HOME - FICTION - NONFICTION - POETRY - PHOTOS/ART

MY FIRST DATE

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

September 2011

My first date was with my mother.

For both of us it was the first attempt at a social occasion after the death of my grandmother. I was eight years old. I had saved my allowance for a whole week and I was taking my mother bowling.

We have home movies of my mother in her white leather jacket and chic pantsuit (that dad had bought her for the occasion), and me in my good slacks and red coat. I had escorted her, in my best gentlemanly style, left arm extended for her balance, to our tiny Renault (the 'Pink Bug'), which my mother had won on a game show.

The television game show was "YOU BET YOUR LIFE", with Groucho Marx. My mother had said the secret word. She had said it while telling Groucho that she had never been to Europe because Emery, my father, had been there during the war and "...told me I wouldn't like it." This had gotten a big laugh from the TV audience as well as the large crowd clustered around our tiny black and white television set at home.

My mothers best friend, Barbara, an artist, had done a very funny pencil sketch of my mother in her one good suit, with the 'almost diamond' pin in her lapel. My mother looked poised and innocent with her Lucille Ball hairdo, and was being ogled by a caricature Groucho with a big signature cigar. I still have the sketch, some thirty years later.

My mother had given up her friend, Barbara, someone I loved, because she had insinuated that I was a queer. My mother could not tolerate such an indictment of either her or me so Barbara was eliminated. This was my first and hardest lesson as a child, after the lesson of death. The lesson was that friendship was perishable. There was another lesson as well, that it was better to lose a friend than to acknowledge the possibility of a queer son.

Our date was an attempt to have my mother to myself. In my gregarious family it was a struggle, between fawning relatives and loving friends, to get my mothers undivided attention. Even Family-only times were hard to come by, although my mother worked at it.

My dad worked very long hours. He loved his job, but also, my mother had very expensive Christmas's and he worked all year long paying for her excesses. His shift at the Phone Company (when there only was one) was from three o'clock in the afternoon until one or two in the morning.

My mother gleefully recalculated his paycheck with every overtime assignment.

In order to keep her sons from father-depravation, my mother had a week-end ritual. With great difficulty, she would put us all to bed right after "Tarzan" on Saturday afternoon, around three o'clock when my father went to work, and then wake us up when he got home and take us fishing. Sometimes it was bowling.

I will sometimes go out late at night now and sit in an empty bowling alley with a hot cup of coffee and listen to the whine of the vacuum cleaner, remembering the wildly funny things that happened to our lopsided family on these nocturnal outings. On one such occasion I put a bowling ball through the ceiling, requiring a full night crew of attendants to retrieve.

The fishing expeditions have left me with a love of the bluing of the night sky as it slowly separated by increments from the churning black water as morning timidly claimed it's right of lighting.

I cannot remember the specifics of our date. I know that I won three out of four games, because it became family legend. I know that it is the first time I was allowed to drink coffee. But I remember little else, except for laughter, of course. What I do remember though, is that I felt special.

The need for that feeling has become a serious flaw in my life, and very tenacious. Not that feeling special is the flaw itself, it is rather the sinking realization and guilt that I could never be as special as my mother saw me that has haunted my adult life.

I was, it turned out, the very thing Barbara warned my mother about. Fraud and specialness, I determined early on, went hand in hand. I suppose that every attack I ever made on my mother was a stricken child's railing at the cruelty of the inevitability of failing her. Especially at what her faith in me had cost her. I would always blame myself for the loss of the artist of my mother’s favorite picture of herself.

My mother, though, was quite sure that she had not given up Barbara for nothing. And I would spend almost my whole life trying to keep this disappointment at bay. I was learning about the quit-point of love. I knew that it would be unacceptable to be the thing that my mother had given Barbara up for and so I had tried not to be. I also knew that eventually lying about the thing I was trying not to be would take its place; and I knew what that would do to our innocent love.

I was learning about the limits of love. This is another of the harder lessons of childhood. The worst of my failures was the promise of forever, which I traded for the lie of the present. It led to our eventual distancing, my mothers and mine. Something I knew but could never have told her was that when she gave up Barbara I realized that one day I would have to give my mother up too.

Mother would never have conceived of the thought that I, too, had drawn lines in the sand. When we were struggling to reach each other at the end of her life, it was I that could not discuss what she now hungered to understand. Too much time in hiding, I would tell myself, in answer to her stricken stare, to be free now. I had suffered my inferiority too long to let it go. "I don't know who you are...." she said to me on the last time I saw her.

We had forgiven each other of course; our love was never in question. She had died alone, though, and, after the age of eight, I don't think that she ever really did know me.

My first date was with my mother