It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny Purmort

Author:Nora McInerny Purmort
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Madge

My mom is my mom.

And by that I mean that like most women, I love and adore her and also she drives me insane and there is a very real risk of my elder-abusing her in a few years, given the right circumstances. The wrong circumstances? Either way, watch out, Madge!

Some women are going to read this and say, “Not me! My mother is my best friend!” To which I say, keep telling yourself that. Because I’m not afraid to admit that sometimes my mother breathes and I can hear the air moving through her nose and suddenly all the love I’ve ever felt for her just dissolves into a puff of smoke. And sometimes I see her and I love her so much my heart could explode. But then she asks me if I’m planning to get a haircut soon and I need to go into the other room and take five. But then she plays with the ends of my hair while I watch TV, and I feel like I am seven again and she is the most perfect human I’ve ever met.

The love we get from our parents is not completely unconditional. It’s impossible for it to be, because before you even have a child, you have fantasies about who he or she will be. In the early stages of love, you look at your partner and say things like, “Oh, gosh, our kids are going to be so cute. And I bet they’ll be good at math and love golf, like me. And they’ll have a funny upper lip, just like you.” So a child is born into a nice warm pool of expectations, and while your parents will love you no matter what, the fine print reads that they will love you more if you turn into the person they imagined you to be.

I knew as a child that my mom had some idea of who I should be and how I should get there. Madge was always very interested in showing me how to do things. That is different than teaching someone how to do things, which is difficult with children because they aren’t good at anything, and it is easy to lose your patience and just do it for them. Which is basically how I remember my mother: standing behind me, holding my hand and guiding a paintbrush across the paper; holding both of my hands and knitting, then purling. Sometimes it was frustrating, but sometimes it was kind of awesome, like when she took my fifth-grade report on Minnesota, ripped it out of the plastic cover I’d bought at Walgreens, and bound it with leather and birch bark. I didn’t just get an A, I got sent to the state fair, where my mother won a blue ribbon. Sometimes it was benevolent and lifesaving, like when I was fifteen and finally got my period, a year after I lied about getting it to fit in. I had just read the warning

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