When our kids were toddlers, we had a few fan favorites when it came to naptime music.  The perennial go-to was The Mozart Effect’s Music for Babies Vol. 2 – Nighty Night, which never failed to summon Morpheus for any family member in earshot in less than 20 minutes. Not that dear old dad & mom needed help as 40-something parents of two rambunctious boys.  But late one beautiful, sunny weekend morning, as Heather showered upstairs, I decided to spin Fisher-Price’s Baby Wellness – No More Crying CD for sleepy time instead – just to break things up a bit – and laid down for a little quiet time with the lads.

Huge mistake.

Not only was this piano/guitar/flute collection the most inappropriately titled CD in the house (nay, the galaxy – I was weeping like a hobo over a wet pack of smokes less than 10 minutes in), but producer and alleged “music response specialist” Dr. Lee R. Bartell was actually, in true and troubling form, a “cruel bastard specialist.” It was like this motherfuckerson captured all the shame, regret, fear and missed opportunities of man in a single digital projectile, just knowing there’d come a time when every dad, at some point, would get caught out there alone listening, without a single distraction – a lawn to mow, picture to hang, bike to fix or burger to grill.

Track one was “Hush, Little Baby,” which was immediately tenderizing but I rode it out, like one would soldier through a hard-truth TEDx talk about male vulnerability.  But as I laid there getting snuggy next to my boys – an experience I wrote off as unlikely at best only a few short years prior – with the odd aromatic mélange of Nag Champa and Desitin twerking down on the nose holes, the rush of municipal water coursing through hastily-installed copper pipes cushioning the delicate, careful calm of “All the Pretty Little Horses,” I started to get, shall we say, a little shifty.

Then came the trio’s music box version of John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy,” and I knew I was in deep trouble.  It was then I realized these sadists were not only killers of men, but also sought to prolong the torture by diabolically doubling the length of each song with extra verses and choruses (easy to do with instrumentals).  With so many parents having children at older ages these days, someone really must start auditing the impact these lullaby compilations have on trauma-surviving millennials recovering from years of abandonment and alcohol/drug abuse.  Seriously.  But I kept my chin up.

Until, that is, the coup de grâce.  The dreaded “You Are My Sunshine.” And see ya.  The other stuff was minor league baseball.  Wiffle ball, even.  This is the one my mother would always sing at naptime, my earliest of childhood memories, muted sunlight illuminating the drawn pull-down shade in my room, chick-a-dees singing outside in her fragrant lilac trees, the give of the hard-sprung mattress when she’d sit on my bed with the coarse green tartan bedspread.  Her voice was a beautiful, dusky but clarion soprano.  The one act of domesticity where she seemed to lose herself in being, so much that it took her quite a while to realize that the song made me cry almost every time.

Or it could have been the Valium.  Whatever.

“Why are you crying Billy?” she finally asked one day, and since I was too young to say, “Read the lyrics, woman, it’s a guilt gambit in 4/4!” I lied and said I was crying because I was happy… and she bought it!  I distinctly remember this, playing the old tears-of-joy card because I didn’t know how to tell her that the thought of taking her sunshine away made me dreadfully sad and scared, and why would she ever think that I’d try?  And maybe, even then, I perceived that lying was safer than chancing a new crack in her eggshell-thin protective coating.  And there I was, more than 35 years later, with a water main broken inside of me, leaking out the corners of exhausted eyes, just quietly convulsing there on the bedroom floor as if having just regained consciousness after a grand mal seizure.  And I couldn’t turn it off, couldn’t find the throw.

Thankfully, the kids were already out cold.  My wife came downstairs after her shower and became the unwitting first responder. “What’s wrong?” she asked. This time – almost two generations later – I just told the truth, trying not to choke on thick gobs of mucus between heaving sobs.

