Happy Morbid Mother’s Day!
Many horror fans remember the moment they fell in love with the genre. Taking joy in terror is considered strange by those more normal and less interesting of the species, so the moment we realize that the pack is for squares and break free is impacting. One good friend recalls that at the tender age of 13, he saved all of his summer paychecks working at a pizzeria in New York to buy Night of The Living Dead on VHS for $100. A good buddy I grew up with still considers sitting through the entire cursed tape segment of The Ring the most terrifying moment of his life, made much worse by me calling him seven days later and groaning into the phone. For me, my desire for the dreadful came at a much younger age, and from an unexpected source: my morbid, Minnesotan mother.
She grew up in a small town called Chanhassen, a sleepy suburb best known for its marvelous midwestern multiple stage dinner theater. She grew juxtaposed between the rural farmland tracts and the allure of the glittering stage. Her flair for the dramatic would take her all the way to New York, where at the age of 18 she journeyed assured that growing up in a Minnesota small town would prepare her for the realities of the Big Apple in the 80’s. But it is not from the cocaine and seedy nightclubs that her horror stories hail. No, it is from the cold, mean, and uncaring streets of the Minnesota backroads, where horses exploded and decapitations were frequent.
Now my mother is not the kind of person you would expect tales of terror to spring forth from. 120 pounds after a Thanksgiving dinner and 5’4” on a phonebook, the blonde, white, still beautiful lady touts a smile that only a life on the stage could teach. Kind to strangers, quick to a laugh, and generous to a fault, she has a true dark side. The kind of dark side that only comes out with those she loves or when a joke catches her off guard. The kind of dark side that the harsh Minnesotan seasons breed. Between the bitter sub-zero winters and sweltering summers whose mosquitos blot out the sun, a gallows humor grows in the way I imagine grew in young Englishmen crouched in trenches on the Western Front. Nature is bitter and uncaring, so be kind to those close to you, keep calm, and carry on.
When a child, this usually came out in the form of cautionary tales. I remember once walking on the ice as a child early in the winter, after my mother was thrice assured that it was not too thin and the whole 50 pounds of me would not crack it and fall right in. The lake was maybe a quarter mile walk from the back of my grandparent’s house, but at that age it might as well have been Narnia. I wanted to explore: see the other side of the lake, investigate icehouses, spot fish below the surface. Looking down, my mother came up beside me, “See those bubbles in the ice? Yeah, that means someone fell in. The bubbles are from their last breaths getting trapped when the ice freezes over. It freezes fast when it’s this cold, faster than you can get up.” The rest of the day was spent sipping cocoa and watching owls from the safety of the living room.
As I grew older and a mother’s concerns changed, her tales evolved to match. My adolescent self was warned about crossing the street with the story of a young neighbor who was hit by a truck in the winter. Stranger danger was taught through a second hand tale of a boy who was abducted for over a decade. The story of an ex-boyfriend of hers who was hit by a train served as both a cautionary tale against drunk driving and dating.
What has always been remarkable about her storytelling ability is that right when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. The neighbor who was hit by the truck? His blood stayed caked in the snow until the summer came, a constant reminder she walked across every day on the way to school. The boy who was abducted? Never the same, and crashed his motorcycle years later. The ex-boyfriend? After crawling miles back to the road through a cornfield, he was taken to the hospital and had to have his kneecaps replaced. Only back then, they didn’t have replacements, they just tied your tendons together, and you could never bend your legs again. After a year of learning to walk, physical therapy, and pain, he was finally mobile again. That is, until he slipped on the ice, snapped the tendons, and had to go through the process all over again.
These cautionary tales were part of the fabric of my mother’s parenting, but later in life I learned they were more importantly part of the fabric of who she was. When you grow up around the terrible, you learn to live with it. The kind of tales she tells would receive chuckles and nods in the heartland of Minnesota. They were not shielded from life and death in the ways many of us were. To us, we learn about death when Grandma is gone and birth in sex-ed (or more realistically, from the shifty kid on the playground). To them, birth was presented by the cows and the housecats every season, and death even more frequently. So with living also came dying, in a pure sense that one can only laugh at once you really understand.
I didn’t grow up healthy. As a child, I was incredibly sick. I spent a lot of my developmental life in the hospital. As a kid who is sick, you come to terms with a lot of realities before most do. My mother used to sit by my bed night after night, asking me to just hold on one more day, and then it would be okay if I let go. Being taken away to surgery, I would look back and tell her not to worry, because I’d be back soon. Death was a reality, and never really scared me.
What did scare me was the monsters and creatures I came up with in my brain. Being so sick, I didn’t become physical until much later in life. My parents restricted T.V. and video games, so much of my time was spent imagining things. I wrote stories in my brain, creating new plots with characters of my favorite cartoons. I would spend hours in the shower (a taboo now that California is out of water) just meditating, creating worlds in my head. The consequence of this was that my brain would not stop running. My nights were labored and exhausted, as the dark presented a canvas of endless horrors for my subconscious to paint.
It was something I feared I would never get over; I felt I would never again sleep without tossing and sweating for hours, or dream without feeling I was suffocating. I would never be able to be home alone, or the horrors just over my shoulder would lurk ever closer until I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulders. This persisted into my teens, but slowly, things changed, and it is all thanks to my morbid Minnesotan mother.
I learned, as they did, to take humor in the horror. Sure, nature is an uncaring monster that would much rather sick wolves on you than give you a fruitful harvest, but hey, at least you won’t have to walk home 10 miles uphill through the snow then. Be kind to your neighbors, because tomorrow you might be the one covered in leeches. Even more, be nice, because they might be gone tomorrow, and you’d feel like a big ass if your last words were unkind. I grew to laugh at the terror, to embrace fear. I still feel scared, but I rule it, not it me.
I now feel at home in horror, safe in the macabre, excited by the terror and alive. I speak my mind because there might not be another chance, and I know to give my all because I might have none to give tomorrow. I tell my friends how much they mean to me, and I love with all my heart. Most importantly, I dream of terrifying and exhilarating worlds, unafraid of what I might find in the dark corners of my mind.
To end, I will tell you her favorite story. Back when she was in middle school, the schoolhouse was a composite of both middle and elementary school. The young and new teacher would teach the youngest grades, and their vibrant energy and passion made them instant favorites. Simultaneously, their amature status and still stabalizing finances required them to carpool to save money. In the dead of winter, even the best prepared and most capable cars are hard to control. It would be on this fateful day that a truck carrying a load of rebar would be traveling in front of the carpooling teachers. Unstable controls and an uncaring God came together to dislodge the rebar from the back of the truck, and re-lodge it in the bodies of the young and promising teachers. It was a horrifying tragedy, but would not be one of my mother’s stories without the punchline. A few cars behind the thoroughly punctured SUV was the school bus for the elementary class, who watched as the still bodies of their teachers froze and their blood dotted the snow.
So, my question to you all is, what does horror really mean to you? When were YOU first introduced to horror? And most importantly, how does your mother fit into how you love your horror life this day? Let me know in the comments, and let’s make this Mother’s Day one to remember! I love you mom. May your dark humor continue to light up my life.
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