An Imperfect Pair

We were an imperfect pair, my mother and I.  I got on with her up until I turned 13, then literally the same day, I despised her.  She claimed if she said “black” I said “white” just to oppose her.  It didn’t feel like that to me.  I thought she was wrong, wrong, wrong.  About everything.  Dragging the family from New York to Sydney when we were kids; her fondness for screechy opera records that she slapped on the turntable to scare me and my siblings awake; her insistence that we were Jews despite our long history with Quaker meetings; her long skirts with slits up her right calf that embarrassed me in front of my friends’ sleek-slacked, button-upped mums; her obsession with smoking a lady’s pipe; but mostly her chaotic moods that swerved between gaiety and wrath.  I tiptoed around her buried minefields like a crazy person myself.

Much, much later, I figured she couldn’t help the mood swings, and was possibly right about some things.  Growing up in Australia turned out to be a Big Adventure.  

Arriving at the Scheyville Migrant Centre in Australia. I am in the striped sweater next to my mother.

Although it felt like she’d discarded Judaism in favor of Quakerism, we were Jewish.  The horror of the concentration camps had only been revealed a few years before my birth.  My grandparents on both sides were Jews through and through.  The fact that my mother dangled a Christmas tree in front of my horrified Kiev-born, Orthodox Jewish grandfather’s nose was her attempt at embracing the American culture and giving her children some fun—not necessarily a denial of her Judaism.  In fact, after my father’s death many decades later, she embraced Orthodox Judaism in an ironic reversal or possibly, an apology to her father-in-law. 

Despite the photo of us clutching our Easter baskets that I waved in her face, she said, “you always knew you were Jewish.” 

 Well, yes and no.  I pretended, just like she had, that being Jewish wasn’t central.  When we first immigrated to Sydney, and the blond and red headed Aussies asked me why I was so dark, I claimed to be Russian.  Later, I said Kashmiri Indian and Italian.  Or Greek.  Or anything but the truth—that I was ashamed of being Jewish.

 

 

 

My mother was right to worry about my fascination with the bearded hippy biker R from New Zealand.  When she said he was “not of my class”, I was derailed by the fact that she thought class was even relevant.  But later, much later, I realized she was, quite rightly, worried about her dark-eyed, dark haired, naïve daughter.  The first time I slept with R, I got pregnant.  Dumb bad luck.  I was 21, clueless, troubled, insecure, a virgin, and then, suddenly, pregnant.  I didn’t love R. I didn’t even really like him, but nevertheless, he was the first man I knew in the biblical sense.  He was quite astonishing looking.  Over six feet, broad shoulders, shoulder-length blond hair and the clearest blue eyes when he wasn’t stoned.  He didn’t delve into the nuances of language.  He didn’t dissect every human interaction.  He just was.  Plus, he rode a motorcycle and could fix things.  So different from my dark-haired intellectual Jewish brothers who were sensitive, intelligent and incompetent around the house, as was my father. 

To R’s credit, he offered to marry me, but I burst into tears at his proposal, shaking my head enough times to set him free. I was horrified that my cool, intellectual, non-sexual cover was blown by becoming pregnant my first year at Uni.  I proceeded to ask the nice Jewish doctor (the one my mother secretly hoped I would marry but who was more interested in my goyisher girlfriend) to arrange for an abortion, which in those days in Australia was not an easy feat.  The only way you could get one was if your mental or physical health was at stake, and believe me when I tell you that I was teetering towards insanity.  I never told my mother, although she later claimed to have known. 

Later on, after my mother, father and baby sister had moved onto their next Big Adventure—Israel—I went for a visit.  It was my mother’s birthday, so I stressed about what to bring her.  I wanted it to be something she would treasure.  I consulted with my older sister—who also lived in Israel and had also become an Orthodox Jew—for advice.  She told me that my mother collected dolls, something I hadn’t known.  I searched far and wide and finally found an amazing doll in a little store in Montrose, California.  She was dressed in a white full formal dress and hat.  She had long dark-brown curls, brown eyes, thick lashes and a lovely porcelain smile.

