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| My most recent pic of my mother |
Blasphemous Rumours
(Gore, M) Performed by Depeche Mode
Girl of sixteen, whole life ahead of her
Slashed her wrists, bored with life
Didn't succeed, thank the Lord
For small mercies
Fighting back the tears, mother reads the note again
Sixteen candles burn in her mind
She takes the blame, it's always the same
She goes down on her knees and prays
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing
Girl of eighteen, fell in love with everything
Found new life in Jesus Christ
Hit by a car, ended up
On a life support machine
Summer's day, as she passed away
Birds were singing in the summer sky
Then came the rain, and once again
A tear fell from her mother's eye
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing
When I was in university, Depeche Mode was huge with my friends (and for whatever reason, particularly huge with my gay friends). When I was looking through their songs this morning, I nearly picked People are People (the obvious choice, as it was the one they played at the dance clubs we went to), but then I found Blasphemous Rumours and remembered how they'd play this one, too: remembered how it so perfectly captured the limp nihilism of the Eighties, of my life, and I knew this was the song I wanted to reflect on.
In my final year of high school, my mother decided she wanted an education, too: having gotten pregnant at 19, and then having two more kids in quick succession (essentially destroying any ambition she ever had; and especially because she was now under the thumb of my angry chauvinist of a father), Ma decided it was finally time to put herself first. She aimed to attend the local university, and so to prepare herself, Ma took some grade twelve courses through the community college. Being so out of practise with schoolwork and writing essays, she would struggle to make all of her assignments perfect, and although we were pretty much studying the same things at the same time, I wasn't much help to her: when she'd ask me to read over one of her essays, I'd sigh and try, but her language and syntax were so agonisingly formal that I usually couldn't follow her train of thought. Not that my opinions really counted -- Ma kicked butt in her courses and followed me to university.
This was, naturally, an ambivalent time for me: I would have loved to go away for university, but as no one ever discussed that as an option for me, and as no one ever offered to pay for my schooling either, I followed the path of least resistance and lived at home and went to the local school; at least it was mine. When Ma started in my second year, I was both proud of her (I suppose I'll never really know how hard she fought for the right to do this for herself) and sad for me: everywhere I'd turn, there would be my mother, and this was no longer mine. I stopped going to the gym when she started going. I avoided the library when I thought she might be in there. And the one time we had a course together (gah, how could that even happen?), I cringed every time she'd talk in class -- Ma was totally one of those mature students who thought she was there for an interchange of ideas, whereas us younger students just wanted the Prof to give us the info that would be on the exam and move on. She wanted to study with me (I refused) and when she asked me how I did on the first exam for that course, I answered something snarky like, "It would be pretty easy for you to do better than me when I'm trying to live a life as well". (That could well have been hurtful for her, but Ma likes to tell that story with a laugh.) Between the boyfriend who was jealous of my time away from him and my mother's presence on campus, by my second year, I rarely attended classes anymore.
By this time, I'd buy the textbooks, usually read them in my car at the riverbottom, and only go to school for exams. Note: I'd go to the riverbottom because my parents' house was an insane asylum, with my mother and father either screaming at each other or stomping around looking for someone else to scream at, and also because my jealous boyfriend didn't like for me to hang out too much with my friends. Eventually, sitting in my car at the riverbottom became the only place that actually was mine, and I nearly lost my mind the one time my mother came down there looking for me (apparently thinking that it was cold outside and I might not understand the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning and have my engine running for hours with the windows up?) This constricted existence was the exact opposite of the carefree university life Hollywood had been promising me with movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds : how was this my life?
When I was at school, I loved the social sciences; I studied Psychology and Anthropology, and eventually focussed on Sociology. But, the further I went along my course of study, the more useless it all felt: if I could get B's without attending classes, what was the point of a university degree? And if I did complete my degree in Sociology, what then? Was I really going to become a Sociologist? In what would become my fifth and final semester, I tried desperately to apply for a student loan so I could move out of the loonybin (totally denied because my father made too much money and the world, therefore, thought he should be funding my education), and then my parents announced that we were moving back to Ontario. Ma tried to smooth this over by pointing out all the great local schools we'd be able to choose from to transfer into, but I knew immediately that there was no way I'd be moving with them: I had this one chance to break away, and I was going to take it. Sad footnote to our university careers: Ma never did go back to school once they moved, and while I briefly flirted with the idea of going to the U of A and studying to become a Pharmacist (based on a throwaway comment from my high school Chem teacher and my after-the-fact insight that I would have been better off studying for something practical and specific all along), once I moved to Edmonton, I finally had freedom and a sense of a place that was just mine, and I was too happy with my life to go back to being a student. (Until I eventually returned for a college diploma; practical and specific.)
Now, to get back to the beginning and tie in the song choice and what I referred to as the "limp nihilism" of the times. Maybe it was the hormones or the chaos of my homelife, but I was a fairly miserable teenager; crying myself to sleep all the time despite putting on a happy face all day long. When I was twelve, I thought of suicide -- not in a planning sense, but as a "what if" thought experiment -- and while a part of me imagined that me killing myself would be a suitable revenge against the parents who either screamed at me or ignored me (would they be apologising over my casket at the funeral?), in the end, I knew that my mother would get the final revenge because I would have proven myself to be as weak and useless as she was telling me I was (note: she wasn't actually telling me I was weak and useless, but this was the subtext I convinced myself of as I'd cry myself to sleep at night; I perfectly understand that the majority of my misery was of my own making). When I was nineteen and my parents were fighting again (Ma took me for a drive one day, and while I was trapped, she spent hours telling me everything my Dad ever did wrong -- no conversation any child wants to hear no matter how old, and if it was meant to recruit me to her "side", it only made me bitter for having had whatever illusions I had left poisoned) and I was trapped in their house and trapped in an increasingly unhappy relationship with my boyfriend and beginning to see the futility of my schooling, and it suddenly occurred to me: if I had killed myself when I was twelve, would I, to this point, have missed out on anything worth living for? The answer of course was "yes" -- I had had a thousand laughs in the intervening years, and experienced love and knew friendship, had helped others and been helped in return, teachers and coworkers had liked me, and every now and then, one of my parents would throw me a bone of approval -- but the teenaged brain is a crazy brain and it was very easy for me to brood on this and convince myself of the answer that would make me cry myself to sleep, my head squeezed under my pillow as I tried to block out the sound of my parents screaming at each other (note: they didn't actually scream at each other nonstop, but that's all I remember). Add to all this the general vibe of the time: Reagan was in the White House, and being Canadian, we knew that we were in the path of any ICBMs that the USA and the USSR might end up exchanging, and this was both widely accepted as likely and generally anxiety-producing. (When I wrote about the fake band we formed, Men in Comas, and the songs we recorded, I forgot to mention the one called Save Me a Cyanide Pill: since we all agreed that none of us would want to try and survive in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter scenario, this song was about rushing towards ground zero of a nuclear attack in order to be vaporised, and failing that, hoping someone would have some spare cyanide; happy times.) So again, the idea of suicide at nineteen was just a thought experiment, and again, I knew I wouldn't give my mother the satisfaction (even at the time I knew this was a mean and unfair thought, but it was what I needed to combat my misery; it was a limp nihilism, without any energy or agency behind it; as useless, ultimately, as my university career).
And of course it gets better; and of course, as I look back on it now, my life -- all of it -- has been worth living. But in 1988, as I was dancing along to Depeche Mode with my friends, I thought I knew exactly what they were singing about; they were singing about me.
I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing
