Moms are great. They carry you around in their bellies for months, give painful birth to you, and then (hopefully) spend years caring for, worrying over and nurturing you until you're (hopefully) able to do all that life stuff for yourself.
Sometimes Moms are with us until we're senior citizens ourselves. My Dad is in his 70s, and his mother reached 100 last summer. She remembers the Influenza Pandemic and the day The Great War ended, and more recent events like when commercial airliners first flew the skies.
My own mother had a shorter life, moving along to the other side in her mid-40s, when I was only 18. But in the handful of years that she was around, she certainly had an impact on my life creatively.
Music was more of a focus for me back then, so she didn't sit bedside reading classic novels to me, nor did we discuss our favorite authors or practice prose. I was too hyper for that. What we did was play the drums.
She was in drum corps as a teen, so she taught me how to play my first snare drum cadences. Soon enough a drum set followed and I took lessons on my own. She attended every musical event I participated in all through school --- concerts, competitions, talent shows. Always lurking in the back so as not to embarrass me, but I always took note of her support.
Eventually I started a rock band that practiced in our basement. For hours every weekend she endured 105 decibels of me and my friends playing rock music, and never complained once. Only encouraged me to keep going.
I believe her early and constant support of my music ingrained a sense of creative confidence in me --- not that I believed I was the best artist in the world, but that it was okay to do creative things, in fact it was a good and worthwhile pursuit. That is something that stuck with me. And it definitely weighed in on my decision to take writing seriously as I got older.
My first novel, POSTCARDS FROM A DEAD GIRL, has a mother character that dies suddenly and unexpectedly, but her voice still hangs around a bottle of 1967 Bordeaux, complaining about how everyone will forget her now that she's gone.
Good news for you moms out there. You'll always be remembered.
Kirk Farber’s debut novel POSTCARDS FROM A DEAD GIRL is in stores now.
