We’re Going to Have Good Time, Even If It Kills Us!

By A.E. Bayne




My mother is crazy, and I say that with the best possible sentiment. She does not have a mental illness; rather, her insanity comes straight from the heart. She’s the type of person who would give you her shirt, take the bullet, and build you a classic Cape Cod from the sticks and stones thrown by that bully back in third grade, if you’re still hanging onto that baggage. However, like any great super-hero, she does have her Kryptonite: Hattie Mae Rogers, her mother. Yes, my grandmother, who is loved by all who meet her, who makes the best potato salad on earth, who has never known a stranger, is my mother’s Achilles heel.

On the surface, they appear inseparable. My mother dotes on my grandmother, drives her to see doctors and to restock at the grocery store, and pays for prescriptions and medical procedures when she needs assistance. Conversely, my grandmother satisfies my mother’s need for company, which abates Mom’s fears of solitude. For my mother, she is someone to care for, someone to talk to, and someone who relies on her daily. They dance around each other with symbiotic gestures; and yet, like any two objects exerting the same electrical charge, they are bound by the laws of physics to repel one another.

Conversations between my mother and grandmother often reflect each one’s need to control any given situation. I present the following example for your consideration:

While returning from our trip to Colonial Beach today, my grandmother repeats a story about a woman named Heather who lived in Memphis when she was there and who helped her often. They worked together, and Heather was very good to her – dare I say, like a daughter. My grandmother never misses an opportunity to revisit all the kind acts that Heather bestowed upon her; yet my mother feels slighted because Grandma rarely pays her even the briefest compliment for all the things Mom tries to do for her here in Fredericksburg. My mother has asked many times why my grandmother never seems to be grateful for the things that she does for her. Grandma’s response, “Because you’re my daughter and you have to do it. Heather just wanted to do it.” So be it; we hear the story of the time when Heather bought her a cell phone in case my grandmother was to break down while driving to work, and wasn’t that the sweetest thing, and how much she missed Heather.

I am rolling my eyes to the ceiling, mouthing the words to the story as my grandmother gazes out the window in the retelling, when we hear the rotating gear of my mother’s lighter spin and the lighter fluid ignites. She doesn’t say a word, but purses her lips around a Carlton Ultra Light, pulling smoke into her lungs like a rope. We all roll down our windows and there is silence for half a minute.

“You don’t see many women smoking anymore,” my grandmother says from the backseat, as if she is stating her thesis for a much longer piece of rhetoric.

Silence again; my mother is bent forward over the steering wheel, barreling down Rt. 218. She purposefully drags the cigarette up to her berry lips, sucking the dense fog into her lungs like a spirit. We wait, surrounded by murky expectancy, while she continues to stare at the road ahead. She finally blows out the smoke long and full so that it slides around her, hugging her in a haze.

“You see more women smoking than men,” she slyly responds.

And then my grandmother is off and running, “Well, Margaret Ann, you may THINK more women smoke, but they don’t. Women don’t smoke much anymore because it’s a dirty habit. I never could smoke. I tried, but I couldn’t inhale. I wanted to, tried very hard to do it. My friends all tried to show me how, but now I’m GLAD I couldn’t do it because it’s such a disgusting habit. I’m so glad Amy never took up smoking.”



I shift a sideways glance at my mother and say through clinched teeth, “You just had to say something back. You knew what would happen, but you had to say something! You can never just let it go.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” Mom sputters at me.

“What? What now?” Grandma is demanding from the backseat.

“Nothing, Mother! Nothing.”

“Oh, it’s something, alright! Oh-ho, it is something.”

“Look at the scenery.” My mother flicks her cigarette out the window causing tiny flashes of lit ash to bounce behind the bumper.

There is silence again, but for the whirr of the tires treading along the canopied country road.

“You know, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should call Pearl today. She was so like a mother to me. It was so strange, and I’ve wanted to call her so many times the past few weeks,” my mother’s eyes tear up visibly. Pearl was my grandmother’s sister who passed away in April. She raised my mother for a few years when she was very young.

“I know; me too. It feels like I should talk to her,” Grandma says, and then, “Emma Jean called me to wish me Happy Birthday yesterday.”

My mother sighs, “That’s nice, Mother. That’s very nice.”

And so it went; and so it goes. Mother and daughter, twisting and untwisting knots in a desperate attempt to overcome the friction, to hold fast against the repelling forces of their genetic bond. They are two negatives that make a daily attempt to create a positive, beyond all odds.