Of course I’m in love with my mother, as befits a sensitive young man. A tired old whiff of Freudian fog hangs about the love of a gay son for his mother, but let us here attempt to dispel it: loving her so ardently is a result, not a cause. The old dominant mother theory puts the cart before the pony: I am not a gay boy because I am obsessed with my mother; it’s that my mother looms monumental because I’m drawn to her potent mix of emotional vulnerability and made surfaces. She is the dominant emotional figure in the landscape; she seems so much more profound and complicated than any man I’ve known. And she has legitimate access to the stuff of craft, the tools with which beauty is made.

And there’s more; the lens always can take us a little further. I love my mother more because it isn’t safe to love her. You can’t trust her mercurial unavailability, unpredictable alternations of affection and absence. Taut, contained surface, withdrawal. Then a wash of affection: you’re the center of the world, what could you ever do wrong? There’s a particular hold love has over you when you’re afraid of who you love.

One day I’m playing in the desert with my friend Kurt. Our games have to do with digging in the dry arroyos—sometimes we find shards of old pottery there, terra-cotta-colored fragments, inscribed with wavy lines—digging under the hot sand to the cool sand, and saying dirty words. Kurt teaches me a new vocabulary; we look at the smutty pictures other kids have drawn on the concrete walls beneath a bridge that crosses the dry wash. I ask what Fuck means and Kirk explains, incorrectly. We pee in a little metal tea strainer we’ve found; we say, Shit. It feels interestingly powerful to say it. We walk to my house and, coming into the shade of the carport—I don’t know my mother is at the kitchen window, just a few feet away—I say, “Shit.”

All hell breaks loose. She is disappointed in me, thought I was a nice boy, a smart boy; she is furious. She spanks the backs of my thighs with the hard back of a hairbrush, she considers making me eat soap. We are alone together in the house, and the kitchen and the dining area are full of her anger, steely and overbearing, and still feeling that taste of power I’ve gotten from strong words, I say, “I hate you.”