The Jewish Daughter Diaries (8 page)

Lauren Yapalater

Somehow, the stars have aligned and either by accident (this book fell off the table and landed open on this page) or by another accident (this book fell off the
couch
and landed open on this page), you are now reading about my Jewish mother. The thing about having a Jewish mom is that one day
I
will turn into a Jewish mom. Like a little Jewish caterpillar, I too will blossom into a beautiful butterfly yenta, and it couldn't be done without learning and subconsciously absorbing from my own mother, which any Jew will tell you includes having multiple neuroses and being a “worry wart.” Being a Jewish mother also includes knowing exactly when someone is hungry and what to feed them; determining a diagnosis based off one symptom; and bagels. Because always bagels, right?

My mom does all those things and more. I moved out of my parent's house about two weeks ago. Which means that up until then, I was being fed and nurtured by my mom as if I was a helpless teenager. My mom packed me lunch every day, left vitamins and a glass of orange juice on the counter for me every morning, and bought all my lunch supplies. I would literally go into work, and say, “My mom made me lunch,” to no one in particular. I just thought it was exciting that
my
amazing
mom
was
still
making
my
lunch
—and I work at a company full of adults whose moms probably haven't made them lunch in ten years!

A fun thing about being a twenty-four-year-old who lives with her parents is that you get to see firsthand their struggles and triumphs with social media. My mom has been able to navigate the cold, dark waters of the interweb, and I saw her evolution from flip-phone user to master of the iPhone. (In this case, “master” meaning “holder of basic knowledge.”) She is faster to upload pictures of my dog sitting with his legs crossed on the couch than I am (and I'm fast at taking pictures of my dog, okay?).

Now that I've moved out, she sends me selfies of her and our dog. I know I will never miss a cute couch moment because I receive texts throughout the night of his many positions. She's not the typical social-media mom who posts inspirational memes on Facebook. She's a cool social-media mom. She follows several people who I work with on Twitter and Instagram, and favs and likes everything they post. Everyone loves having their tweets faved and their photos liked!

I remember the first time that I noticed my mom had been having a Twitter conversation with one of my coworkers. After panicking for three seconds and having that same feeling you might have if your mom dropped by your fifth-grade classroom to announce that you had forgotten your antidiarrheal medication, a calmness fell over me and I felt proud.

I imagine it's how she felt when I took my first steps. Yes, probably exactly like that. She's a mover and a shaker of the World Wide Web. She sends me funny tweets and g-chats me during the day. SHE OFTEN YELLS and I need to remind her to turn off the caps lock, but other than that, the woman knows her stuff.

I should probably mention that in many ways my mom isn't the typical Jewish mom. She's never pressured me into doing anything I didn't want to do. (In fact, she fully supports me in all my ridiculous endeavors and ideas.) She has accepted the fact that I don't like lox, and she says
coffee
, not
caw-ffee
. But, similar to Jewish mothers around the world, she worries. A lot. And that's a trait I inherited directly from her.

The two of us are like
Dumb
and
Dumber
but more like Neurotic and Neurotic-er. Whenever I'd call home from college complaining about some ailment, she would insist I visit Urgent Care the next day and I would oblige. Like the time I woke up with mild neck pain and together we decided it was meningitis. (Urgent Care diagnosis: get a new pillow.)

As a person who lived at a home with her parents and took the Long Island Railroad to work in Manhattan every day, I was one o' dem peoples they call “commuter,” which meant my mom was a train-shuttle driver as a part-time gig. She would drop me off daily and pick me up from the station if I was later than usual. One night I caught a late train home, late being 10:30 p.m., because even though living at home made me a teenager, it also made me a grandma. I fell asleep on the train and woke up to realize I had missed my stop.

The train usually takes about an hour to get to my town, so it was sometime after 11:30 p.m., but when I went to check the time, I found that my phone was dead. (My mom's number one commandment in life:
Phone
shall
not
die
.) I had no way of contacting any member of my family to tell them I was four stops too far and that I obviously wasn't going to be home when I'd said I would. (My mom's second commandment in life:
“Just tell me when you are going to be home so I know whether to have dinner for you or not.”
)

I got off at the next stop and asked a man getting off the train if I could use his phone. Unfortunately, he was from Ireland, and I couldn't figure out how to call an American number from his European phone. Also, in my panic and haste, I forgot my mom's cell-phone number, so I sent a text to my sister saying, “Missed my stop. It's Lauren.”

Then the man left, so that was all the information my family received about my whereabouts. The text I'd sent my sister, which was relayed to my mom, read as an obvious kidnapping note: foreign number; short text; no information. My mom decided she had to come find me.

Meanwhile back at the train station, I huddled in a corner, making myself as small as possible in case someone appeared out of thin air to take this golden opportunity to rob—or
murder
—me because there would be no witnesses. In my head, the probability of this happening seemed very high. Yes, I was a bit dramatic, but my childhood fear of the dark was coming back to haunt me. I began to freak out and play all sorts of nightmare scenarios in my head.