“I’m… just feeling… a little…sad,” I said, and then bawled in the ugliest way, the kind that sounds like a cross between a maniacal laugh and someone being chloroformed with a rag from behind, and she sat there with me in the nursing chair and hugged me, in nothing but a towel, her amazing wet curls adding cold cure to the already soaked crew neck of my t-shirt. It was so sweet, as was remembering that before my dad died I had a mom who held me when I was hurt, soothed me with song.  But it didn’t last.  I’m a stuffer of sadness.  A stuffer of fear.  I even stuffed my poor young dead dad who I’m sick of talking about generations later but can’t stop revisiting because I stuffed him, and then I stuffed my mother’s emotional incest, her marginally-treated, clinical manic depression, her borderline personality.  I stuffed allowing accidental tourism to direct the course of my career, leading me so far away from the writing life – and the ability to put anything honest and healing into the world – that I would never get eight straight hours of sleep, ever again.

And so, of course, I stuffed this whole lullaby experience.  It could have been a fantastic teachable moment, but it wasn’t.  In fact, it became a whole lot easier to stuff (and far more awesome) when I looked up the history of “You Are My Sunshine” and discovered that the song was proffered in part by former Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis, and actually remains one of Louisiana’s two official state songs.  Ol’ Jimmie was a sort of perpetual gubernatorial candidate down there and, weirdly, a popular country music and gospel singer through the 1960s.  At last!  Here’s the miserable bastard responsible for this agonizing and guilt-inspiring verse:

The other night, dear
As I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms.
When I awoke, dear
I was mistaken
And I hung my head and cried

And then this one, after the next chorus, where things turn coarse really quick:

I’ll always love you
And make you happy
If you will only say the same
But if you leave me
To love another
You’ll regret it all some day

Wait, what?

Did Jimmie just sort of vaguely imply he’ll choose his rifle cabinet over his executive cabinet for this uniquely human conundrum?  The verse after those two basically confirms that, yes, we should call his family, the authorities and probably EMS amidst this claim that the object of his heartsickness has, in fact, shattered not some but all of his dreams. But then, just as sharply as he took that hard left, he swerves back onto Interstate 10 by just sort of weirdly tacking on two final verses that could only be construed as a means to stifle his quivering, revenge-soaked muse with soothing references to white fields of cotton, green fields of clover, crawfish gumbo and jambalaya, tall-ass corn and how the state has the best fishing around (I’m not kidding – look it up).  It’s worse than non-sequitur – it’s downright schizophrenic.

Here we envision Governor Davis, deep in the throes of costly, protracted divorce proceedings, irrationally wielding his authority to demand that this scream-pillow of a tune be deemed by the legislature as the new official state song as staffers nervously hung in the wings, shooting each other furtive glances as his secretary scribbles it out in shorthand.

Then, with Davis at his desk, spent and weeping into the crooks of his arms with a minefield of crumpled, discarded drafts littering the floor around him, they call his neighbor Charlie Mitchell, who, being a sharecropper and the only person in the world Davis trusts anymore (even though unbeknownst to him, Mitchell was the one schtupping his wife), adds all that business about Louisiana’s tourism and agriculture industries to the song.  And in the end, it appears that even Mitchell couldn’t save it, because the legislature ultimately deemed it only one of two state songs, the other being, of course, “Rise River Rise” by Corrosion of Conformity.

I’m kidding of course.

It is actually “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin.

OK, OK.  Sorry.  Wishful thinking.  The other state song was the demanding but certainly far more appropriate “Give Me Louisiana” by Doralice Fontane and Dr. John Croom.  Davis would outlive both of them and Mitchell too, dying in 2000… at 101 years of age!  I guess hatred, as Bukowski once said, really is the only thing that lasts.  And in reality, Davis and Mitchell – in true American form – stole the essential elements of the hit song from a Georgian named Oliver Hood and recorded it before Jimmie ever became governor.  But I’m quite sure he had something to do with the song becoming a “co-state song,” because, boy.  Weirdest. State. Song. Ever.

