Ask The Galaxy Brains

Each lunar cycle, a human will be allowed to ask The Galaxy Brains a question. In this session, the human will have a choice of answers to consume from three different Galaxy Brains. Please send all questions, be they advice, desire for human-life coaching, knowledge of future or past, or merely interesting recipes,  to mm@michaelmurray.ca.

HUMAN QUESTION: 

My husband who is 46 years old, calls his parents mommy and daddy. For instance, on the phone he might say, “What’s daddy up to? or “Could you ask mommy to send me the invoice?” I cannot stand this. What can I do?

ANSWER #1 FROM GALAXY BRAIN Peter Simpson:

Dear mommy fearest,

You should sit before I reveal what will surely come to you as a shock: I believe your husband is Rogers Waters, the famously enigmatic rock star and leader of the band Pink Floyd.

It must be so because it is inexplicable that a sane 46-year-old man would call his parents “mommy” and “daddy” for any reason other than art or entertainment. There are many examples of this, such as Christina Crawford’s scandalous book Mommy Dearest, or the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, or Sylvia Plath’s poem,“There’s a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you/ They are dancing and stamping on you/ They always knew it was you/ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” In the present case, consider Pink Floyd’s epic concept album The Wall, written by Roger Waters.

The Wall tells the sad tale of a disillusioned rock star who has a crippling closeness with his mother. “Hush now, baby, don’t you cry,” she reassures him, over a melody of acoustic strings and apron strings. “Mama’s gonna keep you right here under her wing/ she won’t let you fly but she might let you sing/ mama will keep baby cosy and warm.”

Now, “mama” isn’t quite “mommy,” but it’s awkward enough coming from the mouth of a grown man. And his mama is all over The Wall, including in the climactic trial before the Lord Judge Worm, where she pleads, “M’lud I never wanted him to get in any trouble/ Why’d he ever have to leave me?/ Worm, your honour, let me take him home.”

At one point we hear a boy’s voice saying, “Look, mummy, there’s an airplane up in the sky.” We also hear a phone call from “Mr. Floyd” trying to call home, and when there’s no answer he gets so upset that everything goes wrong, and even “love turns grey, like the skin of a dying man.” You need an inordinate dependence on your mother to despair so when she doesn’t pick up the phone.

Another sign that your husband is Roger Waters is him flying a large, inflatable pig over the house, or if marches about while chanting, “Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!”

You may argue that Roger Waters, born in 1943, is 79 years old, and not 46, but if your husband lies to you about being a famous rock star, why not shave a few years off his age? Mommy would approve.

Like Lord Judge Worm, I believe “the evidence before the court is incontrovertible,” and I rule that you’re justified in dumping your husband. Though I must note that rock stars tend to be very rich, and as your husband once wrote, “Money, it’s a gas/ grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.”

HUMAN QUESTION:

My husband who is 46 years old, calls his parents mommy and daddy. For instance, on the phone he might say, “What’s daddy up to? or “Could you ask mommy to send me the invoice?” I cannot stand this. What can I do?

ANSWER #2 FROM GALAXY BRAIN JANE WILSON:

HUMAN QUESTION:

My husband who is 46 years old, calls his parents mommy and daddy. For instance, on the phone he might say, “What’s daddy up to? or “Could you ask mommy to send me the invoice?” I cannot stand this. What can I do?

ANSWER #3 FROM GALAXY BRAIN KATHRYN McLEOD:

Oh dear. Let me begin my answer by way of a story.

Back in 1975 I bought myself a Raleigh Grand Prix 10-speed, spending all the money I had in the world so I could begin my training for Cycle Canada ’76, which my bitch of a mother nixed for me when she found out most of the other participants were going to be men. So instead I ended up on a six-week French immersion course at Lakehead university (she still wanted me gone for the summer) with every French language monitor from Quebec to France trying to get into my Howick’s because, of course, 17 was considered unacceptably old to them to still be a virgin.

True enough, but I was well used to that, because 16 was considered unacceptably old to still be a virgin in Sault Ste. Marie.

