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.