I know the “theory” of love languages is bunkum, but there is definitely a value to accepting that different people express affection or connection differently. And for my Mom and I, our moments of bonding and closeness seemed often to occur while elbows deep in a messy DIY project.
One of my cherished childhood memories dates back to the fifth grade. The summer before fifth grade, my sister and I had a hell of a row and in a fit of pique, I moved out of our shared bedroom into the tiny room adjacent to the family bathroom, which we’d previously used as a playroom. The playroom was a little afterthought of a chamber, approximately 7′ x 10′ but I made it work. I toted my bookcase, bed, and bureau up the stairs from the basement, solo, a testament to the unnatural feats of strength for which I have been and still am known. By the time Mom got inside from mowing the yard, all of my sister’s playthings and art supplies had been removed from the playroom, and my bedroom furnishings and treasures installed. Mom decided it wasn’t worth the fight and allowed my claim on the little room to stand. There I luxuriated in privacy and excellent daylight, wherein I drew paper dolls, wrote stories, and listened to whatever terrible music was on the radio.
Fifth grade was a fuckawful year. The teacher we’d landed that year turned out to be a mercurial and chaotic woman unsuited to teaching in general, and teaching in a one-room rural school in particular. The thing about a one-room school is that you aren’t just the fifth grade teacher. You’re the teacher of whatever grades there are students in. So you could also be the kindergarten teacher, the first grade teacher, fourth grade teacher, fifth grade teacher, and eighth grade teacher. As she was. That’s a lot to hold down, and if it turns out that you’re not actually that great with kids, it’s recipe for burnout and meltdown. Subsequently our teacher regularly meted out arbitrary and severe punishments, snapped and snarled her way through lessons, and generally stressed the student body the hell out. As such, the student body responded in the way of stressed out kids, and acted out. A lot. All the chaos, noise, and bad vibes would wear upon me, up to the point where I would get sick, or at least convince myself and my mom that I was under the weather.
On one particular and memorable day, i decided to try to pull a sickie, and Mom decided to go along with it. She called the school and let Mrs. Fish know that I would be absent, and we went into town, procured a gallon of pistachio green paint, came home, and she proceeded to teach me how to paint a room. MY room. I learned how to cut in around trim. I learned how to load but not overload the roller, and how to overlap roller strokes so that the paint would dry smooth and free of lines or thin spots. Useful life skill, learned at age 10, still used to this day. I LOVE to paint, and I’m pretty damn decent at it.
The following summer, when I was 11, Mom decided that I needed a desk for my artwork, story writing, and craft projects. The local paper announced a community yard sale, and so we marked the date and went to town to see what there was to see. Sure enough, a lady was selling a desk of the correct dimensions to fit into my scrunchy little bedroom. Said desk was butt ugly, coated thickly and drippily with a highly glossy fake cherrywood varnish, but for $5, the price was right. We drove home with it laid down flat in the capacious trunk of Mom’s 1974 Dodge Dart Sport, and in the following week Mom taught me the ways of Zip Strip, scrapers, wire wool, sandpaper, and finally, linseed oil and turpentine. We refinished that little desk, and there it stood, a handsome matte-finish natural pine, stinking to the high heavens and ready to receive my stock of stationery, art supplies, notebooks, and envelopes of hand drawn paper dolls.
Many years further on down the road, I became a homeowner. My house came gratis with something akin to a garage, but far more akin to a home-made carport clumsily enclosed with chipboard which had suffered greatly from the depredations of termites. Prior to my having taken possession, the termites had been treated and terminated, but I would have no peace until the rotting and gnawed chipboard was removed to a dumpster. My Mom was STOKED. She insisted I hold off on the demolition project until she and Dad came to visit, because she hadn’t destroyed anything in a good long while, and was overdue for some deconstructive catharsis. With a selection of crowbars, prybars, and clawhammers, we levered, smashed, pried, and heaved, and in the space of an afternoon, had reduced that decaying garage back to a reasonably tidy carport and a very tidy pile of broken down chipboard panels, easily disposed in a friendly dumpster.
Mom always made as if she didn’t particularly like the house Dad and she lived in from 1973 until their respective deaths in 2021 and 2025, but she never gave up on the place. Having been cobbled together from an old schoolhouse and a bunch of salvage lumber, for the purpose of serving as a roadhouse and service station, it had never been seriously intended as a residence, and was rife with quirks and inconveniences that irked her more or less periodically. When time, money, and motivation aligned, Mom made many forays into making the bizarre semi-commercial structure more convenient and homely. Whenever we’d come home from school to a pile of lath and plaster out the back door, we knew Mom was on a Campaign, and we should brace ourselves for disruption until operations had processed to their logical conclusions. The scents of latex enamel, wallpaper paste, carpet glue, and caulk were part of the ambiance of home.
