I write a lot here about my relationship with my father, and sometimes I feel guilty for giving my mother short shrift (literally!). My father’s quiet and distance make him more of a mystery to me, in much the same way I imagine I am inscrutable to others. My mother’s relative directness long made me believe I knew her better than him. These days I find I understand them both about the same (i.e., poorly), so I really should favor Mom with a few more words. The confluence of Mother’s Day and a new Star Trek movie give me an excuse to make amends.

I blame my mother and Gene Roddenberry for the way I’ve turned out. The classic Star Trek series had come and gone by the time I was born, and it would be years before its Next Generation revival. But I cannot think of a point in my life before I knew, and loved, Trek.

The Search for Spock (the third Trek movie, for the uninitiated…it’s not the one with the whales) hit theaters when I was five and a half, and I’m almost certain I saw it first run. I wasn’t yet nine when The Next Generation debuted, but I knew its premiere date months in advance, and Mom and I made everybody in the house watch it. It’s the first media event I ever made plans for.

Once a month we received a package by mail containing one VHS tape with two classic Trek episodes on it. I memorized each episode’s description on the back of the VHS case, infatuated with the lofty titles, like “Who Mourns for Adonais” and “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.” By the time The Next Generation aired I had probably seen the 70+ original series episodes a dozen times each. I can’t even guess how many times Mom had seen them before that.

All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Star Trek

Many of you are now smirking as you read this, yet another paean to some geeky subculture to which you do not belong. I won’t begrudge you your sneer (much) but consider this: Star Trek was the antidote to the fundamentalism pervasive in my youthful daily life, and without it there’s a real chance I might never have made it to college.

To be honest I don’t know what about Trek appealed to my mother. Maybe she was drawn to the rationality and optimism, as I was, or maybe she thought Spock was hot (not that these are mutually exclusive). For me, the Star Trek universe often felt much more comfortable than the one in which I lived, and like any kid with an overabundant interior life, I escaped to it as frequently and completely as possible.

There are things about the culture in which I grew up that I felt uneasy about well before I encountered any kind of alternative. It never made sense to me that the women in my family cleaned up after meals while the men sat around at leisure. I was confused by the matter-of-fact racism that seemed borne of neither fear nor hatred but a simple acknowledgment of the inferiority of anyone who was different. It seemed odd to me that nobody around me was aware of these and a great many other injustices.

I can account for my sense of not quite belonging to some extent. First, I read all the usual propaganda about how to treat my fellow humans. Mom had instilled in me a reverence for books, and I took to heart everything I read. Clever of her to throw what appear now to be self-help books my way when I was 5 years old. I also knew the Golden Rule, and was such an earnest child that I truly did try to do unto others. A clear case of do-as-they-say-not-as-they-do in my family.

Star Trek was the other thing that colored my world. Each episode is on a basic level an hour-long morality play. The cultural influence of the show has been discussed at length elsewhere. I’m certain its message of progressive optimism wasn’t something I consciously understood or appreciated as a kid, but I recognized that Star Trek was unlike anything else I was exposed to.

Friends to Know and Ways to Grow

I picture my mother as I’ve most often seen her: reading a book. My parents’ house is overflowing with books, despite semi-annual purges to make room for new ones. Mom took me and my brothers on what seems like weekly trips to the bookstore, where I could have any book I wanted. These were supplemented by visits to the library, and I checked out stacks of books at a time, marveling that I could borrow so many. For probably a solid decade, I would go to bed cozy with a book. Mom would come in after my bedtime and negotiate a reasonable stopping point a chapter or two beyond where she found me.

Eventually I dug into my mother’s fantasy collection. I remember Her Majesty’s Wizard, about a PhD student who finds himself in a world where reciting rhyming verse creates magic. I was maybe ten years old when I read it, but already I was learning to be infatuated with the power of words. I’m not sure I could distinguish well between fantasy and reality.

A common fantasy narrative depicts a young boy plucked from his anonymous life in some backwoods town and, through fate or fortune, thrust into a life of adventure and notoriety. It should be apparent why such stories appealed to me.

It was an easy leap from fantasy to science fiction. I borrowed my mother’s copy of Ender’s Game some time around middle school.  It was another tale of a young boy–a genius, no less–removed from his humdrum home life and prepped to save humanity, and two things about the book struck me.

First, the gadgets were inventive, the world fully realized. I could see the battle room and the way the laser tag of the future would work. The ansible, analogous to the internet (which I hardly knew anything about in the late 80s), made enough sense to me that I accepted it. So many details about the way the world was put together had the effect of helping me focus more on the technology in my own life. Not long after I read Ender’s Game I broke our first computer, trying to understand how it worked.

Beyond the gadgetry, that book was suffused with a potent compassion for its protagonists. I identified very strongly with Ender, who was ostracized because of his superior intellect and also faced with crippling expectations. And Orson Scott Card, the author, made very clear how alienating such a situation could be and how clueless the adults manipulating the world really were.

I doubt I thought of myself as a genius; my friends and family wouldn’t have let me sit on that high horse for long. But I was smart, and I did end up pulled into special school programs apart from most of my classmates. Already pretty shy, I had no chance at building normal relationships while so clearly marked as different in the unforgiving eyes of middle-schoolers.

Reality Has Pretty Awesome Special Effects

I met my first fellow geek in 4th or 5th grade. Tom is still the only other person I’ve known in real life who can recite a Star Trek movie from start to finish (his specialty was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). As if our slight builds and general social awkwardness weren’t bad enough, we spent most of the next few years parading around school in character: his dramatic flair made him a natural Kirk, and my already strong tendency to deadpan made me Spock. We each wore long brown coats one winter, which ensured we were called “Browncoats” (and not kindly) long before Firefly was a glimmer in Joss Whedon’s eye.

My mom paid an airbrush artist in Gatlinburg, TN, to paint this for me in 1993.

I don’t know where I found the confidence amid myriad adolescent insecurities to stare down the monolith of middle-school etiquette and simply walk another way. When I think of who I was then, the person I am most reminded of is my mom. My friend Tom might have given me permission to creep out of my shell, but Mom taught me to be unapologetic about who I was in the first place. Her contrary nature made it okay for me to reject the status quo as well.

So I embraced learning, because Mom let me know the value of people who can think for themselves, and because Spock, Ender, and all my heroes were highly intelligent and well trained. And I exulted in the esoteric when most of my peers were listening to Dave Matthews Band and trying hard to look all the same, because my mission was to explore strange new worlds, not the plain old one that insists upon itself a little too urgently.

There’s a new Star Trek movie out, and I’m taking Mom to see it for Mother’s Day. Consider it payback, Mom, for introducing me to science fiction in the first place. For showing me, directly or indirectly, what potential it describes. I am not bold, so it’s hard for me to boldly go. But I see the path where others have gone before, and it’s not usually the one I want to choose. Thanks, Mom, for pointing out this other way of doing things.