MAMA MIA

Whatever cable channel I’m watching just aired some Mother’s Day bit about Blythe Danner, glorious mother to Gwyneth Paltrow, and how she passed on her genetic ability to look simultaneously demure and fragile in a ball gown or some shit. And I thought, with all the celebrity mom-coms airing this weekend, there’s someone else who totally deserves memorializing: My personal mom-com, Paula Escobedo, who never wore a ball gown to my knowledge, but who can rock the shit out of a ridiculously sized piece of costume jewelry and a swipe of fuschia lipstick.
All things considered, my mom is pretty fucking awesome. Didn’t get hitched to pops til she was 32 – an age that, to me, in late-stage-capitalist NYC, seems almost untenably young for marriage. But for a pre-feminist Mexican Catholic in the early ’70s in Wyoming, it was a major decision – she chose her own will and desire for adventure above cultural and familial expectations. ‘Course, she would have married if she had met better than a bunch of drunks and deadbeats before my dad. But still she was brave. She took road trips in a ’72 Monte Carlo she bought with her own money and later handed down to me (it was a donk and a half, believe it). Before she found dad, she worked. A lot. First as a cocktail waitress, then as a secretary, then as a florist in a shop.
When my parents got divorced she had to start over again, to stake out more lucrative prospects. I remember helping her with her resume, her face bloated from tears, slumped over the cherry desk Aunt Luce gave her as a present when she graduated from high school, a Catholic school. It was the ’80s and she was sweating it. College degrees were really starting to gain cache in those days, and she didn’t have one. I remember looking at her resume, I was like 10, and feeling stunned that she could be so old. She was 50. Half a century. The reality of mortality hit me first. Then I thought: How do you start all over at 50? But you just do. You carry on because if you don’t, you stop. And you can’t stop. And she didn’t. Sometimes she worked four jobs, sometimes funny ones – she sold that godawful costume jewelry for awhile, bags full of dangling earrings made of conch shells and plastic anchors, asymmetrical squiggle brooches in cloisonné and pewter – truly ugly shit, but she made it happen. And now, she still works down at the racetrack, does all her crafts and florals and interior design, art shit on the side. So maybe there’s no ball gown stance to carry on (‘sides, if I ever need it, I can teach myself). But to me, she passed down her ability to keep a plant alive – no small feat – and maybe I got a little of her mettle, too (which will hopefully make up for the Catholicism I gave back).
Happy mother’s day, P.Esc. Thanks for havin me.
Also, thanks to my mom for making me listen to Harry Belafonte “Sings the Blues,” one of her few non-mariachi records of my youth. If you haven’t heard it, try to get it on record – it’s better for the crackles. Listen to it from start to finish and really listen, cause it’s deep. (That’s advice I’m passing on to you from my mom. A gift!)