I lost my mother last year, and this is what I made her.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
My mom bought me a pretty, twilight-blue dresser back in the spring. I'd just moved for the third time in a year and was broke in that desperate, "Should I buy this plunger or wait until next week?" way moving breaks you. She'd come into a little bit of money and asked me if I needed anything.
I was 33, a new man — new to New York and manhood itself, only three years on testosterone and freshly bearded — and I needed a lot, really. My missing inventory belied the loneliness of that winter and the bachelor, sweaty summer since I'd moved from New England, dream-dumb and starting over in a city full of tattooed, bearded men who looked just like me. I didn't own silverware, a table to sit down to — civilized tools of home that said: Here is a man who goes to sleep each night and wakes up knowing he belongs in the world. Aspirational, really — like my pricey Lower East Side studio, like the muscle of my body, like my self-made life.
Still I asked her for the dresser, embarrassed and eying the stacks of clothes on the windowsill. There were factors: a woman I'd just started dating and wanted to impress, who'd inspired in me nesting desire for spicy candles and good towels and a place to put my clothing.
Mom said, "Sure, honey." A few days later she emailed to let me know that the dresser was on its way, and that the assembly looked "complicated." I thanked her and tried not to be insulted by the implication.
It arrived that weekend in three boxes, flattened into dozens of numbered parts and accompanied by hundreds of bits of hardware. I unpacked the whole thing the day of my housewarming party, swore mightily, and promptly shoved the disassembled pieces under my bed.
Days after the party my mom called again. "How's it look?" she asked, and I stared, humiliated, at my growing pile of T-shirts, toppling in a pile onto the floor. I thought of the bones of the dresser, gathering dust beneath me. I thought of my inability to make a real home. "Great," I told her.
"You get it put together OK?"
"Yeah, it was easy to put together, actually," I said.
"Good boy," she said. Later that year, my mom would go to the emergency room of the hospital where she would eventually die, and who knew then that this was her last act of maternal nurturing, one of a million such gestures, cohesive after death but hard to define during life, the many small ways Mom was my mom.
"It's perfect," I said, feeling tender at her. We were speaking to everything we'd never said, of course. Like: I wish I'd could have bought you a million dressers, let's make up for lost time. Like: I'm sorry that this is so messy, thanks for making room for the man I am — a soft heart in a boxing glove. A man who can put it together; a man who knows how to fall apart.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
"What makes a man?" was my question for years and in this beard, these muscles, this echolocation of body language I use to track my movement in space, I found my answer.
Or, I found two: the man I am and the man the world wants me to be. The "man up" versus the man I am.
The tools that helped me bloom like a bristled flower — the spiked needles, the nippled vials of testosterone, the blood tests and bandages — are crude as the violence of my initial arrival, a new man in my thirties, brawny and birthed full-grown into a world I thought I understood but, in fact, I hardly knew at all.
I am a disruptive man, in my ripped T-shirt or pressed white Oxford, with my hand tattoos and smart guy glasses, passing like Clark Kent at work and in barbershops with bros who hassle me kindly about my girlfriend, she who requests, always, that they not cut out my curl.
I know the rules and I break them, at the outdoor bar where I locate in myself a surprisingly passionate, deep knowledge of Sex and the City, which makes me dissonant and strange to the straight woman I'm talking to, but I go on anyway.
My body is a technology, a miracle, a testimony, a call and response.
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