my mother I feel as if I am trying to reach two different women―the changeling and the original woman she was. I long, most, for the mother she was.

As I was working on this post, my mother called, unexpectedly, from Maryland, where they’d gone to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin. “Good morning,” she trilled, “I just called to check on you and see how your morning was going?”

What? Huh? Who are you? I wanted to ask. Then I realized it was simply my mother, the changeling.

Buy What Binds Us http://www.amazon.com/What-Binds-Us-e...

Read the first story from Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...

Buy Damaged Angels : http://www.amazon.com/Damaged-Angels-...

Mother’s Day. I know the drill.

STEP 1: Buy Card. CHECK.
STEP 2: Sign card. CHECK.
STEP 3: Mail Card. Aw, shit!

Now Meatloaf said, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, but he never met my mother. I’m in the doghouse for sure. Which, I suppose is better than ending up in the woodshed.

I would ask my brothers for help. But the youngest, Vernon, is the perfect son. He’s some sort of saint, I swear. (He takes after our dad.)

I used to go to my parents for Mother’s Day, but one year it took me 4 hours to get there and 5 to come home. I hate the George Washington Bridge!

So I started sending flowers to cover my absence. But there was always a debacle. One year, they delivered the flowers in a broken case. I called to complain and the florist sent out a second set of flowers—with NO VASE. I called to complain again. Yep, they delivered more flowers but no vase was to be seen. Another year, another florist. This time they delivered the flowers to the wrong apartment and as they had a signed receipt, they refused to redeliver. My mother called and said you know Vernon always sends beautiful flowers and there’s never a problem. I gave up sending flowers.

Then there is my older brother, Michael. While he’s not perfect, he is the father of my parents only grandchild. And that as we all know is a get out of jail free card.

So, I must ask you dear readers to take to the comments and plead my case for me. Explain to my mother I’m basically a good son (maybe thrown in “and a brilliant writer,” for authenticity?)

Thanks and Happy Mother’s Day to all.