Mom Character Analysis

Now that I think back, the pattern of the little man’s visits seems unwelcomely obvious, but at the time, his arrivals and departures had no meaning. As I grew older, he became a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with morning. He liked to sit on the top of my dresser when he came to visit, and he had a shock of bright red hair which stood up in messy, tangled puffs that he sometimes hid under a black top hat. When he was in a mean mood, he did a jerky little dance and pretended to poke at my eyes. The night before the hawks came, he drooped his head and blew me sad kisses that sparkled silver and gold in the dark and fell as soft as confetti.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game, or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”

“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]

“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”

“[…] How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.

The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense […] When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture book describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing.

“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.

Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”

“That’s not funny,” Josh said.

“That’s the point,” the woman said.

Now that I think back, the pattern of the little man’s visits seems unwelcomely obvious, but at the time, his arrivals and departures had no meaning. As I grew older, he became a variation of the monster under the bed or the thing in the closet, a nightmare that faded with morning. He liked to sit on the top of my dresser when he came to visit, and he had a shock of bright red hair which stood up in messy, tangled puffs that he sometimes hid under a black top hat. When he was in a mean mood, he did a jerky little dance and pretended to poke at my eyes. The night before the hawks came, he drooped his head and blew me sad kisses that sparkled silver and gold in the dark and fell as soft as confetti.

Contacting the dead, lesson one. Sleep is an altered state of consciousness. To fall asleep is to fall into a deep, healing trance. In the spectrum of realities, being awake is on one side and being asleep is way, way on the other. To be absorbed in a movie, a game, or work is to enter a light trance. Daydreams, prayers or obsessing are heavier trances. Most people enter trances reflexively. To contact the spirit world, you must control the way you enter this state of being that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.

“He’s a guide, but not a reliable one. Never trust the spirit world too much. They think different from the living.”

“What about Mom?”

“When Gladys was very young, lots of death going on […] She used to know who was going to die next […]”

“Mom doesn’t see anything” […]

“She doesn’t tell you […] Or she’s forgotten how […] Her grandmother, now she was a real medicine woman. Oh, people were scared of her. If you wanted to talk to your dead, she was the one people went to. She could really dance, and she made beautiful songs—that no one sings any more […]”

“[…] How do you do medicine?”

“All the people knew the old ways are gone. Anyone else is doing it in secret these days. But there’s good medicine and bad. Best not to deal with it at all if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.

The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense […] When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture book describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing.

“Alberni? Really? There’s a treatment centre where the residential school used to be?” one of the women said to Aunt Trudy.

Another woman laughed, then said, “Hey, how many priests does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many?”

“Three. One to screw it, one to beat it for being screwed and one to tell the lawyers that no screwing took place.”

“That’s not funny,” Josh said.

“That’s the point,” the woman said.