How to love your mother

A story about achieving your potential

He learned that all by himself!

He’s such a bright boy. Did you know, we were in talks with the school to move him up a grade? We ended up not doing it, because he didn't want to leave his friends. Isn’t that sweet? Of course, they are trying to give him more difficult work than the others.

We didn't have to teach him how to tie his shoes, he just figured it out on his own. He learned to read before even starting school. I signed him up for a music class after school, and all on his own he gravitated towards playing the bass, now he’s the best bassist under 20 in the entire region, and people seek him out and ask for him for projects. He was headhunted and now he’s playing in a jazz band at 12, with boys who are 5 years older than him.

When we bought our first family computer, he was just exploring and playing around with it and he deconstructed a chess game. All by himself, we never even taught him to play chess. He learned to break the rules and cheat, without us even telling him what the rules were.

He’s doing so well in school. Anything anyone puts in front of him, he’ll just do it, master it. He’s way ahead of his grade in Math, and we don’t even have to tell him to do his homework, because he already finishes the homework during class.

Anything he puts his mind to. He gets new ideas all the time. He started playing basketball, and he was one of the best in his grade immediately. He bought a skateboard with the money he earned from his newspaper route, and started practicing with the neighbour kid. He just always doing something, choosing something.

He is Me, and his every action is my inaction transformed. Through Him my Stillness has been transfigured into Motion, my apathy has been transformed into a self-propelling force. I am the Mother of God. By Him, my Sin of Passivity, of being Acted Upon, has been redeemed. I am Become. I have been turned from tinder into a blazing fire, from being an object of the world to it’s Master. I am finally free. The Guilt of my natural desire has been abolished, and my misalignment into Being has been realigned. The World acted upon me, and now I have my revenge on it. He possess the Generative Principle, he is an avatar of Shiva, He is Genghis Khan, he is Hitler, he is Napoleon, and by his every action in the World, he is ravishing it in revenge of my humiliation.

And he did it all by himself.

After the accident, of course, things were difficult for him. But he learned to walk again – you know, he was walking again just a few days after waking up from the coma. He was shaking and his muscles were atrophied and his legs couldn't carry his weight, but he stubbornly just grasped on to the walking frame, and walked out into the bathroom on his own. He learned to talk again – in only a couple of months, he was able to hold a conversation again, and he barely ever starts just saying a bunch of babbling nonsense because his brain breaks down. He barely ever speaks English to us because he can’t remember his mother tongue any more. The doctors all said, they’ve never seen anything like it. Most kids in that situation take years to get better, and he was back in school already after only six months.

He even started doing drugs all by himself. He wasn’t bullied into it or peer pressured or anything. In fact when he was first offered, he made fun of the guy who was offering it to him. Could you imagine? He just chose it by himself later. In fact, you know, the doctors told us, told him, “you have to stay away from alcohol after a severe brain injury like this, or you have a very high chance of developing epilepsy”. And then he even started drinking by himself!

Sorry I’m all out of breath. After covid and cancer I have really bad lungs now. We were just out walking, and we went up a little hill, and my breath is shallow and I have to sit and catch it again for a little bit. Walking a couple of feet makes me all but immobile, and I have to sit in a chair to catch my breath for thirty minutes, wheezing. But look at him there, inviting his mother for coffee in his new one room apartment. He’s such a bright boy. The years of alcoholism and drugs, well you can barely tell. It’s like the brain damage – people don’t even notice it unless you tell them.

Look at him go. Fussing over his mother, making sure I’m comfortable. Worrying about me. He’s such a bright boy. And we never even taught him to. We never taught him anything. He does it all by himself.