My mom has lots of scars; she says she deserved all of them. She is one of eight kids, six of whom are brothers. She lost both her front teeth from sibling fights and has shiny scars on her knees from touch football. She’s from a big family, and therefore is afflicted with a classic case of big family syndrome. She knows how to dish it out, and she keeps nothing sacred.
Back in elementary school I told my mom that my leg hurt and I couldn’t walk. She smirked and told me that I would just have to crawl to school until it got better. So I gathered my play crutches and hobbled my way to the bus stop, and she waved to my sister and me from the front porch with a twisted smile as if she enjoyed watching me fake an injury. She thought she was catching me in a lie, but my injury wasn’t fake. My joint pulsed with pain every time I put weight on it, and as the days wore on the pain became more acute. Finally I convinced her, and she gave in and begrudgingly took me to the doctor. He diagnosed me with an infection in my knee, and as he shot me with needles my mom begged me for forgiveness.
When my mom tells this story at parties, people are generally horrified. Sometimes they laugh out of courtesy, but no one has ever countered her story with something worse. Most people can’t understand why my mother feels so comfortable telling everyone about the time she wouldn’t take her sick son to the doctor; sometimes she even seems proud of making me “suck it up” for a couple of days. However, I think I can explain. Stories like this are prevalent with my mother; she's always had a dark sense of humor that invades her sense of empathy. She’s not cold, but sometimes her jokes make her appear that way.
There was a blizzard in 2003 that my mother documented with a handheld camcorder. She has hours of footage of me, my younger brother, and older sister playing in the snow, sledding, and throwing snowballs. These videos were taken right before sunset when there were a couple of inches on the ground and thick clouds in the air. The camera cuts when it gets too dark to film, and then resumes the next morning with an addition of a couple feet of snow. My mom filmed from the front porch and focused the camera out onto the white lawn and the weary trees behind it. Through the camera you can hear my mother speaking playfully, “Thomas? Thomas where are you?”
A little red head popped out of the snow and a desperate high-pitched scream pierced the camera “Need Help!” “Need Help Mom!” Thomas spun himself in a desperate attempt to unstick himself from the thick snow, and with no success, he screamed again in his high-pitched toddler voice, “Need help!”
My mother laughed from behind the camera. The frame shakes as if she was sitting down to get a better shot. “Oh Thomas? Where are you? I can’t see you!” She dragged her words out long like a nursery rhyme to sound playful. In her head she was playing a game of hide and seek.
“Need Help!” my brother screamed again. He was making some progress through the shoulder-high snow, but he was clearly not enjoying any of it. “Help me Mom,” his voice trailed off. My mom snapped out of her joke. The camera was thrown to the ground, and she began speaking soothing motherly words. She always knows when she takes a joke too far, and she always knows how to fix it.
She must have gotten her humor from her own mother. I remember my grandma. Her name was Mikey, and she was the same way. I always loved going to Mikey’s house because she bought me sugary non-organic oatmeal, and I was allowed to eat as much as I wanted. Mikey would set me and my siblings up with a train set and a couple bowls of hot cereal in the kitchen, and then she would talk with my parents in the den. We would never last long without bothering them, and when we entered the den to ask questions or to settle a fight, she would always say the same thing: “Go play in some traffic.”
That’s what she always said, and to us it always meant “I love you.”
As a child, I never got a lot of affection from my mother. Before bed, my dad would tuck me in and kiss me goodnight. When my mom tucked me in, she would flip the switch from the doorway. I used to hide love-notes to my parents around the house. When my dad found them he would write another and hide it under my pillow. If my mom found them she would chase me around the house, waving it in front of her screaming, “I’ll skin you with a dull knife!” I knew from a very young age that my parents’ reactions were different responses to the same emotion. Both of them loved me; she just never liked to say it.
My mom likes to gang up. From a young age I’ve been fighting unfair battles. One time my sister convinced me that boys were supposed to pull out their eyelashes. “I can’t believe Mom hasn’t told you yet? You should have started a long time ago,” she taunted me. It was summer. We sat on the parking lot asphalt of the Stop ‘n Shop, waiting for my mom to buy non-alcoholic beer. It was hot and my mom didn’t want us to suffocate in the car so she left us sitting in the parking lot.
“You think I should cut them?” I asked. “They seem kind of long.”
“Yeah Luke. Those are SO long. You need to cut them or people are gonna think you’re a g-i-r-l.”
I grabbed an eyelash, pulled, and threw it onto the ground. “It hurts.”
“It’s supposed to hurt!” My sister was a year older so she spoke with authority. “That’s what grown ups do. duh.”
So I kept pulling and discarding onto the asphalt. With each pull I grimaced, and my sister cackled at my pain. I finished my left side before our mom returned.
“Mom, why haven’t you told Luke yet?” Micah Jo demanded.
“What are you doing Luke?”
“Nothing, Just waxing my eyelashes,” I said. Micah Jo had taught me that waxing meant pulling out hair, and I wanted to sound like an adult.
“You’re what?” Mom stared in confusion.
“Luke didn’t know boys aren’t supposed to have eyelashes!” Micah Jo smirked at Mom. Stacey nodded softly and gave a subtle smirk.
She put her head in her hands. “Oh Luke. I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner.” She looked at me with a convincing stare and I went back to tearing out my eyelashes with conviction. I grunted with every tear.
Micah Jo started laughing. I looked up and they were both trying to contain their amusement. “I-I tricked you! I-I tricked you!” Micah Jo taunted me.
My mom pushed her fingers through my hair. “You can stop now Luke. You look fine just the way you are.”
