Gatemouths

I was talking with my mother today, filling her in on all the goings on here in the north. My mother and I have always had a very interesting relationship. She's never been a mothering mother. But I told her today that I wanted to thank her for my strange upbringing.

See, when I was a kid, all I wanted was the Cleaver family. I had a dad who was an ex-cop turned hippie grad student who got called "Mrs. Compton" when my teachers approached him from behind. My mother was an Amazon. I'm not kidding. She was six feet tall, beautiful (think a more striking Cher before she ruined herself with plastic surgery), and unapologetically feminist in every way possible--both good and bad. Both of my parents were incredibly smart and completely involved with one another. They were soulmates. They still are. They were on this wonderful, amazing ride together and they brought us along because it was cheaper than paying a babysitter. They were kids. We grew up together, really. I loved my parents with a fierceness that came from years of defending them to outsiders. I defended my dad's long hair, my mother's aversion to undergarments. I defended their parenting of me, which was not always nurturing but always respectful.

Part of growing up in my family was speaking one's mind. It was simply a given in our house. There were no taboo subjects, no 300-pound gorillas to be ignored. Everything and anything was fair game. A normal dinner conversation at our table would be a goulash of topics: why I was born six months after my parents got married, what a rabbit's guts looked like, who had more nosebleeds--me or my brother, why Uncle Kenneth was getting divorced again, if Elvis was old how come he looked so young on television...we all were afflicted with the same conversational Tourette's.

The long-term effect of this was that I grew up speaking my mind about almost everything without much conscious thought about it. The words in my head and heart did not have to go through an inspection station before they came out of my mouth. I didn't have to weigh the pros and cons of saying what I was thinking. It came out of me as naturally as exhaling. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized how some families hem their thoughts to fit one another's fears or discomforts. It was the most bizarre way of communicating I'd ever seen. How could you ever know what anyone really meant? How would you decipher what was hiding in the words? What's the point of saying the right things if you never say them to the person who really needs to hear them? It still vexes me, this dynamic that turned out to be much more commonplace than my own family's way of speaking.

Of course, my way has its own grief as well. I sometimes wound without realizing with my frankness. I sometimes put myself at a disadvantage with those who don't know me well by revealing too much of what I feel or think. Even with the downside, I can't swallow my words any more than I could cut out my own tongue. I am driven to communicate, because in my family expression was everything. More importantly, expression was anything. For that, I am thankful. Because I thought of this today, I told my mom how happy I was that I grew up in a home where we could talk about guts at the dinner table. And because she is my mom, she knew exactly what I was saying.