On 31 December, 1977, my mother, Margaret Rose Cameron Herlinger, married Rocco Antonio Emanuel, my step-father. In just a few days, it will be their 30th wedding anniversary.
In stereotypical Midwestern fashion, they've asked that no fuss be made. In fact, it takes nearly two weeks of greasing to convince them to allow us to take them to dinner.
Dinner is at a restaurant called O'Charleys near the mall. There's not a lot of cuisine in this deprived area, so we keep to the 'no fuss' request and go to what is more or less your run of the mill family restaurant.
We are no sooner seated than my mother sidles up to me and starts making recommendations. I can feel my fuse shortening and realise I'm going to have to shut up until I get a beer in me. I'm losing both grip and patience with my mother, and I feel bad about it.
But what can I do? I've been here more than two weeks - more time than I've spent in the state of Ohio since I left to live in Pittsburgh in 1990. What was probably simply an attempt to recommend something from the menu strikes me as my mommy trying to show her sonny boy how to order food. I snap and rather unkindly tell her I can read a menu myself.
My outburst makes me feel like an ogre, and my mother recoils a bit. She looks hurt, but she often looks hurt, and I never really know what will hurt her or has hurt her. I suspect this is just what happens between parents and their educated, self-making adult children. She's a generation apart, still hasn't a passport and has never left North America. She's shaky in planes and has a deep-rooted need to control her environment. Travel, even to the next county, sometimes panics her.
We're different now, even though we were regarded as very similar - 'two peas in a pod' my sister used to say - when I was a child. Then I grew up, went to school, came out of the closet, moved away and never looked back. I became who I am. This is the way the world, as I understand it, works.
Still, it makes me feel terrible, for I so seldom see her and know that I am her son. Mothers are strange creatures if you're not one.
I read somewhere that the struggle in families is greatest between mothers and sons. The first would like your relationship to stay the way it was the day you were born for your entire life; the second must wrest independence from a nurturing, comfortable source of original love. How can we not be at our mother's throats - and vice versa - at some point?
The incident passes, and good times return. I gain an understanding of the way things very simply are: It's time to get back to my life.
Now in the room in which I've been sleeping, typing this entry in bed with a notebook computer on my lap, in the quiet solitude of this little space at the top of the house where I lived from age 12 to 19, this place where I first learned to be human before I made myself forget it all and learned thereafter to be myself, I realise that I live in London, but this place and these people are and always will be, for better or for worse, home to me.
You can't go home, and you can never fully leave it. Knowing this somehow makes the struggle of being alive seem less taxing and grounded in something approaching the comfort of carefully considered reasoning.
I fall asleep envisioning a smooth, uneventful flight tomorrow back to the reality I've invented across the pond.
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