It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Sorry, my faithful readers. I’ve had a lot of life happening: a friend in a hugely messy child custody situation, which coincided with Benjamin’s birthday extravaganza, and….

My mom found my blog. She can’t attach a picture to an email, yet she found my blog. I sent her an email about some mundane thing and forgot that I had included my little Come On Over and Read My Blog signature. She clicked the link and here she was. I feel dirty.

Mom! Step. Away. From. The. Computer.

Naturally, she read the site in one gulp, like it was a National Enquirer she needed to finish before she got to the checkout. She read all of it. I don’t think I’ve even read all of my site. Kudos to my web designer Julia for making the navigation on here so easy my mom can do it. No, really. Thanks, Julia.

On this blog I have ranted and raved. I have bared my soul. I have complained and griped and bitched and moaned. (Thanks for reading, guys!) A lot of what I have written about is the absurdity of my life growing up, my home town and specifically, my mom and her… peccadilloes. (<—Look it up, Mom. Not as bad as it sounds.)

So how did Mom respond? Is she so vain, she prob’ly thinks my blog is about her? Did she think I was strumming her pain with my fingers, spilling her life with my words…? Yeah. Pretty much. She’s mortified. How do I know this? She told my sister.

My sister Michelle after the sentence above.

My sister Michelle before the sentence above.

Mom, of course, told Michelle not to tell me. But these words do not mean the same thing when coming from a normal person. When Mom says not to tell someone something, this is a code that she secretly wants you to tell them, because then she doesn’t have to do it and risk having a fight. There are a lot of subtleties, but that’s the rough translation. see Google Translate: Mary Jane.

So anyway like a lot of people of a certain age, Mom thinks that because it’s called the World-Wide Web, everyone in the world will read my blog. And as a consequence everyone in the world will know that she isn’t, wasn’t and will never be perfect.

Compounding things, she’s not the most careful reader, latching onto some ideas without taking into account the broader context. If I wrote a 10,000 word essay about how creamy and delicious her ‘scalp potatoes’ were, she would be only remember the 9 words: “not the most heart healthy food in the world.”

Apparently, Mom was upset that I called her foldout bed a medieval torture instrument. Upset that sometimes I dread going back to Alton, upset that I shared the difficulty of the life I led there. Upset that I used the word f*ck.

(The other stuff I plead guilty to, but I don’t think I used the f-word. I’ve been scouring my site for it. Sometimes I say it. Sometimes I even write it. But I don’t think I have. Not yet at least. If any of you run across my stray F-bomb, let me know.)

When I visit, I have not been shy with Mom about how it drives me nuts when she lists every single item in the refrigerator. I have told her repeatedly about my ambivalence about dad’s book, about how tough it was growing up gay in a minister’s home, all of it. Almost every time I return to Illinois we get into an argument about these subjects, along with politics, my vegetarianism and a whole host of other stuff. Mostly we argue about her absolute obsession with playing cards. Swear to god, I played for nine hours with her and she was mad when I wanted to stop.

"Now, this time we're going to go fast!"

In other words, we fight like most parents and their children fight.

Everything I have written on my blog is true, or truthy anyway. But the bottom line is that Mom’s feelings were hurt when she read it. And I never wanted to do that.

What I haven’t explicitly said on my blog, (though I had hoped it was understood by everyone who reads it), is how much I care about my mom. And although I tease about her, it comes from a loving place. A black, tortured, loving place. After all these years, after all the phone calls I’ve put in, and the trips, and the hours of worrying about her after dad died, and all the times I’ve said it to her, I hope she knows for certain that I love her. That is the context.

Mom is free to write her own blog about the time I fell face first into a fountain outside the mall, about how disappointed she was that I turned out gay, her even bigger disappointment that I’m an atheist. She can tell anyone who will listen how terrific that Glenn Beck is. That is her perspective. I wish I understood her perspective more completely. The Glenn Beck thing I will never in a million years get my head around.

Now that she has stumbled upon my blog, I hope that Mom can read about my life, unfiltered, and get a fuller understanding of who I am. It’s an opportunity for us to get closer and cut through the sugary surface. Strange as it may seem, sometimes we can say what we really think and survive.

It’s been two weeks now since she walked in, unannounced, on my naked prose and I’ve spoken to her several times since. Like good Mid-westerners, either of us brings it up. We’re both getting around to it. Getting used to each other again. I have promised myself that we’ll talk about it overtly. Soon.

Until then, though, I thought I should also post this disclaimer publicly, so that when she reads this, she’ll know that all the faceless strangers who read my jaw dropping accounts of the food they eat in Alton (grapes with cream cheese and brown sugar????) will know that in addition to making me crazy, Alton has a lot of really great people whom I love. Like mom. This is my hope.

But my greater hope is that she gets a new mattress for the fold out couch downstairs.

As penance for the above joke, and for the rest of my blogging, I hereby publish the worst picture of myself, taken by Maiya Sykes, who is dead to me.

P90X or P90 Xtra Large?

UPDATE: 10/12/11

In talking with my sister, (who practically bitch-slapped me over the phone for posting those pictures of her), I realized that I haven’t yet adequately explained my complicated relationship with the town and the people I grew up with there. I’ll expand on this theme more in other posts, I’m sure. But I want to make it very clear, I have a lot of fantastic friends from my home town:

People who loved me when my skin was bad. People who kept me from flying apart. People who encouraged me to sing. People who made me laugh and think and gave me a reason to live when I couldn’t find any. I very much love connecting with them when I’m back there. Benjamin absolutely loves going to Alton and I get such joy in introducing my son to these generous, caring, hilarious people.

That said, in Alton you can buy fishing worms and donuts at the same store. Just sayin’.