Sharing Sharon's Eulogy by Zowie-Wowie

My mom was a bad speller. Notoriously bad. She named me Zowie. It's supposed to rhyme with Bowie, as in David Bowie, but most people got it wrong. I feared the first day of school growing up. Invariably, a teacher would call my name rhyming it with Howie, as in Howie Mandel. I never bothered to correct the teacher. I always wanted to see how long she would go on pronouncing my name wrong. In third grade, my teacher went all the way to the middle of the term before the art teacher corrected her. Deciding I didn't want to be Zowie/Howie, I went to the social security office when I turned 18 to change the spelling to Zoey. I wanted to try Zoe with the umlaut, but I knew it was difficult to find an umlaut on a computer keyboard, and I was more concerned with having my name pronounced correctly in college classes, subsequent job interviews, and, virtually, any time my name was being called by anyone. I couldn't chance Zoe/Joe—because I knew it would happen.

While I was still Zowie-Wowie, though, I had an alter ego. Zowie-Wowie could do all things, be forgiven all things, and be lauded all things. Zowie-Wowie found anywhere she happened to be was the greatest place on earth. My mom, Sharing Sharon, looked at anywhere on the entire planet as the greatest place on earth. I found her entirely wrong, but Zowie-Wowie was in for a penny, in for a pound.

My mom had me while she was still in high school. She was a teen mom before MTV made it cool. She managed to graduate from high school, and when strangers saw her with me as an infant, toddler, or youngster, they thought she was perhaps an older sibling or babysitter. Most of the time she didn't correct them for the simple fact that she could go the rest of her life without ever again seeing the judgmental looks she received for being a reckless, sexually active teenager.

"Those judgmental assholes," she said one day. I was probably in kindergarten. "No one ever asks about the guy who shot me full of sperm and took no responsibility for his actions. Nope. But they sure aren't shy about telling me how they feel sorry for me, feel sorry for you, feel sorry for the hell I must have put my parents through."

My response to this tirade was, "What's a sperm?"

"Oh, Zowie. Hmm. Sperm is genetic material that punches its way into an egg and makes a baby." She looked very satisfied with her succinct answer.

"Can we make babies with the eggs in the fridge if we punch a hole and put a sperm in it?"

"No, those are chicken eggs. Human eggs are inside us, and boys have these magic wands with sperm. They can wave the wand, but there's no magic from waving it. But when they put the wand inside a woman, it makes a lot of magic. You're not going to see the magic show until you're out of college, though. Got that? You don't get to experience the magic until you can afford to pay for a baby. Okay?"

"But I like magic," I whined.

"Not this magic," she said with finality. And that was that.

In third grade, I was sick all over the place in my classroom. I decorated not only my desk, but Sheila Perkins', Brett Rose's, and Candy Dorman's desks. I also destroyed Luisa Luciani's French braid. Her luxuriously shiny black hair was dotted with chunks of the breakfast sandwich I'd had at school that morning. Luisa sat in the front row, and once the sour stench of my sick found its way into her sinuses, her stomach rebelled. She vomited all over her desk, the floor, and some splashed up on the teacher's desk. Luisa, Sheila, Brett, Candy, and I all went to the nurse's office. Apparently the reappearing breakfast sandwich had a lot of projectile power. Sheila, Brett, and Candy were in the splash zone, and they would need to go home to shower and change clothes. They were probably nose blind now, though, but if anyone approached them, getting too close and catching a whiff of them and their shirts could cause a zomit ripple. Zowie-Wowie would call it "a trigger of epic proportions."

My mom, the young, beautiful Sharing Sharon, was 24, and at 8 years old, even I could see the jealousy that pulled the corners of my mom's detractors' mouths down and raised their perfectly tweezed brows. Once we were in the car, my mom said, "Hunh! The way those other moms looked at me, you'd think I was teaching their daughters how to strip."

My takeaway was, "I heard Candy's mom say that you should apologize to every parent for knowingly sending your child to school sick."

Mom gave a short bark of a laugh and shook her head. "We've changed schools once a year based on where my jobs sent us. I had hoped we could land somewhere and be accepted, but we've never been able to escape other people's criticism. It's exhausting." She looked up to the rearview mirror, finding me in her line of sight. I saw her smile begin to relax her face, the ire dissipating like poltergeist fog burning away under the morning sunshine.