 I carefully buried her in my suitcase under my softest sweaters.  When I went to visit my mother, who was living in a tiny apartment in Jerusalem with her third husband (the other two, including my father, having died of natural causes), I presented her with the doll now wrapped in powder-blue tissue paper with a bright red bow. She tore off the blue layers. Blue was her favorite color. It was mine, too.  She pulled the doll out by its brunette curls, stared at it for a nanosecond and then pushed it upside down on the shelf in the guest room. “Enough with the dolls,” she said.  “I have too many.”  I was furious at how easily she had discarded my gift—like she was discarding me.  No matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough. 

Later, my baby brother, always the wise one, said: “She had no filters.  She always said the first thing that came into her head.” She was incapable of understanding how her words or actions would affect another person, in this case her needy middle child.  She was a true narcissist.  Maybe that is why I became a social worker—to mitigate the damage.  (God save the world in the land of Trump.)

I have a cousin who lost her mother who was a dramatic presence in her daughter’s life.  My cousin struggles with the enormity of that loss.  When my mother died, I struggled with what to feel—beyond emptiness.  I still blamed her for moving us away from all we knew in America to immigrate to Australia.  I blamed her for talking my father, eight years later, to Israel.  They took my six-year-old baby sister with them, naturally.  Although the rest of us were grown up by then—my younger brother was 19, I was 21, my older brother was 23 and my sister 24—the shock of not having parents anymore was fierce.  Even more so, was the shock of losing my beloved baby sister. 

Me with my baby sister

I loved her so much and had pretended she was my baby, too.  The next time I saw her, she was 10 and then 12 and then 17.  Such huge gaps in the life of a child.  Those were the days when you sent telegrams.  The telephone and international travel was an expensive and rare act amongst the middle and lower classes. 

And because of the ongoing violence in the Mid-East about which I worried prodigiously, I imagined my parents’ death many times long before it happened.  My father was diagnosed with liver cancer, when I was 24 and doing my MSW at the London School of Economics. His actual death six months later was muted by the grief I had already suffered when they left Australia.  Neither parent was there when I ran out of money as a student, or when my heart was broken, or when I was awarded my Bachelor’s degree, or my first real job, or my two Masters degrees, or my marriage to my black American Indian Zen atheist husband.  

After my father died, I still had expectations that my mother would play a part in my life. Although I was not expecting her to attend my wedding in Los Angeles because she lived so far away, I assumed she would be happy for me.  I was not prepared for her letter:  “Not that he’s black grieves me, but that he is not Jewish.” And I was certainly not expecting that for years after my marriage, she would send mail only to my maiden name at my work address. That enraged me.  Eventually, her 3^rd husband, on their only trip together to America, talked her into meeting my husband for the first time at Canters Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.  We had been married for over 20 years by then. 

My mother sat on my side of the table, lips pursed, hands fluttering around the fork and knife.  Her husband shook my husband’s hand warmly and sat next to him.  My mother wouldn’t look across the table at my husband, until, without warning, my husband stood up and walked over to our side of the table and embraced her.  Touching a woman, let alone hugging her was forbidden in Jewish Orthodoxy, of course.  Although she pretended shock, remember that she’d grown up in America as a left wing, communist leaning with Jewish rising Quaker.  She could see that my husband was intelligent and kind and had a sense of humor, and so warmed up to him over bagels and lox at Canters.  My younger brother recently told me that she must have seen how special he was.  I agreed with him.

When my older sister called me five years ago, I was in my office, where I raise money for a local community college.  My mother was in the hospital with sepsis from a burst appendix and the doctors did not give her long.  I asked my sister to tell my mother I loved her.  “Tell her yourself,” she said.  “I’m putting the phone to her ear.”  I stood there at the window of my office, watching the students rush to class. 

“Mommy,” I shouted.  “I love you.  You can go peacefully now.  J and R and E (her sons, and baby daughter) love you, too.  We all love you.”  I felt I had to represent the whole family, most of whom lived in Australia.  She hadn’t seen us for many, many years. 

I thought I heard an intake of breath.  I couldn’t be sure. 

She died shortly after that.  When I told the people at the college that my mother had died and I was going to take a few days off, I felt like a fraud. Nevertheless, my college colleagues sent me an elaborate flower arrangement with a fake bird on top.  But I did not feel like a daughter who had lost her mother.  I felt like a complex algorithm.  Mother + crazy = Daughter + fractured.  Mother + absent = Daughter + lonely.  Mother + unorthodox + Orthodox = Daughter + Interesting + confused.  