But my point here is maybe I should be blaming Governor Davis for my character defects, not my mother (god forbid I would blame myself).  But there I go again, diagnosing “what happened to me” and finger-pointing my way through life.  Some of it is justified – like being illegally abandoned at 15, put out to the curb to figure out food, shelter, a job and high school for myself – and no one has ever doubted the impact these types of experiences can have on a pre-teen human brain.  Yes, I know I talk about it a lot. It’s like my friend Scotty says about prison: “You’d talk about it a lot too if it happened to you.”

But before long – and way too long thereafter – there were two adults in the room and unlike mom I wasn’t stunted by weird old Baptist double standards and bullshit dogma about race sin and salvation and sacrifice and sanctimony.  I also wasn’t born female in an era where despite how determined, creative and intelligent you were the most important things for many women were to look good, make good, bang out a good casserole and never mention being sexually abused as a child or all those shock treatments later on.  Serve the nucleus and STFU.  Sure, some women rejected and escaped all that – sometimes at great cost – but my mom wasn’t one of them.  I should have been the bigger person, but I wasn’t, and I’m not.

In fact, sitting here at almost 53 years old, I’ve only ever muttered a few kind words about my mother publicly, in writing or conversation.  To be honest, it never crossed my mind until I started re-reading old Facebook memory posts from this time every year (she would have been 85 this month). These musings are really just hindsight forensics followed by “but-I-love-you-anyway” sentiments.  Attention seeking for sure, but also purgative to a degree, and the sort of mutual aid or ad hoc group therapy that sometimes transpires is even better (and really the highest and best use I suppose), but it did absolutely zero to help me recognize who she really was, inside the fallout shelter. And did everything to perpetually grind the axe deeper into her flaws.

Over the past few years, I’ve been reading up on the science of separation.  I always go back to it, to how negative thinking and the scapegoating and everlasting victimhood it fosters are just a series of chemical reactions, like everything else, really.  Like most vibrational frequencies in our bodies it is ancient, linked to our early survival as a species, and it spins up quickly into repetitive, negative and even destructive thinking that, once in motion, is extraordinarily difficult to extinguish.  Science has proven that, for those of you who still believe in that sort of thing. Even worse, that hot, crazed hum is no more conspicuous than the quiet drone of a florescent dimmer over your kitchen stove.  Today we have a really overused word for it: “Triggered.”

Some people spend almost every waking moment in that state, almost all of it the product of illusory thinking, which in in turn creates a near-bottomless dance of counter-measure, subterfuge, social-climbing, sycophancy, persecution complexes, just plain mean-spiritedness, and worst of all actual violence against other humans, animals, property and on and on.  And these acts can be so triggering to others (especially with the panoptic ubiquity of social media) that, without deliberate intervention, much of humankind is trapped in an ever-evolving cycle of psychic civil war. It might seem pretty standard fare to a guy like Governor Davis if he were alive today, but can you imagine how fucking hilarious that must look to an alien species?

But it ain’t funny for us.  It’s serious shit now.  We have humans literally living every waking minute of their lives in a constant state of upheaval, projecting the trauma they’ve experienced onto family, friends, colleagues, complete strangers, reinforcing our delusions of separateness. We project it, reflect it and protect it. Upon inspection, I have found this to not only be true in my own life, but also for the vast majority of people I know in one form or another.  It’s just a matter of degree. We feel justified under the banners of politics, religion, race, sex, career… but these are just glorified delivery mechanisms for a single, corrosive malady. One need only to spend five minutes on Twitter, at any baseball game or church potluck fundraiser where the building fund is damn near depleted and a coup on the building committee chair is ripe for picking to see how true that is. This primordial chemistry that kept us from being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers during the last Ice Age has all of us navigating life like a three-legged deer trying to bury its turds on a frozen pond.

