Peter Aguero - Me and Mama vs. Christmas

 

So, I just finished my first semester of college, and I have a big bag of laundry. And I come through the door of the house and things aren't looking too good for me and my mom. The first thing I notice is that the piano is gone. She had that ever since she was a little girl and took piano lessons. We always put the nativity on top of it around Christmas time.  I took piano lessons for two weeks, but I still took piano lessons on that piano, and that's gone. I go through the living room, and the only thing that's left is just one couch that's with broken springs sticking out of it. There are two televisions, one on top of the other. One has picture that works and one has sound that works. [audience chuckles] 

 

Over in the corner are the impressions still from my dad's La-Z-Boy. Dad has been gone for four years now. And that's the only furniture in the room. I go upstairs. The dining room's empty. There used to be this big, beautiful dining room set with carved chairs and a glass breakfront and a buffet table, and that's gone. In the kitchen, there's the kitchen set. There's two chairs, there used to be four, but I broke one of them. And the other chair I also broke. [audience chuckles] And there's only two left. And I go upstairs to the bedrooms, and in my mom's room there's nothing left but her mattress on the floor.

 

 And there's nothing quite as damning as a bedroom without furniture because you see all the dings and the scratches in the wallpaper, like all the mistakes that can usually be covered up, but you see them all now. My sister's room is exactly the way it looked when she moved out to go live with my dad. It's Pepto-Bismol pink walls and a canopy bed and this big toy box in the shape of a rubber strawberry as if she was going to move back and be the little girl that she was before she moved out. My room looks exactly the way it was when I left, there are posters all over the walls and it's ridiculous like me.

 

So, I start to do my laundry and my mom comes home from work and she immediately takes over. Doesn't let me do it myself and I end up helping her with it. She's happy to see me. She's happy that I'm home.  When we're done that, we go up to have dinner. My mom makes tomato casseroles. It was one of my favorite things. It was canned tomatoes with cubes of Wonder Bread and American cheese baked in the oven. And if you put enough shaky cheese on, it's delicious. [audience chuckles] 

 

So, we're sitting there in the two kitchen chairs and I'm telling her all about my first semester of college and how it finished up. And she's so proud of me. She's telling me about work. My mom's a nurse and she's been taking all of the shifts that she can, but she had warned me that she was starting to have to sell stuff in the house to be able to catch up on the bills. Because the house was too big for the two of us. Now that I was away at school, it was just her. So, she was doing everything she could. She warned me, but it was still shocking.

 

She had just taken a second job, a part-time seasonal job at the mall behind the perfume counter. My mom didn't like people telling her what to do. So, I knew that wasn't going to last very long. And while we're sitting there at dinner, she tells me that, "Pete, we're not going to have a lot of money this year for Christmas. So, I don't think we're going to be able to give each other presents." And I said, "That's okay, mom." And I'm being completely honest. I'm just happy to be home with her. I don't need anything. And that's the truth.

 

We sit there eating quietly for a minute. And then she says, "You know, it'd be funny. What if we cut out pictures of things from magazines that we would give to each other if we could?" And we laughed about it and then we cried about it because it's really sad. [chuckles] It's a really sad thing. But then we laughed again because, man, like, no matter how hard things are, you just have to laugh. The next day, I decide I want to make the house look as Christmasy as possible. I go up to the attic, and I get the boxes down at the lights, and I hang the lights in the bushes out front and around the gutters. I want to go get a Christmas tree.

 

I grew up in a little, small town in New Jersey called Delanco. It was a little small town, 2,500 people, mostly farms.  At that time, there wasn't Walmart or big stores or anything. So, I went over to the local Christmas tree farm to get a Christmas tree. I figured they'd give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. But turns out they didn't give me a deal because I used to date their daughter. [audience chuckles] Christmas tree was like $40, man. I couldn't afford that. So, I went back home and I got an old saw out of the garage, and I cut out a tree from the side yard and I brought it in. It wasn't even like a pine tree. It was like a stunted maple tree and [audience chuckles] I put it in the tree holder, had like, five branches. I put 20 ornaments on each branch and just kind of put the lights on it and called it a day. And that's-- my mom came home from work, and she just laughed about it.

 

When I was visiting my friends who were also home from college, I would steal their mom's fancy catalogs and bring them home and cut out pictures of stuff. My mom always wanted a green Jaguar convertible. I found a picture of one of those. I cut her out pictures of gold and diamonds and jewelry, an island. All these things that I would love to be able to give my mom for Christmas. And, as I was doing it, I knew it was sad. It was like a sad thing to do. But I kept collecting them and folding them up and tying them up with ribbons and hiding them in my room. And I was waiting to put them under the tree. And like I said it was a sad thing, but I knew it was something that would bring us together. I knew it was something that we would always be able to hold onto. It was something that we would be able to hold onto together.

