MY MOTHER

I love my mother, but I'm no longer accepting her calls. Every conversation is word-for-word the same negativity she put forth the last time we spoke. "When are you going to get a full-time job?" – "Mom, we've been over this a thousand times. You know what I want to do with my life, I've been doing it for the last nine years. Next question: "How's your financial situation?" – "The same as it's been since the day I moved out mom, dire." "Well, you can always come home, save some money..." My mother can't seem to understand the reluctance of a self-respecting adult male to move back in with his parents. There are names for grown men who live at home: Trekkies, Potheads, and the mentally retarded.

My mother is very family oriented. Naturally, she resents her children for having abandoned her, and rightfully so; my brother moved an hour away, I live about three. Long ago when I had the time and inclination to do so, I would explain that kids are supposed to grow up and go away. That's why nature compels them to find a mate and start a family of their own.

As people grow older the realization that life is finite sinks in. Some vow to make the most of every remaining moment, others become consumed with their impending mortality. Given her present health and the average lifespan of a female in a first world country, I'd say that my mother has resigned herself to death about a quarter century too soon. Her affliction is hereditary. My Grandmother should be in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest dying breath ever – two decades and still going strong! For the last twenty years her letters have been post dated carbon copies of the same form letter:

Dear Christopher:

My health is failing. Mountains are moved more easily than my bowels.

Love, Grandma

My ambitions are lofty but my opportunities few and far between, so I've set my sights on the West Coast. When in the course of conversation I mention my plans my mother attempts to psychologically sabotage me with sensationalist news source scuttlebutt about the rampant earthquakes, crime and cost-of-living in SOCAL. When I reply that my fear of wondering what could have been is greater than my fear of what might be she employs a more sinister strategy for keeping me at arm's length: citing my countless past failures as harbingers of things to come. Nonsuccess being as certain as tomorrow's sunrise, I should put my pipe dreams behind me and begin dying the American dream – get a real job that I really hate and become another baby breeder just biding my time 'til I get to heaven. When it becomes apparent that diplomacy will not do the trick, my mom unholsters womankind's standard issue sidearm, guilt, as if I should feel guilty that the time has come for me to leave behind one world on my way to the next.

I believe that every generation should strive to be better than the last – intellectually, morally – our objective as human beings should be to evolve. What is the meaning of life? No one knows, and until we figure it out I challenge anyone to give me a better proxy purpose than that. My father left his home, his family and his friends at nineteen because he knew that he could lead a more productive and fulfilling life here than on his father's banana farm in the Amazon. And he has: college graduate, veteran of two wars; Through his work he's brought some of the third world's most remote regions into the twenty-first century. I intend to leave a legacy as admirable to others as my father's is to me, with or without my mother's blessings.