Now, I can see that she did her best to love me, to love all of us.  She was imperfect.  Just like me.

What I have become in my life was in reaction to her.  I rebelled against her judgements and with great struggle became a more open person.  I fought against her religious orthodoxy and became an agnostic with atheist rising.  I grappled with her craziness and became a social worker.  I negated her as a mother and had no children.  I was appalled at her three marriages and married once and forever.

Now my mother visits me in my dreams.  She still wears those flowered skirts with slits up her calves.  She is voluptuous, with long dark brown hair.  She still smokes that jeweled pipe.  And she is always happy, laughing and ready for an adventure.  I don’t see her imperfections in my dreams.  That is her gift to me.  Her frequent visits.  Her humor and joy.  Not the tantrums or depression.  Not the thoughtless comments.  Death has made her whole.

Maybe it will do the same for me.

 
 

The Road to Islington

I was recently chatting with two women at the college where I work.  One is a professor of Anthropology, the other an English professor.  I run the Foundation.  Quite by chance, we discovered that the three of us had lived in Islington, London.  Different times, different circumstances.  We plan to meet at a wine bar in a couple of weeks to share our stories.

So, it got me thinking.  How did I, a Connecticut-born, Jewish-Quaker child who grew up in Australia, end up living in Islington?  It was a circuitous journey to be sure.  Here’s some things you need to know.  My parents were radicals during the McCarthy era.  They thought protest and independent views were what America was all about, including believing in some of the premises of Communism, especially “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”  Many of their friends were called up to testify in the House of Un-American Activities.  My mother hated capitalism, although she wished my father was rich.  He, on the other hand clung to the American dream and believed that he would ‘make it rich’! He never did, although as a loving, good person he was a Nobel prizewinner.  They were in terrible debt, so I guess they both really bought into the American dream.  I have vivid memories of my parents hiding in the bedroom as we answered the door to debt collectors come to repossess couches, tv sets and other furniture they couldn’t afford.  We were trained early on to say, “My parents are not home.”  It bought them more time but made me cautious about money and debt.  They were adventurous, too, so Australia became the perfect choice to drag their four resentful children.  Despite the fact that we were Jewish, the Australian government, desperate for white people, paid our passage on a freighter and living expenses for the first few months in a migrant hostel until my father found a job.  Which was lucky because my father only had $43 in his pocket when we arrived in Sydney.  And that’s another story.

And so I went to secondary school and uni in Sydney.  After earning my BA with Honors in Sociology, I was offered the opportunity to continue straight to a doctorate.  Suffocating in the small town atmosphere of Sydney in the 70s, I chose to get a job, save money and see the world.  That decision changed the trajectory of my life.  Right out of uni, I was hired for nine months as a ‘Research Officer’ for the Commonwealth Inquiry into Poverty in Australia.  A big title for a little graduate.  I produced a final report,

 

saved money, and was therefore free to travel.

First stop, Israel, where my parents and baby sister had immigrated four years earlier. (Longer story. Separate blog.)  Although my relationship with my mother was filled with buried minefields, I missed them all terribly.  But after a month in Israel, I felt I would lose my mind if I lingered and so flew to London.  No plan.  No job.  No place to live.  I was 22.

I lived in London for four years during which time I had some tempestuous relationships, worked in a school for severely disabled children, and earned a Master’s from the London School of Economics.  I remember being cold, depressed and poor. Half of that time was spent in Islington.

When I first arrived, I madly scoured Time Out for a place to live, and found a room in someone else’s apartment.  I moved in, and proceeded to look every day in The Guardian for jobs.  I found an ad for a social worker attached to a school for severely mentally disabled children, applied and was hired.  During the six months it took for my work permit to come through I traveled.  I met my Aussie traveling partner through an ad.  She was as strong and independent as I was petite and weak.  We were an odd couple indeed.  We ended up hitch-hiking around Europe, staying in St. Andre, France, then on to Spain, Morocco, and back to France, where I fell in love with a Dutchman.  The Dutchman and I ended up living together in London after my work permit came through. 



