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That's my mom!--11/05/99

When I was young(er), my mom had a revolutionary, sure-fire weapon in the war against monsters. It could be found in any department store, was included in the everyday contigent of bathroom supplies, and could banish all ghosts, ghouls and goblins quicker than you could say scat. It was either in an aerosol or pump-action spray bottle, and it didn't matter to me whether it smelled like flowers or medicine, it stopped my childhood fears dead in their tracks so I could get on with the important things in life, like sleeping.

All my mom had to do was to say that she had some monster repellent, and be it Off, air freshener, perfume, or Raid, one spritz under the bed, one into the closet, and one into the air for good measure would shore up my courage, and would dissolve any little (or big) nasties into harmless smells that wafted me on my way into dreamland. Heck, a hulking monster with a taste for little kid flesh was nothing when faced with some unidentifiable spray of cologne or Lysol. Of course, the older I got, the more those monsters despaired, and finally, with little more than a whimper, each eventually left me to find some target with a less invincible mom.

Kids throughout the ages have had heroes, ranging from Hercules to Superman, from the A-Team to the Power Rangers, or from King Arthur to Michael Jordan. Yet none of the heroes of our youth was ever quite so real or important as the one who could tuck us in and keep the nighttime creepy crawlies away from us, or who we could run to after a nightmare and who could shine a flashlight into the closet to warn them skeletons away.

But I guess that most kids grow out of that stage where we think we need the unsung might of our mommys. We start to think we can take care of things ourselves, and while we still love the ones who helped us grow big and strong, we start to feel less and less dependent on someone else to spray away the monsters. Our own imaginations allow us to call in the other heroes, the ones we can always have with us, even when our moms are at home and we're at school, or when they're at work and we have a babysitter.

And for the imaginary ghosts and goblins, perhaps imaginary heroes work great. But not all monsters are imaginary, and for those real ones, we are forced to turn somewhere else. Sure, maybe Mom can help at times: she can help us with bullies, spelling tests, and failed "boyfriends/girlfriends". Only occasionally she's not there. And the older we get, the more we start to think that she doesn't understand nearly so well as our peers. How could she know the problems we're going through? I mean, she's like, a million years old, and she was _never_ our age. He-Man can't help me get up the courage to ask that cute girl in class to go out with me; and neither Spider-Man nor Santa Claus could get me a car or money for the movies, no matter how hard I might wish it.

So we turn elsewhere. Perhaps we have grown up in the church, and we have been taught that God is in control. Perhaps we believe it, perhaps we don't. But even an omnipotent, omnipresent God sometimes seems hard to get advice from. I mean, you can't just call 1-800-2ASK-GOD and get an operator who will listen to your problems and give you all the answers you want. Sure God might have given you a bible(read: instruction book), but does this truly help you if you want to know how to deal with your ex-girlfriend's boyfriend who wants to kill you; or if you wrecked the car and the only way to get to work is to bum rides off of people, and they are getting irritated at being your chauffer? Maybe the answers are all there, but sometimes they seem either too non-specific, or they don't tell us what we want to hear, so we turn elsewhere.

Our society today has turned the avoiding of one's problems into an art form. We can lose ourselves in television, movies, books, alchohol, drugs, sex, psychotherapy, travel, withdrawl, etc, etc, and yet the problems still exist. Perhaps these diversions work on some problems, but like using air freshener to cover up the smell of a decaying body, eventually you run out of spray, and the smell comes back worse than ever. Perhaps dealing with a problem seems as unappetizing as cleaning the kitty litter box every week, but if you keep putting it off, eventually the cat will start using the carpet, your hat, the furniture, or whatever else it can find and your clean-up job becomes magnified a hundred-fold.

So we're agreed that problems generally don't just evaporate when we spray them with perfume, but how do we deal with the problems we can't handle? We call in a specialist. You have a termite problem, you call the exterminator. Your house gets robbed, you call the cops. You have monsters under your bed, call for your mom and her secret weapon. I can't deal with all of my problems by myself. For the most part, I view my life very stoically, and I accept that whatever happens, happens for the best. If my car dies on the highway, I wonder what kind of major accident I'm avoiding by sitting right there. If I find out that someone hates me, I am grateful that I found out so I could do something about it, rather than just going on about my everyday life. I agree with the verse in Ecclesiasties(?), "When times are good, be happy. When times are bad, consider, that God has made the one as well as the other." But regardless of this view on life, I have just recently made a discovery: it would help me immensely if just occasionally I could simply call out and have my mommy come and spray away the demons that run around my bed at night, wafting me off into the untroubled dreamland of my youth.