The Jewish Daughter Diaries (5 page)

“I can see your crotch!” she'd squeal. “Your tush is right there! The contours!”

It was enough to make a person want to rip out her hair.

“You're being so torso!” I'd whine, and there I'd be, a grown woman in her bra and underwear with nothing to wear to temple, sulking on the bed and glowering at her mother. But, mostly, there was lots of laughter. We were beginning to understand each other. We now thought it was okay—and kind of hilarious, actually—that we were cast from such radically opposite molds.

And here's the thing: we adored each other. From this point on, we could hardly be in a room together without clinging to each other's shoulders like two baby koalas. This, not just in spite of our differences, but actually, I think, because of them. We weren't mother-daughter twinsies; we were more like inverse creatures, cuddled against each other like yin and yang. We were each other's.

• • •

I didn't know if my mom would get to meet my daughter, but she did. In fact, she got two years with her. That we got this time together is the thing I feel most blessed about in my life. It's also the thing I feel most sorry for myself about. Two years? That's nothing. Whenever I see women—especially new moms—with their silver-haired, sensible-sneakered sixty-something mothers, I want to smash things.

Meanwhile, I'm stumbling through my newish role as a mom—a Jewish mom through and through—and, like every mother everywhere, am just making things up as I go, often misstepping but sometimes, once in a blue moon, hitting a bull's-eye. My four-year-old daughter is a toothy, blond, laughing maniac who loves to dance and who utters things every day that are so sweet and nutty that I literally have to gasp out loud. My love for this girl overflows, splattering everywhere in an ecstatic mess.

Even in the most joyful moments of parenting, though, there is a piece missing, a hole where my mom should be. Is it strange that I want to parent with my parent? It's not just that my mom was the only one outside our household who always delighted in the tiniest pieces of child-rearing minutiae. (Our girl tried avocado! She got her recital costume and it's Minnie Mouse!) It's that if my mom was here now, she'd see how quickly and easily I've slipped right into her shoes.

I am my mother's daughter, it turns out. In fact, not only am I her, I've lapped her. As it is now, whenever my daughter sustains any kind of standard-fare kid injury, I experience a physical reaction, a full-body clenching that can feel so unbearable that often I just have to walk away. I feel a similar sensation whenever I think about how, little by little, my daughter's strong, smooth, pure little body will charge out into the world, where people will look at her, push her, pull her by the hand, touch her.

She'll ride in fast cars and on trains and airplanes and will leap off the high dive, even if she's not quite ready, because everyone down below will be cheering and clapping and waiting. Soon enough she'll be choosing her own clothes. Hopefully not from the Victoria's Secret catalog. Honestly, these days I marvel not so much at what a worrier my mom was, but at how much she kept her fears in check.

When my daughter was born, she had a red splotch on the iris on her right eye. A burst blood vessel. I had a matching one, also on the iris of my right eye. It was from pushing, everyone at the hospital said. It seemed like a definite sign—of something, we were sure. But sign or no sign, I now know that yes, my daughter's body and mine are, for better or worse, connected. Her body, which came from mine, will in some way always belong to me, just as my physical body was—and still is—my mom's. So the next time my daughter pulls that creepy, legless man-doll out of my night-table drawer and asks what it is, I will tell her. I will begin to tell her.

Anna Breslaw

I am almost certain that my wonderful, idiosyncratic mom doesn't really know what I do for a living, which is “blogging.” I think she envisions me as the decoy underage girl on
To
Catch
a
Predator
, except the decoy house is the Internet. (Which is not far from the truth, incidentally. Be right down, I'm just getting the laundry!) She doesn't really know what I do because her only unassisted presence on the Internet is from an online article about her leading “Team Jerry” to victory during a
Seinfeld
trivia contest at the local library, having won the day on the following question:

Q: In the
Seinfeld
pilot called “The Seinfeld Chronicles,” Kramer is instead named what?

A: Kessler.

My mother is afraid of what I might write about her in this essay, but she has a strict rule about her reading material. It should concern, exclusively:

a. Sisters

b. Cancer

c. Sisters, and then one of them gets cancer, or

d. Anything with a blurb that reads midway through: “After an unspeakable tragedy…”

So I think we're safe. In addition to adhering to the above literature requirements, here are additional steps you can take to be more like my mom.

Step 1: Be Awkward at Expressing Affection, Possibly Due to Undiagnosed Asperger's

I'm twenty-six years old, and like most Jewish New Yorkers, the last nine have been spent on and off in therapy. I am picky about who tells me to stop dating
goyishe
assholes who wear Eurotrashy jackets, so my experience has been more or less a
Next
bus of psychiatrists. (Dr. Daniel Gammerman: His Sliding-Scale Practice is above a Wendy's in the Garment District! Enjoys Long Walks toward a Better Self-Image!)

