You're not weird, Shrek is weird
I called my mom on Sunday, and we talked about the usual things we talk about — I told her about my weekend and how I got so annoyed at the people sitting next to me at dinner for ordering the sardines because the sardines smelled truly repulsive. (They were! So gross!!! and I just had to sit there and TOLERATE IT!)
She doubled over giggling (one of my favorite things), texting me after that she hadn’t laughed that hard in a while. I responded that, yes, great, love to make you laugh but oh-my-god if I am not the weirdest person in the world for getting irritated by sardines. We laughed together, and it made me think about all the ways, my whole life, she’s encouraged me to honestly be such a total weirdo.
I’m probably going to get this story wrong. But as I remember it, I was in fourth grade (ish) and my family was up in Cape Cod for a week in the summer. We were outside eating ice cream and my sisters and I were calling each other weird — we were forbidden from calling each other stupid, so weird was as far as we could get — and my mom interjects and says “Hey! You’re not weird! Shrek is weird!”
This shut us up because we all dissolved into laughter. I can’t explain it further than that — can’t tell you why Shrek was weird, why we thought that was so funny, or why it is so ingrained in my memory. What I can tell you is that this is typical of my mom. This is typical Claire O’Grady, taking something that we viewed as insulting (being weird, for some reason) and making us feel like it was not only okay to be weird but also we weren’t weird, not really. Shrek is weird.
This is one of my favorite things about my mom. Not to sound too much like a kindergartener doing a “This Is Why I Love My Mom” project, but the thing about her is that she always let us be weird. Despite being the most effortlessly cool person I know, she would say she’s very weird. And having that — someone who you revere as being the coolest person you know telling you that hey, it’s not only ok to be weird but I actually encourage it — is something that she so clearly nailed in the raising of me and my sisters. In a world where it’s like, very very hard to be a pre-teen girl (and also pretty famously hard to be a girl in general), she instilled a confidence in us that can’t be taught. She lived out this idea that if you’re a good, kind, loving person — like she taught us to be — you can be as weird as you want. She demonstrated that “cool” doesn’t mean “not strange” and she kept us honest in being ourselves.
She definitely did a better job on striking the balance between cool and weird with Zan and Caroline, as my original post about not being cool really helpfully demonstrates. But despite how weird I was growing up (and still am, but like, I was VERY weird growing up) (sorry about that to all who knew me as a pre-teen) (mostly sorry Mom), she never let me feel like that was a problem, or that cool was something I had to strive for. And even when she encouraged me with tools to be cool — for example, telling me to “try and be demure, be D” before my first middle school dance — she never held it against me when I simply could not for the life of me play it cool. She let me be me, for all the lack of cool and all the weirds.
There’s a quote from Jenny Slate’s book Little Weirds that goes something like “You walk forward. You keep your head angled up so that you see over the fray. You protect yourself and all the little weird that make up who you are.”
I have a screenshot of it in my phone because it so uniquely reminds me of my mom. There is no one better in the world at reminding me to protect all the things that make me weird — there is no person more encouraging of that fact. This is the most, and the best, you can ask for from a mom.
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