My Mother's Amusing Way of Expressing Her Politics Through Her Coffee Mug Collection
This was so goofy and sweet and a real expression of my Mom's endearing partisan worldview that I had to share.
Everyone in the family takes their coffee very seriously. From my siblings to my fiancee and especially to my parents, we all love the stuff with some religiosity.
Especially one should note, my mother. Behold her collection of Starbucks mugs collected from all over the country and even from around the world:
Now, a collection of mugs this epic is something worthy of serious respect. I’ve long admired my mother’s persistence at assembling so many in these various series of geographical mugs.
However, the other night she mentioned to me a deeply amusing habit she has developed which made me just appreciate her and her collection even more.
Some readers may recall last month, what I explained about my mother and her influence on me:
I discussed how her political ideology laid the foundation for my own over-the-top hawkish approach to defending the rights of women and other marginalized groups today:
1. I was raised with liberal political feminism as one of my religions.
She might fool you, with her sweet smile and disposition; her readiness to laugh, but my mom is actually quite radical. It’s just that she's usually much more restrained in sharing her opinions than I am, especially in polite company: she embraces her librarian’s temperament and doesn't seek to stir up controversy. But I know that, deep down, she can be intense, even revolutionary, on plenty of subjects. Usually, when I’m in my troublemaker mood, attempting to provoke a Left-Right ideological debate with my baby boomer liberal parents over something, my dad will bow out quickly. But my mother will typically have the ferocity to go toe-to-toe on whatever I’m feeling inclined to rant on at the moment.
Over the years, I’ve become pretty well-versed on the varieties of political ideologies - a project I’ll be digging into this year at Substack, as I explained in this introduction here - so it didn’t take me long to identify my mother’s variety of feminism: she is very much in the second-wave, Democrat liberal feminist tradition, symbolized by Gloria Steinem. And I see now that, growing up, my mother’s feminism was akin to one of the religions in which I was raised. Respecting women as equal in capacity to men and advocating for their rights and self-determination were simply default settings all my life.
My mom is so nice and friendly most of the time that I forget just how ideological and partisan she can be at her core. Being a liberal feminist and a Democrat are as important to her as being a Christian or a Jew for someone else.
Just how strongly do her beliefs go?
The other night she casually admitted to me while we were talking coffee and I was admiring her collection, that one of the habits she has gotten into the last few years is that for the mugs bearing the name of conservative cities or red states which voted for Trump, she puts those in the back of the cabinet so she doesn’t have to use them!
She finds the politics and values of Trump-supporting “real America" so annoying to think about that she won’t even drink coffee out of a mug emblazoned with their names. She doesn’t even want to see them as she is pulling out more regularly used mugs in the rotation.
I was so deeply amused at my mother’s quiet act of domestic insurrection. Of course this is how a friendly, smiling, Hillary Clinton-style liberal, retired librarian would express her ideological preferences. Makes sense to me.
What doesn’t make sense to me, though: if you despise the red states that deeply then why the fuck still live in one of the very worst of them?
There are no more kids who would be traumatized by a move to another state. There are no longer jobs pinning them down - my folks both emphasize to me that they regard themselves as retired. So why not sell the house and move somewhere else?
They’ve already down-sized once, moving after I graduated from college out of the house of my adolescence into this somewhat smaller house. But now with my brother and sister off living their lives, it is again way more space than they need.
Admittedly, this much extra space has been useful for the last three months as we’ve been here visiting with them while I’ve continued to recover from the PTSD and tried one new combination of prescriptions after another. (BTW - this newest assortment I started last week seems to really be working, expect an update about it soon here at GOTD if my improvement continues, which I am optimistic finally it will.)
Seriously though: these two blue state folks’ sojourn in this red state wilderness should really come to a close soon so they can really retire! Come on Mom and Dad: rejoin your people, return to a blue state. Surely when
and I start growing the family more in the coming years you'll want to be closer to your new grandchildren, right? We want our kids to be close to their grandparents and you wouldn't want us to have to move back to this midwestern hellhole, would you?Much love to you both - thank you for letting Sally and I stay here with you as I’ve struggled to get better.