By Berkeley Breathed
Buy it at Amazon
Though I am the more bookish half of our well-balanced marriage, Steve sometimes surprises me with his good taste in reading matter with which he occasionally gifts me. For Mother's Day, he gave me one of those nice surprises. A box came from Amazon, addressed to him. I usually ignore those packages because they usually contain eye-glazing computer-related reading material. Steve was out of town when the package came, and when I told him about it he told me to open it up.
Breathed is a newspaper cartoonist, most famous for "Opus" and "Bloom County," cartoons with which I'm not very familiar. I got him confused with liberal Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury, and I'm not the only one to notice some similarities in style and humor in my brief acquaintance with his work. Breathed had a funny response when asked about his political views: "Liberal, shmiberal. That should be a new word. Shmiberal: one who is assumed liberal, just because he's a professional whiner in the newspaper. If you'll read the subtext for many of those old strips, you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
While motherhood is a controversial topic these days, political views do not appear in the sweet picture book my husband gave me. It's about a little boy's discovery that moms aren't so bad, and maybe they are more special than he thought.
What the little boy in this tale, Milo, first mused about moms, in his resentment at having to eat things he doesn't like and do things he doesn't want to do, is that they are "bellowing broccoli bullies" and "thundering humorless tyrants." He doesn't find anything special about that, especially when his mother doesn't think sister-tinting is funny.
The prose is amusing, but the cartoonist's illustrations for this picture book steal the show. As Milo fumes over his perceived persecution at the hands of his big bully mother, visitors from another planet arrive and make him see that mothers are special, after all. The most hilarious picture in the book is when the Martian raiders arrive, with a big net, looking for treasure to take back to their planet: Moms! They hide in a dark alley with their net, lying in wait for a victim, attempting to lure a very suspicious-looking curler-adorned mother loaded down with groceries and a baby, using a Starbucks cup for bait. That ploy failed, so they head to Milo's house for some good, old-fashioned mom-nabbing.
Hearing noises down the hall, Milo awakens to see something you don't see every day: his mom being dragged away by Martians. All of a sudden, he finds himself chasing those mom-nappers and ends up in the Martian's spaceship, heading to the red planet hoping to rescue his "carrot-cuddling" mother. It turns out that there are no mothers on Mars which means no one to drive them to soccer, ballet, or pizza, playdates, and parks. No cooking, cleaning, or kissing booboos. No wonder they need moms.
Milo realizes how sensible that is when he has his own accident that needs a mother's attention, tripping and cracking his space helmet, losing his oxygen in that poisonous atmosphere. In an act of supreme mother love and sacrifice, his mom gives him her helmet to save his life. I don't want to spoil the ending of this cute story about the universal importance of a mother's love, and the great extent to which it reaches. But libertarian or liberal, Breathed makes the picture clear that mothers are special, and their love reaches to the most distant galaxy, even when their children do not appreciate them as they should. And they should.
I still don't believe in Martians, but they do make a good metaphor for those who want what we have and help us see that we have more than we thought.