People don’t even try to hide it anymore.  At least there used to be shame to keep things in check.  Now, everyone heralds their character defects as actual moral standards, making people do the strangest things, like obnoxiously drive around town advertising gun ownership with bumper stickers in red pickups with twin Confederate flags stabbed into the rear beds.  And the same phenomenon makes me react to that weird-ass combination of obnoxia and base proletarianism – rife even within my own family – by saying, “My 2nd great grandfather shot every single man he saw charging under that flag at Antietam, under heavy artillery fire from Cemetery Hill that killed all but nine members of his company in the 89th Infantry of NY Volunteers. They were slaughtered like pigs and the blood filled the trenches like milk into a bulk tank. Pull into my driveway and find out what happens to you, Dixie Doolittle.”

See?  All of that hate spilled out of me in less than 5 seconds.  Easy.  Ugly, but easy.  My mother went to her grave spinning with that energy too. She wasn’t rocking the Stars & Bars, but she was perpetually judgmental, unhappy, irritable, restless, discontent, prejudiced and without a single element of doubt or irony knew exactly who to blame for each transgression (and it wasn’t her).  Despite this, her public-facing persona was usually super pleasant, at least before the dementia that accompanies late-stage organ failure set in. She desperately cared about what people thought of her, because she conflated that with survival – not just physical but emotional and mental – but harbored deep resentments against pretty much everyone.  Held on to old ideas about race, religion, money and status.  Gave generously to charities but shopped in the trinket aisle at Walmart for family during holidays.  She allowed fear of abandonment to put herself in horrific and demoralizing life situations, all of which ultimately resulted in self-fulfilling prophecies, which sounds a little too familiar if I’m being honest.

That kind of molecular activity can really do a job, all the way down the family tree.  Practically all the jobs there are to do.  It basically made me just like her, with a few cosmetic differences in style and presentation.  In fact, I have admitted many times that what success I have had in life is directly related to my crippling fear of financial insecurity and a deep and abiding concern about what other people think of me.  Or, more accurately, what I perceive other people think of me.  It doesn’t even have to be real – all I have to do is believe it.

So how the hell can anyone escape that?

I’m thinking Radical Union.  Sometimes.  The fact is, I’m just not that woke.  But it helps.  Radical Union (or Radical Grace) is a deliberate act of aggression against the Big Hate.  It presents selflessness, loving kindness, forgiveness, compassion and empathy as concepts from which humans can teach themselves to catch themselves the moment they are enraged, hooked, triggered, tweaked, spun – which is really just endlessly reacting to the audacity of life – and intentionally run in the opposite direction as if from a massive forest fire.  It’s the old AA recovery trick of taking your first thought and doing the exact opposite. Why? Who cares? It works!

Here’s the catch: it looks simple on the page but give it a go and you’ll soon see that light requires ten times the energy to lift than darkness, and 20 times the desire to maintain. Hate is easy. Love, not so much. Without constantly returning, centering, the perpetual discontent returns almost immediately, which is why Radical Union must be pursued daily (sometimes hourly) as a deliberate, conscious act of defiance, of violence really, against the deep-grooved mental chatter that drives all of our divisive behavior, most of it repetitive and ultimately useless, until you finally arrive at the only true spiritual discovery there is, ever was, and always will be: if it’s not the language of union, it can never be trusted.

I can’t share this with my mother. She has moved on. And honestly, she probably would have processed the concept of Radical Union like most people would process an oral dissertation on phenolic-polysaccharide linkages in Chinese water chestnut cell walls. And then she would shuffle off to her bedroom to write me a check for $2.53 for the nail clippers I bought her at Price Chopper, dutifully recording it into her ledger in painfully neat cursive.

But.

In the spirit of Radical Union, I’d like to share some memories with you, about her:

My mom made homemade chocolate chip cookies from scratch with a Sunbeam Mixmaster, a wedding gift from her boss at the state job she left to raise me.  She’d let me lick the batter off the beaters, and she’d keep wax-paper layers of chocolate chip cookies in a white Tupperware container on top of the refrigerator so I wouldn’t eat them all in a single sitting.  All my friends thought she was a mad god.

Every morning on school days, she would raise the shades in my room and sing the “Bend and Stretch” song from Romper Room. I can’t do either now, but what I’d give to hear her sing it one last time, as daylight’s geometry instantly materialized in my room like an apparition, illuminating every mote of dust as the floorboards creaked and she reached for the stars.

