Pablo Vision

My Mother’s House

My mother’s house is kind of cool by my way of reckoning - loads of hippy shit everywhere -wind-chimes and scrap-metal sculpture in the garden - sometimes there’s bearded-weirdos chanting in the hot tub - or tie-dyed women making lentil soup in old tin baths. It’s more like some sort of suburban commune - a place where old freaks go to relive, as best they can, the only life they ever wanted to live. The neighbours hate it - and, of course, this is why I love it. They’ve even painted the car - I guess they were trying for something like Kesey’s bus - but all the colours got mixed up into brown sludge, and it looks like demented fanatics have made some sort of dirty protest - and maybe they have - maybe they are shitting all over the white-fence-tidy-lawn-middle-class-middle-America that they found themselves being suffocated in - like the ultimate endless bad-trip.

My father had left her for someone twenty years younger - after taking all her best years - and she found herself alone - I mean really alone - you see she’d thrown herself totally into him and her family - and found with him gone - here one day gone the next - that she had no life of her own - she didn’t even know who she was - didn’t know what to do when she woke up in the morning. She got real depressed - cried for days - just fell apart. Me and my sister rallied round - made the effort to go and see her - got her to see the Doctor and get some pills - but then she would just sit at the kitchen table for hours looking confused - not even sad - just not there if you get what I mean.

This lasted about three months - and then I am not sure what happened - maybe some old friend from the past turned up - or maybe because she had no idea what to do, or how to live, she just decided to resume what her life had been before she met dad - maybe, and this is what my sister said, she just went mad - I don’t know - but first thing I knew about this was when my sister showed up to find her playing Dylan at top volume and sharing a bong with a couple of crazies - Sis asked if she was ok - to which my mum replied - does the Pope shit in the woods - and laughed like she’d just invented the phrase. Big Sis don’t like it one bit - oh no - but fuck - I can’t help but admire the woman - she seems genuinely happy for the first time in years - off-her-rocker-stoned-drunk-loveable-laughable-lunatic - a fifty-five year old woman living - without an ounce of shame - like a teenage flower-child in a time-warp - Sis would probably like to see her join a reading group or find religion or get a part-time job or take up a hobby - but bloody hell - she’s found a life - why can’t she live madly today and screw tomorrow? Why does she have to be mother-wife-citizen? So Sis doesn’t visit no more - finds it embarrassing and, well … plain impossible I guess - I mean it can be a little weird to go and find that she has dressed an inflatable sex-doll up in my father’s clothes - pulled the pants down - shoved one big mother of a joint in its ass - and posed the thing in the front window - like a ‘bottom-cigar’ my mum said - delighting in the scatological-fuck-the neighbours-fuck-the-world obscenity of it all.

Yes I worry that she’ll get busted - or that the unpredictability will get out of hand in some terrible way - but she’s living a life that a big part of me would love to live. And it’s not all pendulum-tits and body paint and sex-dolls and geriatric hell’s angels freaking out - sometimes it’s just the smell of patchouli and the sound of sitars and sitting outside gazing into the fire and just being mellow- just being with people enjoying one more sunset, one more moonlit night, and one last flashing chance - like an Indian summer so many years after autumn started turning into winter - oh I don’t know - it sounds shit when I tell it - but it feels like home - feels more like home than my own apartment does - with its plasma screen and computers and microwave food and soulless, life-destroying, normality.

I sometimes wish my mum and sister could swap ages - Sis already lives like someone preparing for a dignified end - someone who has put all the silliness and the madness and the lust for life behind her - she cares about stains on the carpet and the price of groceries and what the neighbours might think - the only life she lives is vicariously, and safely, through books - Christ, it’s like those fuckers who win the lottery and carry on doing the same boring jobs, because, despite what they say, they’re too scared to live a different life -but my mum - I’d love to give her all those years back - because she would use every fucking minute of them - but I try not to get sad or angry - I look at her and I look at all her nutty friends - and they don’t seem sad - not overwhelmed by the cruelty of time - they are just living with the wisdom of fools - and it is only me who cries.

And maybe I don’t think of her as my mother anymore - but that’s no bad thing if you really think about it - I stopped needing a mother when I was about fifteen - and maybe that was part of the tragedy when dad left - we’d all moved on - leaving her as some sort of empty shell - or discarded husk. And it’s true that the house does not seem like my mother’s house anymore - or the house that we grew up in - but least it’s not a mausoleum for the half-living - or an object masquerading as life. So as far as I am concerned she can wave her freak-flag high no matter how ridiculous that flag might now look to anyone else.