 

At home in Islington

In London in those days, and probably still, flats were passed on from generation to generation.  No one moved, no new flats were built.  We finally found one that was partially underground and barely saw the light of day.  It smelled moldy and was always, always dark.  I would dream I was lying on Bondi Beach and wake up in a terrible sweat because there was no air circulating.  We kept the lights on all day.

When my Dutchman’s friends offered to let us rent the first floor of their 2-story house, which they were planning to remodel, we leaped at the opportunity.  It was on Upper Street in Islington, and above ground. 

It was two unconnected rooms, a small toilet and a hallway.  No kitchen.  No shower.  No bathtub.  Knowing it would be remodeled shortly, we put a temporary hot plate in the front room, along with a rickety old table, a few chairs and an old couch and baptized it a kitchen, dining room and living room.  We named the second room a bedroom which we shared with mice, rats and spiders.  We used the tiny sink in the tiny bathroom for cooking, brushing our teeth, and sponging ourselves.  When we wanted to take a shower or bath, we scheduled it with the family upstairs.  There were six of them and two of us.  They had priority.  We put coins in the water heater and waited, naked and shivering for the water to heat up.  The family kept promising the remodel, but in the two years we lived there, it didn’t happen. 

During that time, I worked with the parents of the severely handicapped children.  Armed only with a BA and 9 months of research experience, I was clueless.  My sociology thesis had been on the ‘streaming’ of primary school kids (i.e. putting kids in A, B, C, or D streams for their entire primary school career based on how smart or dumb they were determined to be at six), and its detrimental effect on young children. My first professional job was studying voluntary organizations in Australia and whether they were making a difference in the poverty level of their clients. I knew nothing of the sorrows of parents with severely handicapped children.  I did end up producing, with a colleague, a pamphlet for the parents that told them point by point their rights. 

 

With support from my wonderful boss at the school for the disabled, I enrolled in the London School of Economics to get my Masters in Social Work, on a full scholarship.  Thank you Alda Hoskings!  I wish I had told you back then what a great mentor you were to me but I was young and ignorant.  You died shortly after I moved to Los Angeles.

As a social work student intern, my placement was at the Islington Area Office that dealt with the daily catastrophes of the locals’ lives.  Islington at that time was a working class neighborhood.  As a student intern I was supposedly supervised, but arrived in court alone to argue for taking a client’s children away from her.  Her two girls had complained to me that she never fed them.  They said they wanted to be taken away from her because she was always drunk, and they hated her violent boyfriend.  I prevailed in court, just 23 years old.  A month later, my supervisor sent me to visit the mother, alone.  She threw a lamp at me, and at the time, I felt she was justified.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I spent a lot of time at various pubs with the social worker team, where we debriefed daily. 

After work, I shopped for groceries at a variety of little market stands (there being no ‘supermarkets’ per se) and schlepped back groceries by bus.  My boyfriend and I ate out as often as we could afford it, mostly Indian food, since ‘bubble and squeak’, meat pies, and fish and chips wore very thin, very fast.  I remember Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.  We waved as the Queen was driven by Upper Street, right past our un-remodeled kitchen/dining room/living room.    

 

 

 

First day at LSE, I met a young man on a motorbike with whom I ended up having a wild affair. He was Winston Churchill’s nephew.  Seriously.  My relationship with my Dutchman was over.

I studied social work and economics at LSE with Professor Jalna Hanmer (who is still alive and still a radical theorist).  At LSE, I bonded with the Irish, Scots and Welsh students.  Professor Hanmer was American so I paid close attention to everything she said.  The way she explained the inequities in our society stuck with me all these decades later.  I told her that I wanted to return (having been absent for 16 years) to the land of my birth.  She said “having an MSW is a highly regarded degree in America and will help you to find a job.”  I earned my MSW and moved to Los Angeles.  I got a job within three months of my arrival.  Thank you Jalna!

The rest, as they say, is another blog. 

Facing Old Age Head On

 

They say that growing old is not for sissies.  It’s true.  When you are young, you leap out of bed in the morning, fly into the bathroom and toss your full head of hair out of your unlined face, brush your teeth, pull on a tee-shirt and jeans and you are ready to do battle.  These days, you stretch your legs toward the pillow before gingerly stepping out of bed, so that your heels won’t hurt so much.  You do further stretches in the bathroom so that your torso and neck won’t hurt so much.  And then, you look in the mirror and see—well, your hair. 