"Mama, I'm not sick. Jenny Bransfield brought bacon breakfast sandwiches to school for everyone this morning. Mine tasted weird, but I ate it anyway."

"My sweet Zowie and your sensitive stomach."

"You should have seen the mess right after it happened. It was so awful, even Luisa threw up. Probably because she had puke in her hair. I was all Zowie-Wowie. If they hadn't hustled us out of the classroom, I'm sure some of the other kids would have gotten sick, too. It was a regular vomitorium!"

Her phone rang then, and it was the school secretary calling to check on me. "Hi, Ms. Pullman. We wanted to let you know that it appears there may be some food poisoning in Zowie's classroom. Several other children have vomited and are being sent home. We wanted you to know."

"Okay," my mom responded, drawing out the second syllable. "Do you have any ideas what caused the food poisoning? The kids hadn't even had lunch yet."

The school secretary said, "Please allow me to finish reading this script, then you can ask questions to your heart's content."

Mom sighed. "Fine. Get on with it."

"Please be sure Zowie drinks plenty of fluids, and take Zoey to see a doctor if the vomiting doesn't stop—we want her to stay hydrated. We'd hate to see her land in the hospital receiving IV fluids. Dehydration is a serious thing when people aren't able to hold down food." My mom was rolling her eyes through the didactic soliloquy being delivered by the school secretary.

"Right. Got it. Hydration," Mom paused, and I could tell she was deciding whether to add the next bit or be satisfied sharing her uttered acknowledgement—hence, Sharing Sharon. "The food poisoning came from the bacon sandwiches. If you want to contain this situation, you should probably confiscate any additional sandwiches in Jenny Bransfield's possession. You should probably find out who all ate the sandwiches today." They exchanged closing pleasantries, and life went on.

Mom decided she wanted to see as much of the world as she could while she was young enough to enjoy it. She graduated from high school, but opted not for college, choosing trade school to become an electrician. Her jobs took her all over the US. She worked for a few months here and there, always having a goal for how much money she wanted to make on a job. Once her bank account hit a certain number, she would book a trip somewhere in the world. She took me with her everywhere. My favorite place in the world was Sharing Sharon.

"Zowie, you can't travel with just anyone, but you and I? We travel well together. I would take you to the ends of the earth." She said this when I was a freshman in high school, only two years younger than she was when she gave birth to me. Once I had reached school age, she had started looking for jobs that were either within commuting distance from where we lived or moved us somewhere where the job was for a full year.

For a long time, I loved our gypsy lifestyle. Every time we moved, Zowie-Wowie would reinvent herself. Being gypsies meant I didn't tend to form super deep friendships because I knew we were always going to move away. I was always the new girl, and being new and relatively attractive meant I was always popular wherever we moved. New friends, old friends, forgotten friends could never decide if the stories I told were true or fabrications.

"If I tell you about unicorns, then you'll know it's a fabrication," I would say. "If it's not about unicorns or hobbits or Harry Potter, then you can assume I'm telling you a true story."

On my 16th birthday, Mom and I were sharing pain au chocolat from a boulangerie in Paris. By design, she was between jobs. We rented an apartment in Paris for the summer. "I'm the same age you were when you had me," I said. "I can't imagine being a mom right now. Do you remember how you told me about sex using the magic wand analogy?"

She was shaking her head and laughing. "You know," she said. "Your father's penis really was a magic wand because all that spunk helped produce you, and you are and always will be the truly greatest thing I ever did in my life. It was never my life plan to be a teenage mom, but it put me on this unorthodox path. I have made decisions I never would have made had I not been in a very difficult position and been so young." We looked at each other, and I saw some wetness brimming at the corners of her eyes, and I was, I don't know, gooey, maybe for this very young, vibrant, beautiful woman who chose to be a mother, my mother.

Even now, now that I'm Zoey, Sharing Sharon, the woman who would always tell me or anyone as frank as can be how the world works as a single parent or teen mom or traveling electrician—I can say my mom's heart was and is (at least in my head and heart) home. Sanctuary. The most beautiful place on earth. The best place on earth.