But, unflaggingly, a conversation like the following always goes down:

THERAPIST:
Does your family express affection?

ME:
Define that.

THERAPIST:
Physical affection? Do you hug?

ME:
My sister pushed me into a car once.

THERAPIST:
Do you say “I love you” to each other?

ME:
Not really. Because, I mean, ughh, right? Ughhh. Blehhh.

[Therapist makes “That must be hard” face.]

THERAPIST:
That must be hard.

ME:
No! We just don't do that stuff. It's gross. It's just so…ew. Ugh. Puke.

THERAPIST:
I want you to do something for me. Every morning, look in the mirror and say out loud to yourself, “I love you.”

ME:
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. See you next week.

My mom differs from many Jewish mothers in that she hates expressing physical or verbal affection. She's a preschool teacher who occasionally receives special assignments to one specific student. The most memorable one was Marchmont, the child of two British-born Princeton professors, who had severe Asperger's and perfect pitch.

One day, my mom burst in from work to excitedly inform us that Marchmont had jumped on top of the lunch table and had begun singing “All Star” by Smash Mouth in a perfect choirboy soprano. When he and his family returned to England, his going-away gift to her was a cactus. Marchmont and my mother got along famously, and I don't believe that is a coincidence. It also explains why she's the
Seinfeld
Rain Man.

Step 2: Become Fixated on Mortality (Your Own and Others')!

In spring 1975, when I was little more than a gleam in Hashem's butt hole, my fifteen-year-old mother was walking home from her all-girls' yeshiva with her friends. They passed a man striding back and forth on Second Avenue, a trench coat wrapped tightly around him.

“I'm so cold, girls! Brr.”

Before they could do anything, he opened up the trench coat, revealing the first penis that my mom had ever seen (I assume). And, like John Travolta's shooting-star sighting in the first fifteen seconds of
Phenomenon
, staring into this flasher's sad, wind-burnished penis instantaneously freed up a good 40 percent of her adult brain for endless
Law
and
Order: SVU
marathons and macabre search-engine results. More than once, while making out with some inappropriate person or another, I have received a 12:00 a.m. text message like: “canuhelpmegoogleplanecrashphotos??? sorrydontknowhowtoputspaces.”

Jewish humor is known to be gallows, but my mom takes it to the next level. To wit: The hardest I've ever made her laugh was when I told her that I'd watched a tiny, crone-like old woman with a shopping cart attempt to break through a line of pretty eighteen-year-old girls wearing Urban Outfitters sundresses.

“That'll be me soon!” she said, and laughed so hard she had to go to the bathroom in a Subway restaurant lest she pee on herself.

Step 3: Find a Nemesis and Stick with It!

Like rappers, Jewish moms feud endlessly—only instead of partaking in drive-by shootings on Nostrand Avenue, they throw passive-aggressive digs at each other's unfinished basements over decaf coffee. In the fifth grade, I became best friends (still am) with a girl named Jessica Levy, the daughter of an upper-middle-class Jewish couple to whom “appropriate” thank-you cards and check-splitting etiquette are tantamount to a life-saving kidney transplant.

Being from a much more laissez-faire family, religiously and otherwise—my dad a former pot-smoker and outspoken atheist, my mom a lapsed Conservative Jew, neither of whom could ever really deliver “You're grounded” or “Your curfew is eleven thirty” with any real conviction—I thought nothing of showing up at Jess's house for impromptu, unscheduled playdates. Her father would answer the door and stare at me like I'd just mounted the lawn ornament in their driveway.

Jessica's mother, Amy, was (still is) the ne plus ultra of big “my way or the highway” Jewish-suburban-mom personalities. Brooklyn born and upper-middle-class, she'd met her husband at a singles mixer, dyed the gray out of her hair regularly, and was always equipped with un-PC rants about welfare mothers and crime rates that would be offensive if you took them seriously. If either one of her two children didn't wind up at U Penn—which, fortunately, they did—she would have committed seppuku with her son's childhood EpiPen.

Jessica was an A-student, and I was straight Cs. Jessica's mom was under the impression that my parents didn't provide enough structure for me, and my mother thought Jessica's mother was constantly looking down on her. I was from a “broken home,” so Jessica's mother considered me some kind of special after-school latchkey kid. She insisted on feeding me to the point of the gluttony victim in
Se7en,
giving me advice on who to marry in ten to fifteen years, and telling me to stop back-talking to teachers. As I leaped out of her car to run into my house after hangouts with Jess, she would always sign off with: “Tell your mother to call me!”