While I was entering into Code Red panic mode, my mom was driving from train station to train station, calling my name in hopes that I will be close by, hear her maternal caws, and we will find each other like a lion cub and its mother separated in the jungle. But no motherly calls did I hear. Instead, I heard footsteps on my abandoned platform, and thinking these footsteps were coming to attack me, I ran away in the opposite direction.

While doing so, I tripped and fell, ending up with bloody palms and a general paranoia that
this
was
the
end
. So naturally, I started weeping (because I'm a hormonal tween) and waited for it to all be over. And then, just like they all say, I saw the light…of the
train
. I saw the lights of the train that was finally here to bring me home! I got on that train and was its sole passenger. (No idea what happened to the footsteps person.)

Finally back at my home station, I walked down to the main area and saw Mom sitting outside in her car. After driving to and from train stations without finding me, she'd decided to wait at ours until I showed up, knowing with her sixth motherly sense that when I eventually arrived, I'd most likely be an emotional wreck and need immediate comfort. And boy, does she know me. I burst into tears when I got into the car, and even though it was the most trivial and undramatic “dramatic” event that could happen (I was never in any danger), she was there to calm me down when I needed her to be.

I've always known that I have a wonderful mother, and I know she would have waited at that train station for five hours or five days if she needed to. And of course, I knew that when we did finally reunite, she would never even think about judging her twenty-four-year-old crybaby daughter.

Rachel Ament

The most precious and irritating biological data God ever created, slithering around in the far reaches of the Jewish DNA, is the chromosome for matchmaking. All Jewish women are carriers, but the trait surfaced with a particular strength of spirit in my mom. As early as second grade, my mom would point out different snot-drenched boys in the carpool lane at my school, insisting that they were meant for me.

“What about that Mikey Richman boy? Didn't you say he is always sharing his Twizzlers with you? What a sweetie!”

I reminded my mom that I didn't even like boys yet, that they all had cooties and a parade of other contagious schoolyard diseases; but this never seemed to faze her. “I just feel like you are missing out on a big opportunity here, Rachel!”

By the time I was of actual dating age, I presented my mother with even more pressing matchmaking concerns. I liked boys—a lot—but rarely of the Semitic variety. I believed that dating should be about exploration and discovery. I wanted to peer out into new, exotic frontiers; date guys who were messy and irresponsible and
bad
ideas.
Not guys whose looks and attitudes reminded me of every nebbishy Jewish kid who had attended summer camp with me. When I would try to explain this to my mother, she would insist that I was being too narrow-minded, that she knew plenty of young Jewish men who she was sure were my
beshert
.

“Seth Cohen from
The
O.C.!
” my mom cheered one Thursday night, as Seth pulled his neck skin at weird angles for the camera. “I swear, if that guy wasn't designed by God Himself to be your soul mate, then I don't know who was!”

I tried to explain to my mom that Seth was already dating the anatomically flawless Summer Roberts and was also a
fictional
character. But she just shrugged. “I think he would really like you.”

When I moved to New York from Kentucky, a year after college, my mother continued her matchmaking pursuits long distance. She had heard that the Matzo Ball, billed as the largest Jewish singles event in the country, would be in New York in a few weeks and demanded that I attend. No, never, I told her. I was too young, too idealistic. I was a twenty-three-year-old recent college grad who still dressed like a reckless teenager. Not some suburban divorcée clad in jaguar print and macramé.

“I'd rather pour molten lava all over my face!” I yelled stupidly. But it was too late. My mother had already signed me up, and there was no way I could get a refund. I was officially a few short steps away from the American life cycle of wed, divorce, wed, divorce, wed, divorce.

I walked into the Matzo Ball that fateful evening rolling my eyes intolerantly. I quickly sauntered over to the bar area and asked the bartender to spike my drink with some general anesthesia. Strangely, he refused but agreed to prepare me a vodka cranberry. I drank it down in three gulps and scanned the crowd for any signs of intelligent life. There were none.

There was, however, a lipless Israeli man brushing his sweaty hand against my back in swirly, disgusting motions. “Hello, little girl,” said the sweaty pervert. “You look like a nice American girl. Are you a nice American girl?

“Sorry, I'm waiting for a friend,” I answered, staring devotedly at the floor. I spiraled the room for a while and eventually fell into conversation with Jerry, a twenty-eight-year-old ad exec with big, soupy eyes and a wrap-around mouth. I suddenly had that sick feeling young Jews often get when they recognize someone they've seen on JDate in real life. This feeling becomes even sicker when they remember said JDater was leaning princely against a splashy red convertible in his profile pic.

“So, do you love sports as much as I do?” Jerry asked within seconds of meeting me. “Because I'm a
crazy
University of Florida basketball fan! Go, Gators!” He pumped his fist towards the high heavens. “Goooooo, Gators!” Jerry then bought me a drink and proceeded to provide me with stunning insight into the dark, well-twisted corridors of his soul.