Everybody would be up on charges today, of course, but back then it was considered only natural to sexually harass a teenage girl for weeks on end if she was still a virgin. Well, everybody except Pam, also 17, and also a virgin, who caught one of the monitors spiking my orange juice at a dorm room party, grabbed it from him, and threw it in the toilet.

And so it was that Pam became my new best friend for the rest of the course.

Anyway, Pam was from Toronto – Warren Road, to be exact – and turned out to be rich rich rich, so rich that when she turned 18 that November, she invited me to her birthday party by way of a return flight on Air Canada. And although my week at Pam’s is a whole ‘nother story, what caught my ear on entering the ginormous pile that was her home, is that Pam, her ne’erdowell older brother (freshly kicked out of Upper Canada College) and older sister (home for a visit from Western after a hit & run) all called their parents “mommy” and “daddy”.

So, back to you and your question, which I will now rephrase as: “What if my husband’s parents outlive me and I never get to enjoy his inheritance?” Because, as the above anecdote shows, the only people who call their parents mommy and daddy after age… 8? (6 in the Sault, 5 in Hamilton) are people in line to inherit a shit ton of money.

Terrible, isn’t it? how we stay with each other – or don’t – for all sorts of reasons and excuses, some more golddiggery (as in your case) than others, for sure. But I get it, I do. I once dated a man for three years because I couldn’t get enough of his mother’s pie. Heck, dated? I married another man for the same reason. Twenty years and three kids later I finally learned how to make my own pastry and <poof!> just like that, marriage over.

They say the key to a man’s heart is through his stomach but like a lot of things they say, it’s sex ass backwards. The fact is, men can and will eat anything. I’ve lived with men who could get all their food needs met from a convenience store, ffs.

I live with a man right now I’ve seen with my own two eyes eat pepperoni sticks bought at a gas station.

Not so with women. And I grew up with my Gram’s baking so that goes double for me. Triple. I’ll go hungry before a store bought pie will pass my lips. I will. Pastry matters. The key to my heart was learning to make excellent pastry and since no man has ever loved me enough to do it, leaving me dependent on moms who lived in other cities, enough already. Time to grow up and learn to make my own. Was it hard? Of course it was hard or I wouldn’t have had to learn to do it myself. But the fact is no man will ever love me enough to meet my pastry needs and now I don’t need one to and so can live out my days with a man who can eat pepperoni sticks bought at a gas station.

Crazy how everything we’ve been taught about biology or sociology or whatever is such a lie. Men are terrible providers and women totally suck at nurturing (see paragraph 3 for proof).

Hey, I get it, I do. You’re middle-aged, time invested, and all that. And we get lazy, lose confidence, can’t imagine starting over, even though that’s not what happens, we don’t start over, we just change course. But it’s not just men being different from women here – the rich are different from you and me, too, and not just in the way F. Scott Fitzgerald meant. They’re dependent. All. Their. Lives. That’s why they never stop calling their parents mommy and daddy.

(It was the cook’s night off and Pam’s parents were going out to dinner at the club. There was a bit of a panic at this unforeseen circumstance before they decided – aha! – they could order us a pizza. But when the pizza came, and the delivery person insisted on being paid for it, a worse panic ensued because no one had any cash, it being 1976 when cash was king, but Pam’s parents being so rich they just ran tabs everywhere they went. Enter the pauper guest from the Sault with the $20 her bitch mom had given her in case the chauffeur was a no-show at the airport, which he wasn’t, and Pam’s parents left red-faced for dinner at the club, which was the Rosedale country club where I would have dinner later in the week. The menu had no prices on it and when I asked what the shrimp rang up as, oh how they laughed. Finally, Pam managed, “Prices don’t matter! Mommy and Daddy have a tab!”)

Look, you know what you have to do, but just in case, let me leave you with this gem from John Cleese:

“Why is divorce so expensive?

Because it’s worth it.”

P.S. Rich people can live a long long long time.