Chapter 3: Very Unschool

My dad had never been happier. It was as if all the moderately good feelings of the rest of the family (or at least myself and my mother) had abandoned us to join him. As I woke up and was packed and shipped off, I gained more and more respect for my mom. As my father tutored my brothers as to the intricacies of turning the other cheek and “obeying the powers that be,” my mother was making the ham sandwiches and wedging our futures beside juice-boxes, goldfish, and Oreos, packing them in Ironman and Barbie lunchboxes. As I circled figure-eights around her long slender legs like a yappy Pomeranian, I started noticing things which would ultimately foster my undying admiration for her strength: her indestructible love for her children, the constancy of her implacable placidity, and most of all – her tolerance for the increasingly erratic behavior of her husband. Even in the refuge of her leisure time – what little there was – she always had energy to take care of her family, and despite the exhaustion that entailed, she still found time to love us.

My parents were an exercise in contrasts. My mother was a thin woman of average height with pale features and shoulder-length wavy black hair. With less of a shape, she could have been considered skinny. As it were, she had the kind of hips one might expect to bear three children. In all of my seven long years, she had never changed in my eyes. Not one wrinkle or gray hair had appeared like a fly in the ointment. Neither my dad’s schemes nor my mom’s exhaustive schedule had aged her a day. She had soft, defined features that made her comforting to look at and she spoke with a slight and smooth Southern accent that made her comforting to listen to. I always loved her, but never viewed her as powerful, reluctant as she was to argue with her husband before her kids. If she had a fault, it was her conciliatory nature towards my father, but that morning I realized her strength lay not in how well she fought, but how well she didn’t.

While not morbidly obese, my father was at least pessimistically so (though his body seemed to be trying its best to reach the former). It was curious in that, while he didn’t have money to spend on lunches, he still managed to gain weight at a slow but steady pace (my mom packed him a lunch every day, but what is filling for a 100-pound preteen is hardly sufficient for a 250-pound man, however little he may exercise. If my mother’s features were soft, my father’s were nearly liquid, with the definition of silly putty. Old pictures bore testimony that a good-looking, muscular man once dwelt in that temple, but in recent years, it had become indolent. He still had his blonde hair and hazel eyes, and at least his recent trials and changes hadn’t dented his kindness; for all his eccentricities, he was still a loving husband and father. Nonetheless, I had no doubt that even my brothers would rather have looked like my mom than my dad.

As my mom packed the lunches and inserted personalized notes, my dad regaled my brothers at the table. He had been up all night flipping through the Bible and tactfully looking up the parts that would most appeal to pre-teen boys. My brothers had been impressed by the pastor’s incendiary and charismatic rhetoric, being enthralled by the chicken metaphor and Dante’s descriptions of Hell (what boy can get over “rivers of poo”? It certainly beat the Po[1]). Naturally, the youthful vigor and vernacular of the pastor were equally responsible (I had not developed the patience or discipline to get over my funk and pay attention, so I remained immune) for their fascination.

“So you thought the Silver Surfer trying to wipe out all life on Earth was cool? Check out what Joshua did coming out of Egypt!” my dad challenged my brothers. “He killed everyone, even the kids, sparing only Rahab and her family. Now that’s mercy.” He flipped back in the Bible, as if he’d never get another chance to talk to his kids, “If you thought Magneto trying to kill all the humans was cool in X-Men, look what God does to the fags in Sodom and Gomorrah!”

At that inflammatory statement, my mother turned her head to the dining room and gave my father a stare that was harsher than words could have been. Without missing a beat or raising her voice, she slammed down the butter knife (more to drown out any other offensive statements than to express anger) she was using to put mayonnaise on my father’s sandwich (she had finished our lunches) and said, “It’s time for you cowpokes to mosey on to the bus-stop, ya hear?” Being from Texas, she would often affectionately interject ranch-talk such as this when she was angry. My brothers came in from the other room, grabbed their lunches, thanked our mother, and left. I just stared, my eyes welling up and my bottom lip quivering like a guitar string. However tame her outburst may have been, it was the angriest I had ever seen her.

She knelt down with my lunch in her left hand and hugged me, “It’s okay, sweetie, I just…didn’t want you to miss the bus so I wanted you to go without me having to ask twice. I love you; everything’s okay.” She sang my favorite tune, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…” as she nudged me out the door. I knew she had lied, but there are a few things in this world that can truly fix anything, and a mother’s love is foremost among them, especially for a seven year-old.

I would later find it interesting that, despite my dad’s newfound offense to words as tame as “damn,” he liberally used the other f-word. I would also find it interesting – and tragic – that a man who had previously held no biases against homosexuals or anyone else (and indeed, had even had gay friends, as my mom would later tell me) could have been turned so quickly into a bigot. I would also find it fascinating that he taught his sons of such violence less than a half-hour after encouraging them to “turn the other cheek.” Only later did I realize this strategy was an adaptation to my brothers’ lack of enthusiasm regarding Jesus’ pacifism.