today is my moms 31st birthday

raised by the first black brain surgeon and the first black plastic surgeon, my mother was very disappointed when i came out and declared that i wanted to be a pro blogger. especially because i stated this in 1984 well before anyone ever got paid to do anything on the computer.

oh, that is other than my mom. my mom was one of the first black female computer programmers. which is funny because back then you had to write your stuff in COBOL and PASCAL and all these crazy languages and now she can barely work her Tivo. it took her years to get wifi going in her house but now she comes home from work and dials up the busblog and squints because she knows a bad word is bound to hit her when she least expects it.

my mom is an angel. she has put up with so much in her life and she only gets sweeter. how is that possible? she will talk politics she will talk sports she will talk current events and even though the conclusion of each discussion is usually “man we’re all so doomed” she shrugs it off and tells me about my cute niece and nephew.

my mother hates bad language and bad manners and pleads with me to try harder to be “clean” when i write. i say momma thats the white man youre trying to please. f whitey! and she says, no, your grandmother wouldnt approve, so pretend youre trying to please her.

i feel like ive told all the stories about my mom in here before so let me tell you about the time i had a column printed in the LA Times. im sure it wasnt the proudest moment, but it was right up there because it was about race and i didnt swear. poor mom has had to read hundreds if not thousands of opinion pieces of mine where f bombs are being carpet bombed. my best college column started off “f— f— f—“, so when i told her that there was a good chance that i was gonna be in my local rag, her first words were “oh no Lord.”

shes always worried that the cops are coming or that im about to be fired or that i will be banned from writing somewhere because a)the cops have come, b)i get fired all the time and c)i was fired and then banned from my college paper.

but i tell her those things were just flukes. and i wonder why my mom couldnt have had a richie cunningham like she deserved – some apple pie eating white kid with freckles who wanted to direct movies about astronauts.

instead i was her first born and louder when i was younger, and hyper and wild and full of classic cocacola. she was outnumbered, outgunned, and exhausted when she came home but our house was always clean, there was always food, we always were at school, we had braces and went to scouting and sports and she gave us everything that any kid could ever want because she gave us love. the most important thing of all.

and because i love her i didnt say all the colorful words that you know i was dying to say.

i love you mom

xoxoxoxoxox
tony

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