mother-f***!

got your attention, didn't i? actually, what i bleeped out was mother "Four" as in the four mothers i should honor tomorrow (today? TODAY!): my wife (mother of my kids), my mom (mother of me), my ewa beach grandma (mother of my mother), and japan grandma (mother of my da). as usual, i am a lazy and procrastinating son of a b- (oh, whoops, wrong thing to say, especially today); so tomorrow morning (i mean, today), i've got to be "creative" (so to speak) and produce something out of nothing.

it's not as though i don't already preoccupy my time with "important stuff." today, as part of the mother's day present (though not something i intentionally planned), lynn went out with jani and jessica and aunty joan to try out some new fancy shmancy chinese restaurant, and also went to see some chic flick called "made of honor" with that suddenly this year hot patrick dempsey fellow. that meant me and the boys (my bro and min) got to watch our respective kids over at min's place. and, of course, right on schedule, aiden gets sick: reports of a headache, then a manifest fever (which i quickly try to quell with meltaway tylenol), and then, during a warm bath (to reduce the fever), VOMIT. that first eruption, i managed to catch cleanly; i could see the drool building in his mouth, and, quick as lightning, i picked him up and arched him over the nearby toilet bowl... but later tonight, as i was half-dozing, i could hear him complaining; i raced over, almost got to him, but received most of it on ME. not very good.

(truth to tell, i think i'm pretty good at reacting to the kids, to being a relatively attentive caregiver during times of sickness. i think a part of my brain is tuned to them. if they make even the slightest sound of discomfort, i'm usually always there. it's kind of a reflex thing.

when i was pretending to be a monk, i'd have to get up first, like at four in the morning; i had an alarm clock, but i never allowed it [and, it was implied, i was not supposed to allow it] to ring. i always managed to wake up before it. i'm not sure, but i think my current skills are somewhat related; like, a piece of my mind is aware, even when i'm dead asleep dreaming.)

but: back to mothers. i could be pretty philosophical about it. yeah, yeah, i will try to totally bore you to death, by pretending to say something profound and meaningful (and pretty empty-hearted). here goes:

there is this thing called the semantic triangle (at least that's what I call it right now). it is a triangle. and it's supposed to be semantic (related to meaning, kinda like ROMAntic, but with SEMA- whoops, shouldn't go there). anyway, related, or superimposed, or coincident with this triangle is what i misrepresent as the familial triad, the father, the mother, and their product, the subject.

"in the beginning," there is only a line, a flat line on the ground. this represents the relationship between the two points, the mother, and the newborn subject. at this stage, there is no differentiation between the one and the other, the child is SO dependent on the mother.

the introduction of the father (who, for some reason, though a participant in the "fun" part, never seems to be quite around afterwards) serves as the "vanishing point" across from this line, the angle that determines that the shape of this relationship will be a triangle. it is commonly held, perhaps even universally held, that the father is an "absent figure": father gods are almost always tied to the skies, and to time. this absence, however, is what informs the subject (particularly sons), for it is in trying to "reach" the father that the subject "comes into his own" (there is a dangerous pun there; remember, a lot of this is also oedipal).

in the process of striving to reach the father, the mother becomes a relatively abjected figure. this abjection is somewhat necessary, for, as was implied, without the introduction of the "absent father" figure, the relationship with the mother is one of little differentiation: therefore, the subject as initially related to mother is constantly threatened by her smothering influence. this smothering is not intentional, nor is the necessity of fighting that smothering; it's just the physics/biology of the situation. so at some point (in the modern context, increasingly late), we've all got to "cut the cord." we've all got to break away (from mother) and find our own lives.

i've often wondered why i've written stories about my father (sudoku), but rarely mentioned my mother. honestly, i think i was very close to my mother when i was young. she really cared/fought for me. but as i grew older, i started to realize that maybe she wasn't as wise as i thought she was; sometimes, in fact, she turned to ME for advice to address some of the issues she was dealing with. it was a strange realization, maybe a bit of growing up: my mother was a vulnerable being. i love her all the more for it, even as i regret losing more and more of my dependence upon her as the beginning of everything... maybe that's what makes the relationship with mother so difficult to capture; it is such a fundamental and "undifferentiated" bond, one which both allows and negates growth, and therefore has no real "literary" progression. nothing drives the plot of a story about mother, except perhaps situations that threaten the sanctity of that relationship (and, of course, examples of abberant mother-child relationships).

does that make sense???

to sum up: i love my mother; i just don't know how to say it.