Here’s the thing you need to understand.  I always had good hair.  Dark brown, thick, wavy tendrils down to my waist from age 12 to early 20s.  People, mostly men, but sometimes women, too, would stop to compliment me (or my hair) as I walked around Sydney, Australia where I grew up.  It seemed like a big deal to them and so it became a very big deal to me.  I felt my hair distracted onlookers from my acned skin, which may not have been as bad as it felt.   Nevertheless, my hair was my shield.  I made sure it covered at least two-thirds of my face.  My hair gave me the confidence to feel ‘attractive’. 

During the late 70s, I stretched my hair on an ironing board, which by then reached my waist, and ironed it straight.  By the late 80s, when I was living in LA, my acting coach (yes, I was a wannabe actress) told me that with my hair I had limited my options and I should consider cutting it. 

He didn’t say that I looked like a 60s Italian hippie, but I did.  It is so clear in the headshots on which I spent hundreds of dollars.  In my mind, I was quite British with a touch of educated Australian, but there was the proof in black and white.  Italian American.  Or Jewish.  No callbacks.

After much anguish, I found a Lebanese hairdresser in North Hollywood who cut it so that it just graced my shoulders. 

I looked even more Italian.

During the late 90s, I had it colored and highlighted to hide the grey.  And all that time, imperceptibly through the 2000’s, it thinned.  I noticed it in photos and was horrified.  My new friends and colleagues, who had no idea what I had lost, said how photogenic I was. Those who saw photos of me in my youth asked who that was.  I tried to comfort myself with the fact that I still had more hair than most women had ever had. 

So, here’s the thing.  I spend a lot of money these days on my hair.  But who am I actually fooling?  Maybe no one.  Maybe everyone.  But it’s amazing the things I have done.  There was the Rogaine for Men I purchased on the advice of my dermatologist.  I paid a fortune for it, took it home and then studied the side effects, which ranged from acne, to facial hair growth, increased hair loss, swelling of the face, blurred vision, dizziness, fast or irregular heartbeat, and rapid weight gain.  Oh my God!  I could die from this product.  Or worse, I could be bald, fat, with a beard and acne.  I quickly threw it away and, to this day, have never used it. 

Meanwhile, my hairdresser, an adventuress into the world of hair, found a product called X-fusion, a magnetized powder that covered the bald spaces on your scalp.  I loved it.  I called it “shake and bake” and used it after every hair wash.  My hairdresser also found a little fake bang piece that I could clip on and cover with my real hair.  No one seemed to know.  But it was hard to clip in and when the real wind blew it separated my fake bangs from my real bangs, so that I ended up walking with my hand over my forehead.  I watched carefully to see if any of my colleagues or friends were staring strangely at my forehead, never sure.  It was not a perfect solution.

Then one day my fearless hairdresser found a new thing.  Real hair.  An attachment.  Easy to put on.  Almost impossible to detect.  Many actors use them, she told me.  It cost mucho bucks but I went ahead and ordered it.  Here’s the thing.  I haven’t told anyone.  Not my husband, friends or colleagues.  Only my hairdresser knows.  And now, you.  My hairdresser colored it to match my already colored hair.

I love it.  It never turns grey.  It makes my hair appear thicker.  It looks real.  Hey, it is real.  Just not mine.  I wonder who the person was who sold it.  I hope she had so much hair that it left her head with barely a ripple.  I understand she is from India.  I fantasized that the money she got represented a year’s worth of salary, giving her time to stabilize her poor finances.  But when I googled it, I see this: 

“ 2006 the Daily Mail reported how in the hills of Tirupati, in India, a Hindu temple has become the second richest religious site in the world- due mostly to its sale of human hair . . .  every day, up to 4,000 women visit the temple to take part in a religious ceremony, called tonsuring, during which they shave off their hair as a sacrifice to the god Vishnu. These women believe that taking part in the ceremony is a sign that they are willing to give up their pride and vanity, and to thank the gods or ask them for health and happiness in the future- but what they don't know is they are also making a lot of money for those who run the temple. After the ceremony all the hair that is collected is combed, sorted into lengths and dyed before being shipped to Western countries to sell as wigs and hair extensions. So while we see our extensions as a great way to give us a beauty boost and make us feel great . . . there is in fact a much bigger human story behind every lock of hair.”