“I don't know about you, but I'm a huge romantic and I'm looking for ‘the one.' One of my favorite things to do is not just to have sex, though I do love that, but to snuggle. Love to snuggle! And I think that says a lot about my character. You know, I'm just going to put it all out on the table. I'm twenty-eight. Ready to settle down. And I think my mother is ready for me to settle down as well.”

Oh. My. God.

Every guy I had met that night seemed to have sworn a blood oath to his mother that he would return home from the event engaged (or laid, depending on his mother's standards). It was a creepy feeling: the spirit of mothers all around you. A guy tells you that you have a nice smile, and all you can hear is a jittery Jewish mother whispering in his ear about how he should seal the deal. The next morning, I called my mother to complain that Jerry had left three enthusiastic messages on my voicemail before 11:30 a.m. But my mother was not sympathetic.

“Rachel, you don't like anyone. You are not allowed to judge a guy unless you have gone on at least one date with him!”

“But Mom!”

“Rachel…”

“But Mom!”

“Rachel…”

“Fine!”

Jerry picked me up from my apartment in Brooklyn that night in a sulfur yellow station wagon that was (naturally) not the car in his JDate pictures. As we made our way out of my neighborhood, I racked my brain trying to think of ways I could connect to my new sports and snuggle-crazed man.

“I hate cats,” I finally blurted out, hoping he could relate to my kitty bigotry. “I think all cats are selfish and overly independent!”

Jerry stared at me darkly. “Um, have you ever even seen the look on a cat's face after rescuing it from the top of a tree?” I hadn't.

“Well, maybe if you got to know cats better before judging them, you would know that they can be very vulnerable.” He shook his head three times, reflectively. “Very vulnerable.”

Jerry parked his car in a 7-Eleven parking lot and began raking his hand through my hair and along my neck. He whispered into my ear that he would never do anything but kiss me on the first date because he respected me and wanted to be in a serious, exclusive relationship with me. With that, he grabbed my face by its sides and thrust his thick-veined tongue all the way down my digestive tract, probably into my respiratory tract as well. But it was still just a kiss. Jerry was a man of his word.

“My mother raised me to be a good boy,” Jerry said lamely. “And I would never do anything to upset my mother.”
Mother
. The word wobbled in my brain for a while, making me dizzy, delirious. “Mother other-other eh-eh-eh,” I could hear Rihanna's voice cooing from the radio that wasn't turned on, “Under my mo-o-other other-other eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh.”

“I have a wonderful surprise for you,” Jerry whispered, pulling into a neighborhood that looked suspiciously like a suburb. Outside the car window were trees smelling as fresh and tart as hippie cologne and birds chirping their sweet aviary catcalls at all those slut hummingbirds who were already nesting on, like, ten eggs each. Something told me we weren't in Brooklyn anymore…

“Rachel, what your little eyes are about to witness is the very town in Jersey where I grew up!” Jerry's smile curled behind his gum line.

“Yay,” I said blandly. Jerry then whirred his car around the town, pointing out his favorite ice-cream shop, his favorite pizza joint, and his favorite homeless man who wore pink Umbro shorts and went by the unfortunate name of “Gee Whiz.” Luckily, Jerry's tour of nostalgia was interrupted by a cell phone ringing in his jean pocket. The ring sounded louder and more urgent than it had the rest of the night. Must be his mother, I thought.

“Heya, Mom!” Jerry clucked into the phone. “I'm in the car right now with that great girl I told you about! She just moved to New York from Kentucky. Yeah, she's a real sweet girl. Jewish. Hmmm, well, we are in the neighborhood…”

Oh god. I have these nightmarish visions of hell that creep up on me sometimes when I am in strange situations. I'm sure this is normal. My hands are curved into handcuffs and a benighted hunk is dangling me by the legs into a fountain spiked with open-mouthed alligators. The heat is sucking every last bead of sweat from my overworked sweat glands, and there is nothing to breathe but carbon monoxide poisoning and—

“Ouuuuur house!” Jerry sang operatically, bringing me back to earth, “Is a very, very, very fine house. With two cats in the yaaaaard. Life used to be so haaaard.” I looked up and saw the blurred, sleepy colors of Jerry's car in a driveway and a woman flapping her arm at us from a window.
Jerry? Jerry, where am I? Where have you taken me? Is that your…mom?
I tried to pretend I was somewhere,
anywhere
else. I tried drifting back into the carbon-monoxided world of my imagination, but it was too late. Jerry's mom was now moving toward us, telling us to get out of the car to come see her.

“Jerry, quick we gotta get out of here.”

“Huh?” Jerry didn't
get
it. “We just got here.”

“But…my headache!” Yeah, I have a headache. “Ow, it hurts really bad.” I slapped my hand against my imaginary pain.

“So you're not even going to meet my mom?” Jerry's downward-slanting eyes drooped even further downward into his cheeks.”

“Oh shoot, I'm afraid I can't now!”

“Well, I guess that's your decision.” Jerry let out a sigh and agreed to drive me home. On our way back to my place, I texted my mom that I was finally ready to be set up with Seth Cohen.

I figured that even fictional characters from Fox TV programs would be more promising than the eligible young men you meet at the Matzo Ball.