Her humor rubbed off on her kids. From a very young age my siblings and I imitated her jokes. When my dad made chicken, he would tenderize the meat by banging a pan over the table. With every loud crash my mom would scream “Ow! Peter Stop! Peter that Hurts!” We found this hilarious, and we made it a thing that any time my dad made chicken the four of us would scream in unison.
Sometimes her humor got her in trouble. We didn’t go out to dinner a lot as children, but sometimes on special occasions my parents would take us to Emperor’s Choice Chinese Restaurant. In reality it was pretty trashy, but to my younger self, it felt like five-star dining.
I remember sitting in the corner table with my entire family. Micah Jo and I convinced our little brother to stand up and sing. We whispered into his ear what he had to say, and because we were older and wiser, he happily obliged. He stood up, and belted “Mommy and Daddy Hit Me!” He sang in a cheerful, nursery rhyme tune. Within seconds the whole restaurant had focused their eyes on our little corner table.
My dad froze in embarrassment. He grabbed Thomas by his chest and tried to sit him back down into his chair. My mom embraced it. She laughed and nodded. I’m not sure if I remember it right, but when Thomas quieted down she might have even given a little bow.
My childhood was always fun and always funny. I had my dad to play sports and to be sweet, and I had my mom to teach me how to suck it up. Neither of my parents ever let me cry for long. I used to get upset when I lost baseball games, and I remember my dad telling me that I had to suck it up and be a man. He taught me not to complain and showed me that you’re not supposed to cry when you chop your finger or stub your toe. One day I was watching a movie and he came downstairs bleeding. He had a drill in his hand and the bit had gone all the way through to the other side. He told me he couldn’t drive me to my friends and that he was going to the hospital. Then he left, walking upstairs with the power cord banging behind him. He came home a couple hours later with a bandage and a bottle of pills that he promptly flushed down the toilet.
The suck-it-up attitude changed when my grandmother got sick. Mom began taking daily trips down to New Jersey where Mikey lived to take care of her. All of a sudden, Mom’s jokes became her reality. They were no longer funny, and when I came home from school I was greeted by solemn discussions instead of laughter. We didn’t joke at the dinner table anymore. Mom didn’t want her kids to visit Mikey while she was sick, but we insisted and eventually she gave in. We drove down to Westfield in silence and at the door my mom told us to prepare ourselves for what we were going to see.
Mikey was bedridden. Her veins popped out of her neck and her skin was darkly blotched. She breathed with a respirator and spoke with a soft, hoarse whisper. I was scared to get close to her.
Mom couldn’t understand her mother. Mikey was saying something, over and over again, and my mom just couldn’t make out the words. She began taking guesses: “You want water? No, you are hungry?” Mikey kept shaking her head.
“Wait, are you trying to tell me I’m your favorite?” Mom gave a little smile. It was the first joke I had heard from her in a while.
Mikey fanatically shook her head. She mustered all of her voice and said loudly, “Absolutely not Stacey!” She lifted her hand as if to play slap her daughter, but didn’t have the power to lift it high enough. Mom laughed and Mikey let out a smile.
Mikey died a couple days later. We had her funeral at a church in Westfield. Her body was cremated, and we spread her ashes in the garden behind her house. We planted a tree in our yard, and then summer came and Mom began to laugh again.
When Mikey was sick, people gave me a lot of presents. Most of the time I got stuffed animals. I shared mine with the ones my siblings had received, and we created a town in which they lived. Each animal had a name, an employment status, family vendettas, and sometimes a mental illness. My sister named all of her stuffed animals with the first letter of that animal. Her lion was named Leo, he was a therapist with anger problems. My brother’s names were a little more primitive because he was younger. He had Heavy Bear, Ma Horse, and Sleds (named after his favorite activity). I named all my stuffed animals after myself. I had Luke Jr., Luke III, all the way up to XII. Our stuffed animals were actors in a soap opera. We would set up weddings. We would sing “Here comes the bride” and the animals would walk down the aisle and kiss. Then when we got bored with the honeymoon, we would set up a divorce. We would sing “Here comes the bride” backwards. The married couple would walk backwards in the aisle, and they would punch each other in the face, completing the divorce.
We decided that Sleds was clinically depressed, and we had no other choice but to operate. We stuck a needle in his arm for an iv, cut him open with a scissor, removed his stuffing, rushed it to the kitchen screaming “We’re gonna lose him!” and then stuffed it back inside him. We sewed him up with a needle, said prayers, and hoped for the best.
Our mom found us playing hospital, and she quickly joined in. She ran to the kitchen, found two pieces of bread and told us they were the defibrillators. “Quick! you're going to lose him!”
Sleds didn’t make it.
We held his funeral outside by the swing set. We wanted to cremate him, but Thomas didn’t want us to burn his toy. I begged my father to help me dig a hole for the grave. I insisted he maintain accuracy and dig it at least six feet deep, but I compromised and he dug it three feet instead. My sister clipped flowers. I placed Sleds in a cardboard box and displayed him on the kitchen table for the wake. We insisted our parents wear a suit and a dress to the funeral. I fake cried all the way through my eulogy, and we played “The End” by the Doors as we marched Sled’s casket out to its burial site by the swing set. My mother filmed the whole thing. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but she laughed through the entire thing.
I still don’t know why my mom is so dark. It’s probably because her mom was the same way. I found out recently that almost all of my uncles and cousins suffer from depression. I asked her if she ever took medication, and she said that all she needed was exercise and humor. I told her that I was worried that I would get sick too, and she said I was like her and that I had nothing to worry about. She knows how to be happy, and I love that her genes were passed down to me. I’m proud of her and I love her and I hope that one day I’ll teach my kids how to suck it up as well.