When I Was a Kid, We Had To Earn Our Holes

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The first time I remember having a major fight with my mother, she had surprised me by sewing teddy-bear-shaped patches over the knee holes in my favorite acidwash jeans. I was nine or ten--the age when I tried most desperately to be cool--and those button-eyed bears were a disaster of the greatest magnitude.

Not only were they bears with big button eyes, but they were made of dark denim and sewn on with two different colors of thread--yellow on the right and turquoise on the left. We're not talking a thin straight-stitch, either, but a thick surger stitch. The bears, they had zigzagged cotton auras.

And not only were they made of dark denim and sewn on with two different colors of thread, but these patches covered up my hard-won holes, the holes that said I was just like everyone else and therefore cool. Back then you couldn't buy "distressed" jeans at Mervyn's, and the work had to be done by the wearer. I had put countless hours into those things, playing hard at recess, grinding my knees extra hard into the industrial carpet at school when Mrs. Kreek (she wore a wig!) made us scour the ground for stray staples and straight pins once a week.

After months of painstaking yet casual manipulation, those holes finally had the perfect wear pattern--not two gaping tears, but asymmetrical gaps bridged by horizontal threads that let just the right amount of skin peek through. I liked to weave a pencil through the strings when I was sitting in class, but I was always careful not to rip the openings any larger once they had finally achieved the appropriate dimensions.

Gosh, those holes were rad.

And then one day I reached into my bureau and discovered that my mom had sewn on those stupid bear patches. It was a travesty. It was a tragedy. I remember screaming and crying and going through all of the reactionary stages of grief. My favorite pair of pants were defaced beyond repair, and there was someone to blame, and boy did I let her have it. How could she do this to me? How could she be so astoundingly ignorant of contemporary fashion and the cult of cool? How could she go through my drawers while I was away? I was overwhelmed with potent preadolescent angst.

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The next time I got significantly angry at my mom was when she visited me in Berkeley for the first time and I walked in on her doing my dishes. I was twenty-two and living apart from my parents for the first time.

"Stop doing the dishes," I told her. "I'll do them later."

"No, I've got it," she insisted.

"No, stop it. I'll do them later. They're not yours to do, you're on vacation, and besides, you're putting the clean ones away in the wrong cabinets."

"Just let me help you," she said.

"No. Knock it off and get out of my kitchen." My voice was getting loud.

"Just..."

"No. Get out. It's my house, and I can kick you out of it if I want. Put down the dishtowel and leave."

She started crying. I didn't soften. I kicked her out and she took a couple of laps around the block.

--

While we were in Italy this summer, we got into a heated argument about her having gone and done something I'd specifically asked her not to. It was an invasion of privacy I had every right to protect, and this was not the first offense. Sitting on the hotel beds in Florence, she said, "I never thought I'd have a daughter like you. I thought my daughter and I would bake cookies together and be girlfriends. You are great and awesome and I love you, but you're so different from how I thought you'd be."

I didn't know how to feel about that. On the one hand, I was offended to find out after all these years that I didn't live up to some unspoken relationship standard. On the other, I was overjoyed that I didn't turn out to be the kind of twink who is best friends with her mother.

In the end, I decided to be neither offended nor overjoyed. Instead I settled on grateful and relieved. Because even though I didn't fulfill her idea of Perfect Daughter, my mother still loved me and was proud of me and, perhaps more important, she had never let on until that moment that I wasn't what she'd have ordered from the offspring factory. What she was working on then was making peace with the fact that even though I wasn't just like her, and even though I didn't want to be her best friend, and even though I enjoyed my independence as a full-functioning adult and didn't need my mommy to do my dishes or patch my jeans or know every last detail about my personal life, we could still have a fulfilling relationship.

I firmly believe that what causes so much chaos when families get together is how different people are--not only different from each other but different from their younger selves. When relatives get together for the holidays, those differences are brought into greater relief when you look around the Christmas dinner table at the cousins you used to spend long, dreamlike summers with and instead of a pack of towheads in matching Mickey Mouse shirts, you see Brian over there with his trenchcoat and black eyeliner and Katie trying to keep her four kids from putting their hands in the gravy and Monica sitting on her girlfriend's lap stroking her buzz cut and Joey with his motorcycle helmet ready to bolt out the door if Grandpa starts talking about Jesus again. People so often choose their friends and lovers as a reflection of their own personality that it's often hard to get along with family who are nothing like us even though we used to get along so well. What do you say to someone with whom you no longer have anything in common besides Crazy Uncle Bob?

I can only assume that the phenomenon is most pronounced between parents and their children. No matter how you cut it, reproducing is at least partly a vanity project, and older generations have more than just a marginal interest in perpetuating all the qualities they like about themselves--whether it be something as complex as social responsibility or as simple as a cleft chin. When the children who used to want to be "just like daddy" end up cultivating their own distinct personalities, that must be hard for parents to accept gracefully.

When my mom patched my awesome holey jeans, she probably just wanted to keep my knees warm. But did she also do it subconsciously to convince herself that I wasn't yet too old for teddy bears with button eyes? Maybe so. And when she insisted on doing my dishes in my very first apartment, was she trying to convince herself that I still needed her help and caretaker skills? Perhaps.

Somewhere in my old photo albums there's a picture of me wearing those stupid bear jeans. I look ridiculous, but I'm smiling. Apparently, something made it okay for me to go out in public with dorky patches on my knees and have the moment captured on film. Was it that bear patches suddenly became all the rage at Jordan Ridge Elementary and that I was hailed as a trendsetter? Or was it that I dug deep enough to mine the maturity that weighed my mother's feelings as more important than impressing the cool kids? Neither sounds quite right, but if I could go back to 1989, I'd choose my mom over those gap-toothed nerds.

Today, I am happy to report that I'm a wiser, better, more understanding person. I realize that just as my mom needs to be tolerant of the ways in which I'm different from her, I need to be tolerant of the ways she's different from me. Some things will always be sacred--my jeans and my privacy, for instance--but some things I'll consider open for negotiation. I wonder if she's still interested in doing my dishes?

wrote Leah at 6:40 AM | Comments (11)