My mother, while she is not into articulating “beefs,” did not want to call her. To this day, her resentment of Jessica's judgmental mom only expresses itself when she drinks. She is not a drinker. When she was twenty-two, she had one White Russian on a date with my father, went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, waved to her reflection, and threw up. Since then, I have occasionally located a single Miller High Life in her refrigerator on holidays like New Year's Eve (I hear it is the champagne of beers!), but otherwise she's a teetotaler.

When my younger sister graduated from college, my mom had a few sips from a pitcher of beer at the pizza joint we'd gone to. After looking down at her slice as if it had said something rude to her, she mumbled, apropos of nothing: “Amy Levy
probably
didn't like the wedding present. Amy Levy
probably
wanted the receipt.”

At this point, she had not seen Amy Levy for at least three years.

“What?” I asked. “Ma, are you drunk?”

“Iz bright in here.”

I am told that a similar episode occurred after she imbibed a chocolate daiquiri during my other sister's college tour of Brown. YOLO.

Step 4: Perpetrate the Following Insignificant Everyday Heists

Provided for you in handy checklist form.

□
 Go to Panera Bread and buy an iced coffee. Fill it up at the self-serve station. When you finish it, dump out the ice, save the cup, and put it in your comically large Vera Bradley handbag purchased for this and similar purposes. Every time you want an iced coffee from Panera Bread in the future, walk with purpose past the cashier and use this cup. Reuse this cup for a year or until you are fairly sure it has been contaminated with a number of unknown airborne diseases.

□
 In the summer, acquire at least two dozen varieties of wristbands from the local beach (eight dollars per person admittance fee). On future beach trips, solicit a spy (usually one of your reluctant children) to walk onto the boardwalk and glance at the pattern on today's wristband being handed out. Behind some convenient shrubbery, attempt to secure that same wristband—culled from your stash—onto yourself or a loved one.

Alternative: Hand all of your beach paraphernalia to a loved one. Strip down to bathing suit. Boldly walk on, sans wristband, while loved ones distract bored teenage lifeguard at beach entrance with inane questions about beach hours, precise percentage of the likelihood of shark attacks, or both.

□
 Force reluctant children (ages eighteen to twenty-six, all roughly five foot eight) to attempt to pretend to be fourteen or under to score children's admission.

Step 5. If You Are Already Carol Breslaw

I love you. You can go back to your sisters and cancer book now.

Chaya Kurtz

“Do you want some hand sanitizer for your son? He's touching the pole and then touching his snacks…Are you sure? He could get sick.”

That was me on the D train back to Brooklyn during a recent rush hour. A Chinese man's son was eating fruit snacks with the same hands that he was using to hold the pole, and all I could picture was the layer of human grease and filth, crawling with non-beneficial microorganisms while entering the boy's tiny, adorable digestive tract.

The man politely refused the hand sanitizer that I whipped out of my bag, but he did feed the kid the fruit snacks straight out of their little packet, as if he were squeezing a Go-Gurt into the kid's mouth. When the kid reached for the snacks with his hands, his dad said, “Don't touch. Dirty.”

Everyone knows that New Yorkers don't wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, and then they hold the subway pole. I had saved one family the agony of an
E. coli
–fueled night at the hospital. I had also become my mother.

My mother is not just my mother. My mother is everyone's mother. I'm fairly sure that if she met you, she'd be your mother, too. My mother is not just a mother to every person in the entire world, but she also is a mother to the entire animal kingdom. When I was in high school, my mother adopted a dog from the dysfunctional family of a child in the special-ed nursery-school class that she taught. The dog was a terrier mutt. She was nothing special, but my mom loved her because my mom loves underdogs.

The dog had a limp. When my mom took her to the vet, they x-rayed her (the dog, not my mom) and found that she had a bullet lodged in her shoulder muscle. It made my mom love the dog even more. When the dog pooped on the floor (as she was wont to do), my mom scooped up the poop with paper towels. When the dog got the worst case of dog breath that anyone ever smelled, my mom still invited the dog to sit on her lap and breathe in her face. When the dog got diabetes, my mom filled syringes with insulin and gave the dog shots. When the dog could barely walk anymore and had cataracts over her eyes, my mom simply picked her up when she couldn't walk.

A sign of aging for Jewish women is taking on some of your mother's trademark attributes, both the attributes that you appreciate about your mother and the ones that make you say, “Oh my G-d, I am becoming my mother.” I appreciate that my mother loves the most ignored and underappreciated specimens that G-d created. I think it is a very Jewish quality. G-d loves all of His creations, and my mom loves all of his creations, too.

If someone is developmentally disabled, my mother especially loves that person. My mother shops at a grocery store ten minutes farther away than the other local grocery stores because, and only because, that store employs people with Down syndrome as grocery baggers. She wants to support that business. She believes in hiring people with Down syndrome, and she puts her money where her beliefs are. In addition to shopping at that grocery store, my mother knows all of the baggers by name. They are all her children.

