My mom is a Christian, but she follows this bizarro, eccentric branch of Christianity that emulates Christ. Yeah, I know, it’s weird. They work with food banks and halfway houses and help the local homeless population—the kind of stuff that Jesus would do, if he were still alive, when he wasn’t cleaning up in the stock market.
Anyway, my mom is, like, a nerd of Christ.
One of the things she does that I admire is that she takes the consumerism out of Christmas. She either does no presents or she does presents “under five dollars.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried purchasing a gift for less than five dollars, but it’s a lot of secondhand bars of soap and half-eaten boxes of cereal.
She usually ends up stopping by CVS and grabbing some bargain-bin stuff, and I’m easy to shop for, because she always just gets me a journal. On a recent visit to my parents, my mom gave me a new journal, and privately I wrote down this in it:
During the pandemic, my wife, Jen, and I tried out ordering these meals that were ready-to-eat—basic fresh food, like chicken and rice and a vegetable, that you just stick in an oven for twenty minutes.
The service is called Freshly, which I think is a terrible name for a really good product. I think the “-ly” is very suspicious. As if to say, “it’s not fresh, but it is fresh . . . ly.” It’s like calling it “tasty-kind-of” or “not-spoiled-ly.”
I tried Freshly because I saw Michael Che casually mention on Instagram that he eats their meals. Here’s what’s strange about that. I know Michael Che. We’re both comics and have been friendly for a while, and then he got famous and now I’m more reluctant to call him, which I think is related to me not telling my parents that I love them. Your parents are like your family members who got famous, except instead of getting famous they just became grandparents. Which is all to say that my mom is “family famous.”
But that’s not the point.
I mean, honestly, why don’t I tell my parents I love them?
There’s no downside.
I’m trying to game out the worst-case scenario.
Scenario 1: I say, “Mom and Dad, I love you.” They don’t respond and keep watching “Hannity” or doing whatever they’re doing. They die eventually.
Scenario 2: I say, “Mom and Dad, I love you.” They say, “Michael, we have something to tell you. We actually don’t love you.” I think to myself, Something always did seem weird. They die eventually. But the key factor there is that I always felt like something was weird, and unresolved feelings aren’t helping anything except the cancer growing in your pancreas. Which, by the way, don’t forget to tell your pancreas that you love it, even if you don’t quite understand what it does. (Quick high-school-bio refresher: Your pancreas creates enzymes that break down sugars, fats, and starches. Sounds like someone owes an “I love you” to their pancreas.)
O.K., back to the “I love you” scenarios. I want to point out that the constant in all of these scenarios is: They die eventually.
Scenario 3: I say, “Mom and Dad, I love you,” and my mom starts singing the Tina Turner classic “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” which is a great song that my mom does love. So this scenario is not entirely inconceivable, especially since the song came out in 1984 and the sound of it used to bleed through the walls as I tried to read Highlights magazine in the Gloria Stevens waiting room while my mom took her aerobics class. The point is: this scenario isn’t bad. It’s just confusing.
Let’s invert the game and imagine you don’t tell your parents you love them.
Non-Love Scenario 1: You don’t say I love you. They die eventually. You regret this for the rest of your life.
I don’t think any more non-love scenarios are necessary. You get the idea.
One argument I heard from my friend Tom is that they know. This is a classic approach to the non-love-you strategy.
Every once in a while, when I was a kid, my parents would say a variation of “I love you,” but it wouldn’t be in their real voices. It would be: “We wub you.”
It’s not the same thing.
And, by the way, “we wub you” came out only when things were dire. This was the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency type of situation. This was when I was crying. A lot. Like when my childhood dog, Leo, got hit by a motorcycle and I could barely speak or breathe. My parents said, “We wub you.”
Anyway, I decided to get Freshly for my parents, who are the Michael Che of my life, and they received meals for a while, but I never heard back from them.
This goes on for, like, a month.
Finally, I said to my mom on the phone, “Mom, how’d you like those Freshly meals Jen and I sent?”
There was a long pause. Too long. Clearly something had gone down with the Freshly meals.
“Mom, did they get to you?”
No response.
I said, “Mom, are you there?”
My mom said, “Yes! I’m here, Michael. . . . ”
Then she paused.
I said, “Mom, it’s O.K. if you didn’t like the Freshly meals.”
She said, “We didn’t like the Freshly meals.”
I said, “Mom, it’s O.K. that you didn’t like the Freshly meals. I’m just surprised. They’re so basic. It’s just fresh chicken.”
She said, “They’re too fancy.”
I knew what she meant. Though some of the meals were chicken and rice or chicken and macaroni and cheese, you might also get chicken vindaloo, which is an Indian dish that could be interpreted as “fancy.”
I said, “Mom, I will cancel it and get you something else.”
It felt as if the weight of the world was off my mom’s Christian shoulders. It felt as if this was something she had grappled with for weeks. She told me the truth even though it was uncomfortable.
It was as though she’d told me she loved me.
