August 09, 2006

WANTED: One fashionable electric scooter with significant lumbar support, preferably in yellow.

My mom is retired!

Actually, that should read: My mom is retired. Because she’s not the good kind of retired with twilight cruises and bingo games. She’s the bad kind of retired, on permanent disability for a spine that curves like Route 66. But she’s very excited about it, so I suppose that’s all that matters.

She walks funny. That’s what this post is really about. She walks with a distinctive gate that it will be nearly impossible to recreate here. But I will try.

Its like a gorilla is holding on to her hips. No, no. Its like she’s in a dog sled race, and someone has a rope wrapped around her midsection and is just being dragged along behind her. She walks utterly doubled over, pumping her clenched fists at double time as if to start some sort of steam powered back-up system that she has stored in at the base of her abominably crooked spine.

Sometimes she starts to feel confident, and its as though someone has attached a rip line to her nose and is reeling her in to her destination. I can see her thinking “If my nose can just get there…the rest of me is bound to follow suit.”

When we walk around town, she sees people she knows sitting in cafes or on park benches, and she stops to talk to them, leaning on one arm as though really interested in what they have to say. People always comment on my mom’s charismatic personality. If only they knew it isn’t charisma, but a gesture to keep her spinal disks from collapsing like a slinky. She’s like the President (G.W.B, folks), with their beady little Texas eyes and their propensity to make up words. George leans on the podium with a cocky air to hide the fact that he’s reading off a script typed like a “See Spot Run” book. While my mom, leans on park benches, also trying to cover her own weakness.

We were in Starbucks the other day and my mother spasmed. She started to buckle and collapse as we placed our order. I, of course, knew this was the sign of a slipped disk and she would need a good leg yanking later in the evening. The poor Coffee Artists, however, thought my mother was having some sort of massive stroke. They looked at me with pleading eyes, betraying their fear that they might be asked to take some measure to save this woman’s life. “Screw CPR!” I nearly screamed. “What this woman needs is a Venti Frappacino!”

It shows me what I have to look forward to. Apparently my mothers brand of scoliosis is pleasantly hereditary.

Posted by vcbailey at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)

July 19, 2006

Mom's Adventures in CyberSpace

My mom plays EverQuest II. She’s a healer – a ‘Templar’ to be precise. She goes by the handle “ThisIsMom SeeMomRun.” Her alternate character’s name is Gimpy, but everyone still calls her Mom. They call to her across cyberspace, “Mom! My leg was severed by a rusty sword in battle! I need you…” My mother is the matriarchal hen of the internet.

She claims she started playing as a way to connect with my 18 year-old brother. It didn’t really work out that way. Now, they watch Law & Order together (the Doing-Doing, as it is known in my family). But even though my brother is now too cool for noobs, knights and spell casting, my mom keeps playing, four hours a day, two for each of her ‘toons.’

And I have to hear about it. She drives me in to class or work or on errands (my precious Volvo is in the shop), and she talks about EQII for 45 minutes straight. My brother gets of scott free, watching Doing-Doing and then retreating to his room, never exchanging words with my mother or listening to her rants. While I am trapped in a 1994 Ford Escort for the half hour commute EACH WAY, listening to my mom talk about Plat, rades and skill points. We used to bond over the Young and the Restless, I miss those days sometimes.

But it can be interesting, to listen to my mother’s tales of a secret world. As a college student I have no time for indulging in hours of fantasy gaming. My mother praises me, “I’m so glad your not like Beatles4You, we gamed until 4am and he had an Econ Midterm at 8 today!” I don’t comment on the obvious lack of intelligence vested in an individual called ‘Beatles4You.’

So, yesterday my mom drove me in to class and shared with me her first adventure as a clan leader.

“You have to have balance in a clan. You have to have a Tank who can deal some damage to others, and you have to have some regular people who can take the damage that is dealt, and you have to have healers…who just sorta sit under a tree until they are needed. You should really have 2 healers, but most clans just have one since they can be a liability. Our contributions are vastly under appreciated….”

It’s a metaphor for martyr mom’s entire existence.

“Usually the leader is the Tank, or a wizard or knight or something. Someone crafty and strong. Healer’s are almost never leaders. The boys [my protegy younger brothers, who like Al Gore, often claim to have invented the Internet] couldn’t believe I tried to start a clan. You can tell the difference between guys running a clan and girls running a clan. Guys are all like ‘Gotta Kill! Gotta Fight! Gotta Get Get GET!” and girls are always so diplomatic and fair, saying ‘Oh BloodRage, you really should give that spell book to DarkMage, because he is a wizard and it would benefit him a lot more than you….’

“Often, when I’m online with women, and I tell them I’m a single mom who plays EQII to be close to my sons, they always say ‘Oh! Divorce! How terrible! Do you wanna talk about it? If you’re ever in the Boston area, we could meet for coffee or something’…Do I want to fly to Boston to talk about my divorce that ended almost 9 years ago? I mean, its just so thoughtful, women are so considerate…”

She digresses…as always.

“Anyway, I started a clan and the boys couldn’t believe a healer started a clan. Apparently healers can’t be leaders.”

I stop her there…healers can’t be leaders? “It seems to me,” I say. “That a healer is exactly the kind of leader this country needs. Maybe if the current administration were full of healers we could have healed the anger from 9/11, healed the poverty from Katrina, and healed our relationships with foreign countries, re-establishing ourselves as mediators and HEALERS in a time of global conflict and chaos!”

My mom, never a minimalist, states concisely, “But we didn’t get a healer, honey. We got ‘The Decider.’”

It seems to me, he could decide to heal.

Posted by vcbailey at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)