Mom as word vs object:

Well, I could ask you how you were conceived, and you'd have the usual reasons, right? Your parents had sex and nine months later you jumped from the tummy to the teat, and part of you never let go for the rest of your life. The mother. Mom. It's supposed that I have one, simply because there was a "mom" in the infamous test-market strips. But there are two things to consider. First of all, it was all acting, I was just playing the part. Sis was not my sis, Dee is not a seemingly retarded half-mute, and "mom" wasn't my mom. Secondly is that, even at that, you never saw her.

I have no mother, no mom; and I never did. I was born from a pen, conceived by the press of a sharp point to my head and scratched out like a chicken digging for worms. "Mom" was simply a word to me, or so I wish, but things with Chris are never that simple.

Yes, let us enter the sordid mind of my creator. The style of "method acting" requires taking previous experience and applying it to the present acting scene, and Chris prefers this method. So even though a mother never appeared, I had to feel as if she was real, which includes all (well, as much as Chris fabricated) the desires and love and conformity and rebellion and sick pining for replacement of the mother. A mom who I'd cry for, but who never existed.



This feeling is a wonderful one, I'm not sure if I would actually rather not have it. The problem is that it is unfulfilled. It is one of the main driving forces in life (if you can call my existance in the cell "life"), this love and need; but it is empty. I can't go home and kiss her on the cheek; have her press me to her chest in a hug that would remind me that no matter what happens, no matter if Chris never draws me again or I have my rights sold to a corn-chip advertising department or I get my soul doubled into a character in another one of Chris's strips; no matter of all of that, that I was loved and life would be okay. The psuedo-existance of my "mother" feelings are simply a reminder of what I lack, the entire point of living at all: "love"; that the passing of the four cells of my life is meaningless, because there is no grand final punchline, there is no conclusion in a daily strip. There is only, pen, paper, print and passing from this world's memory. But love for a moment is all one needs of existance, for all existence, and a mother's love is the only model we are born with.



My model of love was never more that a figment of passing whimsy in an artist who can't feel in my world. If I were his mother, I'd keep my head hidden beneath a sack, from shame and embarassment.



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