 

There was one night toward the end of December, close to Christmas, when we're sitting there in the living room watching the TVs and the Charlie Brown Christmas special is on. One of the TVs hooked up the cable, and the other one gets the antenna so the sound doesn't quite jibe up. And we're sitting there just right next to each other on the couch. We're worlds apart. My mom's exhausted. I've been trying to get her to sell the house for years because I knew it was just too big for her to be in by herself. It was too big for the two of us to be there. If I'm being honest, it was too big when all four of us were living there. I don't know why they got it in the first place, but four years before that, my parents, who had been separated on and off the whole time that they were married, they were giving it one last try. And the plan was that they were going to sell the house and take the money, and we are going to move to Georgia from Jersey and have a fresh start and that was the big plan. And it went along okay for a couple of weeks. And then somebody just came in and poured the eggshells all over the floor again. And they started to fight, and things were back to normal. And that fresh start never really happened.

 

And it culminated with the four of us, in the third pew at St. Casimir's Church in Riverside, New Jersey, for Christmas Eve midnight Mass and right before the priest started the mass in the packed church, my dad stood up and he walked out of the church. And the only sound you could hear in the silent church was the hydraulic door just go shoom. And the four of us-- the three of us left, stood up and went outside past the priest and everyone we knew, and we walked the two blocks to where the car was parked. And my dad was nowhere to be found, but he left the keys of the car on the hood. And that year, my parents were done. That was it. I got what I wanted for Christmas that year. My parents never got back together.

 

So, here we are now today, the two of us sitting on this couch and trying to watch this thing and let us be happy or something. And she's a million miles away. It's all killing her. Trying to pay the bills, trying to keep it together. She did everything she could to try to keep the house so there would be some semblance of normalcy to the outside world. I know that she took a big hit on her pride. She's a very prideful woman and I knew that when everyone that she knew in her life saw our family disintegrate that midnight Mass, I knew that it was just ripping her apart, but she was trying to keep the house together. And she was a million miles away. My mom was my best friend. It was the two of us, man. She was my partner. She was like my road dog. It was like me and her against the world. And, like, being there with her and having her be a million miles away was killing me. Just like I knew this house was killing her, too.

 

It got to be Christmas Eve, and my buddy Brian came over and picked me up and went to a different church for midnight Mass. When you're under 21, you can't go to a bar, so you go see your friends at Mass. [audience chuckles] And we split a jug of wine in the parking lot and we went. And the Mass was awesome. [audience laughter] It was pretty great. And afterwards, I come home, and the next morning, I wake up, and it's Christmas morning. So, I go and I gather up all the little pictures of the gifts that I want to give to my mother, all wrapped up and tied in ribbon, and I put them under the tree. And I hear my mom stirring upstairs and she comes downstairs. And her hair's in corkscrews and she's got this big flannel housecoat on and her big red plastic Sally Jessy Raphael morning glasses [audience chuckles] with the broken ear thing on the side taped up.

 

And I say, "Merry Christmas, mom." And she goes, "Oh, honey. Oh, hold on." And she goes upstairs, and she's upstairs for a minute, and then she comes back down and she has a few--, and I give hers first. And there's the Jaguar and the jewelry and the island and a picture of a baby grand piano and a picture of a new dining room set [sobs] and a picture of a new mahogany bedroom set. All these things I wish I could replace for her and she's smiling and laughing the whole time. And then when it's all done, she gives me mine. And there's three of them. There's a picture of a bag of Reese's peanut butter cups. [audience chuckles] There's a picture of a pair of Homer Simpson slippers, [audience chuckles] and there's a picture of a karaoke machine. And they were all from the same Rite Aid catalog that was up in her bathroom because she had completely forgotten about this thing [audience laughter] that I thought was going to [chuckles] bring us together because she was working so hard. So, we're stuck in the middle of this O. Henry story that he never should have written. [audience laughter] And I thank her so much for the gifts.

 

And we go upstairs, and my mom makes the best pancakes in the world. You might think your mom does, but I'm so sorry, you're wrong. [audience laughter] My mom made the pancakes, but this morning she burned them a little bit. I'm sitting in the kitchen eating these pancakes, cutting around the burnt pieces. I'm looking out through our backyard at everybody else's houses. All the light in their houses looks like orange and colorful and friendly with all these people, and our house just feels empty and stark and white and the fluorescent light eating these pancakes in silence together, the two of us. A couple months later, she finally did send me my present. I was back in college.  I had, man-- I had taken out all the tuition and loans and we couldn't afford it otherwise, but it was important to her that I go. I had just finished a day of classes and I was heading to the dining hall and I stopped over to check my mail.

 

Remember mail? When people used to send mail? And I open up the mailbox and there's an envelope with my mother's postmark on it. And I take it up and I fill up my-- into the dining hall and I fill up my tray with too much food, because that's what you do. And I go over to a table and I sit down. And before I start eating, I open up that envelope and inside there's no note. There's just one photograph. It's of her standing in front of the house with a “For Sale” sign. And the house sold pretty quickly. And she got it, she offloaded it, and she took a little bit of a hit financially and she took a bigger hit on her pride and she moved into a much smaller place that she could afford. It hurt her-- I know it hurt her and it took a big hit. But the most important thing to me was right then, we're looking at that picture. I got my girl back. Thank you.