Incorrigible Women

 

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been 102. She died nearly thirty years ago, but not a day goes by when I don't think of her. Miss her.

This missing--this feeling of loss is always evolving. Sometimes I miss the woman in this photograph--the version of my mother before I was born--before she was sent to a mental hospital at age thirty-seven. She did eventually return home, but by then, she was no longer the mommy I had known and so I spent a lot of years waiting for my real mommy to return. But, she never did.

By the late 1960's, I accepted the new version of my mother--high on amphetamines, completely unhinged—but brilliant and wise and hysterically funny. She seemed to fit the tenor of the times we were living in back then--eating our Swanson's TV dinners while Walter Cronkite, as he served up images of body bags being loaded into helicopters in the jungles of Viet Nam, and then--after a brief commercial interruption--the insanity of Hogan's Heroes, the giddiness of Carol Burnett, the psychedelic loopiness of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In. And finally, every Sunday night Sonny and Cher reassured us that I've Got you babe. I've got you to hold my hand. I've got you to understand. So yes, my crazy mother no longer seemed all that crazy, but rather simply responding to the reality of a world gone mad.

I was simply her co-pilot, her designated driver. Her sober-eyed witness.

Oh, and writer. Because, yes, this is how I became a writer. Someone had to take notes, after all. I can thank my incorrigible mother for that.

Creative Friends--there is someone in your life who drives you crazy. Who fills you with anger or regret or a bottomless well of sadness. They may be wild. Or dangerous. Uncontrollable. No Matter—love them anyway. This incorrigible person is your muse and if you allow space in your heart, they will offer up to you the key to your own deep creativity.

So, please—take notes.

Love,

Jamie