She assumed complete responsibility for making sure the weekly court-ordered payments were made to my dad’s first wife, so my five siblings were supported. She arranged visits for them on birthdays and for other events when planets aligned. The sad reality is that my father couldn’t and wouldn’t have done any of that. He had no clue. Likewise, we would never have lived the life we knew in Colonie Village without my mom.  He had no concept of money, couldn’t properly mow a lawn or get himself up in the morning, lied about his entire family history and got mad when anyone called him out on it.  She took care of it all.

In 1976 my 2nd grade class planned a red, white and blue party for America’s Bicentennial, and everyone had to sign up to bring something to class.  I signed up for the most patriotic thing I could think of – apple pie – but I forgot to tell her until the night before the event.  This was in an era before grocery stores were open 24-7, so she had to beg, borrow and steal to make that apple pie – one of the harder to make from scratch – but she did, until 2 AM. For me.

She had what old-timers call an incredible green thumb.  Anything she stuck in the ground grew to massive, almost invasive proportions.  Especially Hibiscus and snap peas.  Mom knew exactly how to prune every perennial to maximize blooms and minimize disease.

Long after we had a clothes dryer, she kept a clothesline and put everything on it when the summer sun was high and there was a breeze. I can recall the smell and sensation of a cool bed spread just off the line at bedtime, wrapping myself in its traces of loam and cherry blossom as I drifted into sleep.

She also had cajones when it came to First World injustice. We lived across the street from the rambunctious Leitch family, whose kids ran roughshod over our entire neighborhood gang like a tribe of Scud Farkases on acid.  They always had a Mach II or some other muscle car up on blocks in the driveway, dirt bikes in the yard, and a cute little dog that always seemed like the black sheep in that crazy longhouse of horrors. One day the family matriarch decided she was going to let Buster crap all over our lawn every morning. Like, deliberately walk across the road and let him do it. Mom let it slide for about a week, until one day just before driving me to school she grabbed my sandbox shovel and scooped every butt nugget she could find into a huge coffee can and peppered the Leitch’s driveway as if seasoning a pork loin. Maw maw immediately appeared and went completely apeshit, cussing at my mother practically in tongues, using combinations of profanities I wouldn’t hear again until I heard my first GG Allin LP.  Mom said she was still out there when she got home, listing all potential forms of retribution as she went inside to watch her morning game shows.

Best for last. She surprised me at my wedding by selecting, against all odds, the perfect mother/son dance song: “May You Always” by The Andrews Sisters (also the McGuire Sisters, and the Lennon Sisters… apparently it’s a sistery song).  She literally pulled it out of her ass.  I had never once heard her hum it, sing it, or listen to it on the old HiFi in the basement, where – begrudgingly relegated to the role of homemaker – she would do laundry and iron clothes while I played with my Evel Knievel stunt stadium or Marx army men.  Not one time.  And yet she immediately threw it out there as if it was the obvious choice.  And in hindsight, it was:

May you always walk in sunshine
Slumber warm when night winds blow
May you always live with laughter
For a smile becomes you so

May good fortune find your doorway
May the bluebird sing your song
May no trouble travel your way
May no worry stay too long

May your heartaches be forgotten
May no tears be spilled
May old acquaintance be remembered
And your cup of kindness filled

And may you always be a dreamer
May your wildest dream come true
May you find someone to love
As much as I love you

This is my favorite memory of all, mom.  And now I know why you sang “You Are My Sunshine” to me all those years ago. You just sang what you knew, regardless of what the song really means (and maybe even in spite of that). I’ve sung Alice Cooper’s “I Never Cry” and Queen’s “Love of My Life” to your grandchildren almost every night for over 10 years and whew… they are arguably way more depressing that what you laid down.  Like, Lexapro and Xanax smoothie more depressing.

I’m sorry that I took your sunshine away.  I didn’t want to.

I’ll try harder.