I may not have purchased this if I knew.  I am so, so sorry.  But whoever you are, wherever you are—my great thanks to you.  I pray you made money, but if you didn’t, I hope you are not suffering now.

One of my work colleagues said this to me on the first day I wore it.  This exactly.  “Your hair looks so healthy.  It’s really great.  What did you do?”  Without hesitation, I said: “Well, my hairdresser is trying new things.” “It’s working,” she said.  Since then, many others have commented, “I’m not sure what you’ve done to your hair, but I like it.”  And I just laugh because I have somewhat tricked old age. 

But I dream about this poor woman who visited the temple one day.  Perhaps she went to that temple to thank the gods for all of the small fortunes that came to her family.  Her first born son has a job now in an American call center in Delhi. Her husband is still working as a cook in a restaurant.  And her 2 daughters are healthy.  They are poor but most days can afford 3 meals. 

But then I look up life expectancy in India today.  It is 27 years old.  My poor donor may already be dead.

It has happened:  I have joined the vast society of women with too much time and money on their hands.  But by now, you realize, I am trapped.  I can never not wear this “extension” because the contrast would be so noticeable.  I understand now why my very beautiful cousin began extensive surgery.  She was probably complimented all of her life on how beautiful she was, and when she started to get older and noticed the wrinkles in her 10x magnifying mirror, she didn’t want to let her fans down.  She only saw what she had lost.  Everyone else saw what she still had.  And so she went to the plastic surgeon and had just one thing done, and then another and another and another and another.  It ended up destroying her own natural beauty. 

To date, I have not had one single thing on my face or neck altered.  Only my hair.  Even though I notice the little lines from my nose to my lips, and crow’s feet around my eyes, and the worry lines on my forehead and the downfall of my neck.  They scare me in the 10X mirror, but when I look in regular mirrors, everything is a blessed blur.  Plus, I hate pain and I don’t have the income to afford extensive anything.  I admire how European women age with grace.  But how about those poor Hindu women?  Who is looking out for them?

It seems to me, and probably many other women, that others seem so happy when you look good.  They say things like “wow, you never age” even though you have documented every wrinkle in your 10X mirror.  You think, “if I look old, they won’t like me anymore.  They won’t want to look at me.  They won’t want to spend time with me.”  But how stupid is that?  But you, like everyone else, revel in beauty.  In art, in nature, and in other people’s visage.  Is that shallow?  Or is that natural?  I get that people’s inner beauty is transformative.  And that once you get to know someone, they become beautiful because of their soul.  And no one can buy an “attachment” to make their soul better.  Although, you can work on being more loving, less harsh towards others, forgiving, living in the moment, being kind to every living thing, handing more money out to the homeless, or better still, supporting the legislation that will build affordable housing in the inner cities . . . and so much more.

But back to me and my hair.  So here it is.  Out there now.  I am wearing a fake/real attachment.  It makes me feel good.  And I believe, it makes everyone else feel good.  So where’s the harm?  Well, it’s fake.  But isn’t my make-up fake?  My skin is not that even.  My eyes are not that dark.  My lips are not that moist.  Fake.  Isn’t that what art is all about?  Replicating nature.  Imitating life.  When I looked at the still life of some of the greats, the best thing was how close to the real beauty they came to portray.  Like Vermeer’s “Tulips in a Vase” at Norton Simon Museum, or the many paintings of Cezanne.  Were they frustrated with how far from the actual beauty their paintings came?   

You can take yourself too seriously as a work of art like my cousin did.  At the gym the other day, I watched a program, while pedaling on the bike, about plastic surgery gone wrong.  These women, who agreed to be on camera, went overboard with catastrophic results.  One of them said, “I just wanted to be perfect.”  And, as I was struggling to make ten minutes on the bike (which I am proud to say ended up being 20 minutes because I was sucked into the woman with the boob job gone awry with no problem lifting her tee-shirt to show us) I asked myself, “What is perfect?  Who defines it?  Is there even such a thing?” 

 

Sometimes I think that women who got a lot of attention in their younger years are the ones who have the most problems growing older.  Those others who suffered in their younger years roll gracefully into older age.  Maybe that is the Higher Power’s way of evening out the playing field.  And that, my friends, is a good thing.