My mom lies to me all the time. She sorta has a problem. She is a fabricator of falsehoods. Or maybe she is just drunk again, which is no excuse.
Sometimes when I am losing faith in Mom—which is, like, all the time lately—I like to think about one of the top-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moments. These are little videos I have stored in my brain—all documenting the mom I knew before she sorta gave up on life, before Oliver broke Mom’s spirit and got her drinking so heavily. Here’s the number-seven all-time Amber-and-her-mom moment:
Back in the 80s—when Mom was in high school—she was a big-time softball player who helped her team win a state championship, which was the highlight of her entire life. She used to talk about softball all the time, and even used to play on a local bar team in a beer league. I used to go and watch Mom play softball against fat men with huge beer bellies and foul mouths. There were only a few other women who played in the league, and Mom was a million times better than all of them. Mom was better than most of the men too, for the record. She couldn’t hit the ball that far, but she knew how to hit through the holes in the infield, and she was one hell of a second-base woman—never making any errors.
Anyway, when I was a little girl, Mom got it in her head that she would train me and make me into a killer softball player just like her, so she took me to the sports store and bought me a glove and a bat and a ball and a hat and cleats and even a pair of batting gloves, even though I hadn’t asked for any of these things. This was well after my dad took off on us, and we never had all that much money, so this purchase was sorta a big deal, which I understood even as a little girl, so I just went along with the idea, even though I really didn’t want to play softball.
The next day, Mom took me and all of my new gear to the park. She showed me how to swing a bat and throw and catch a ball, but—even though she was a really good coach—I just couldn’t get the hang of any of it, and trying made me feel like a complete idiot. For weeks I swung the bat and never hit any of the balls Mom threw me; all of the balls she hit went over my head, through my legs, and occasionally nailed me in the face or stomach, and all of my throws went to the right or left of Mom or hit her feet. Mom never yelled at me or anything like that, but after a few weeks of steady failure, after swinging the bat and missing for the bazillionth time, standing at home plate, I burst into tears.
Mom ran off the mound and toward me. She picked me up and kissed me on the cheek. “Amber, this doesn’t happen overnight—you have to work at it if you want to be a good softball player. It takes lots of practice. It took me years!”
“But I don’t want to be a good softball player. I hate softball. I really do.”
Mom looked me in the eye, and I could tell that she was surprised by this news—I could tell she had never even once thought that maybe I wouldn’t want to play softball.
“I never want to play softball ever again!” I yelled. “Never again. I hate this! All of it!”
“Okay,” Mom said.
“What?” I said, shocked, because I thought that Mom would make me keep trying, because that’s what adults usually do.
“Amber, it’s just a game. I thought you might like it, but if you don’t want to play, well then, you don’t have to play softball.”
“You won’t be mad at me?”
“Why would I be mad at you?” Mom said, and then laughed.
“Because you spent all that money on equipment, and now I don’t want to play softball.”
“If you don’t want to play, you don’t want to play. It’s okay.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
We left the field, got some Italian hoagies at the local deli, and ate by the lake sitting on a park bench. We fed parts of our rolls to ducks, and it was really nice to just sit with my mom after telling her how I felt. It was good to know that I could tell my mom what I truly felt inside and still be able to feed ducks with her afterward. I really love ducks. I like watching them waddle around on land, and their quacking noises crack me up. True.
I remember the sun reflected in the lake so brightly, it hurt to look at the orange water.
“Thanks for not forcing me to keep playing softball,” I said.
Mom put her arm around me.
She never ever again tried to make me play sports, although we ate many more hoagies on that bench and fed flocks of ducks for years to come—and the feeding-ducks memories are something I truly treasure.
Quack, quack.
Ducks.
Pretty killer.