I can tell that I am aging because I am becoming my mother, whereas in my youth, I was distinctly not my mother. Many years ago, in my freewheeling early twenties, I hiked from Crested Butte, Colorado, to Aspen to see my cousins. That night in Snowmass, while we were grilling vegetables, we were joined by a three-legged dog. He wore a tag that read “Ranger” but had no phone number or address.

I really liked this dog and considered taking him back to Crested Butte with me, but I decided not to because I didn't want to be known as “the Girl with the Three-Legged Dog.” In a town the size of a small liberal arts college, you had to mind your moniker. Obviously, my mother would have taken in the three-legged dog.

Thirteen years later, when I walk through Prospect Park in Brooklyn and see a three-legged dog with his loving owner, I regret having not adopted Ranger. How could I have been so image-conscious? Ranger was a good dog and he deserved a loving home. I should have been his mom. My mom would have been that dog's mother.

My mom particularly excels at the mitzvah of
bikur
cholim
, otherwise known as visiting the sick. It doesn't matter who is sick. It doesn't matter if my mother even knows the person. If my mother hears that someone is going through chemotherapy and can't keep food down, she starts cooking blintzes. I don't know why or how, but people who are going through chemotherapy can hold down my mother's blintzes.

This is a fact: my mother's blintzes are vomit-proof. She discovered the power of her blintzes—and proceeded to make, freeze, and deliver them by the dozen—when a friend of hers went through chemo and narrowly skimmed above starvation by eating a blintz a day. Maybe it is because my mother mixes blueberries into the sweet cheese filling. I suspect it is mostly because my mother made them, and she is the mother of all sick people.

I recently asked my mother what she was up to. “Well, I'm making blintzes for JoAnne Shmoe's brother-in-law. JoAnne told me he is going through chemo.”

“Wow, Ma, that's really nice of you,” I said. “Do you know him?”

“No, but JoAnne said that he can keep down my blintzes.”

JoAnne Shmoe's brother-in-law isn't Jewish. He probably had never tasted a blintz in his life. But you know what? He is getting enough calories to not become a skeleton because my mother—a stranger—makes him blintzes.

As one would expect, my mother also makes chicken soup for sick people. When I was writing this essay, she had recently made chicken soup for a lady who died a few days later (not from the soup). The lady told her it was the best soup she had eaten in years. My mom had never met her.

• • •

The downside to having a mother who is the mother of all children and all animals and all old and sick people is that my mother never stops moving, and therefore neither do I. I once asked my psychiatrist to rate how crazy I am on a scale of one to ten. “You're a two,” he said. “If ten is psychotic, you are a two. You obsess. You're neurotic.”

Knowing that I fall low on the crazy scale was a relief to me, because I often feel like I am one step away from ending up in a mental hospital. This is because everything is important to me, and like my mother, I must succeed at every little thing. It is hard when I don't do everything the right way, as my mother does.

I don't think my mother has ever been wrong or has ever failed at anything she set her mind to do. I, however, am a walking failure machine. I take on projects that are too big and then can't manage the details. I make promises that I can't keep. Somehow my mother does not have these problems. She can manage everything.

Despite my inability to make time to save the world one act of
chesed
(that's “kindness” in Hebrew) at a time, I do sometimes live up to the example that my mother sets. I was very proud of myself when I stopped some kids in my apartment building from beating up their brother. I was also very proud of myself when I saw a little kid walking alone on the street and made sure that his mother knew where he was going. I carry extra fruit to give to homeless people on the street. Once I bought a homeless guy a can of chewing tobacco.

That chewing tobacco incident shows I am becoming my mom, but also that I am not at all my mom. Instead of buying that guy chewing tobacco, my mom would have lectured him on the dangers of tobacco, which she is very against. She is also very against baking brownies from a mix. And she is against drinking and driving. It became a joke that she lectured us every single night at dinner about the dangers of drinking and driving.

When I was twenty-one, I drove drunk because staying at the mesa where I was would have been more dangerous than driving home after four beers. It was rural New Mexico, out in the foothills of the Rockies. I drove through the arroyos slowly, keeping my hands steady on the steering wheel and pulling my pickup truck around the bends of the mountain roads by watching the yellow line.

My mom wouldn't have drunk the four beers with the alcoholic poet in Taos, who ditched me two days later for a leggy redhead. My mother wouldn't have camped up on the mesa. My mother wouldn't have spent her twenties pissing outdoors like I did. But true to form, I cleaned up my act. I became Chassidic; I got married; now I live in Brooklyn. People always say to me, “You're good with kids. Do you work with kids?” I work as an editor, but I'm aging, which explains why I am good with kids. Aging as a Jewish woman means one thing: I am becoming my mother.