Tag Archives: family

Dear Mom

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Dear Mom:

In life, some days are just horrible, no-good, terrible days. Today is one of those days.

I wish I could jump back in time to hear your voice and feel your hug.  But, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell, those stupid, stinking painted ponies keep going up and down and round and round on the carousel of time. 

I saw a moment between a mother and daughter — the mother comforting a crying daughter, and taking her home to care of her — and I thought that was what you would have done, just as you did a long time ago even into my late 20s, when I would run home because I was scared of life and responsibilities and failure.  I was sad for the daughter but I knew she would be all right — her mother’s love is strong and her nurturing so apparent.

Carly Simon thinks her mother is dancing with Benjamin Franklin on the other side of the moon.  I think you are lecturing G-d about changing things in the world.  I know you’re busy because the world is a bit of a mess these days.

Stop by for a chat in my dreams when you have a moment —

Love, me

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My mother’s wishes and her mother’s honor

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This week is my mother’s mother’s Yahrzeit.  Yahrzeits always remind me of the Days of Awe (10 days including and between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur).
 
 
I am not much into religion since my mom died and given all of the heretical things I say I am waiting for the lightning bolt to strike.
 
I am not sure why this happened, but about three years after Mom died, I started getting reminders from my parents’ synagogue about the anniversaries of my grandparents’ deaths — their Yahrzeits.  Maybe the synagogue staff finally got it together to start sending them to me but the staff wouldn’t have known where to send them unless my mother had put me down as the next recipient of these notices.  None of my father, brother and sister receives these notices.   I was overwhelmed that my mother trusted me with the responsibility of remembrance.  After all of the issues, sturm und drang, etc. about my being gay (which all were resolved 15 years ago, thank G-d), my mother trusted me with this, in the end.
 
Remembering is very important in Jewish tradition.  It is said that people live again when remembered.  That does not generally resonate with me.  But when I lit the Yahrzeit candles (Jews light them on the anniversary of the death and on Yom Kippur) this last year for Mom and her parents, I understood why.  In this world of a 3 billion or so people, a person dies every second.  I lit candles to say I remember you and you are not anonymous in this world and your life is not forgotten.  I realized that I don’t know my great-grandparents’ names and no one remembers them.  And so, maybe my son’s grandchildren (should he be so lucky) will not light a candle for me.  Maybe, remembering two generations is more than anyone should have to do, because it dilutes meaning of remembrance if these dead people are strangers.  But this Friday I will remember especially my grandmother on her Yahrzeit.  She was a life force for my mother, a woman who suffered greatly in Europe and was often a prisoner of those memories.  And on Friday, my grandmother will not be an anonymous dead person.  Because I will remember. And, now, I get it.  Remembrance.  A commandment under Jewish law to remember and, by remembering, to honor.  And by honoring, to make sure that your loved one isn’t relegated to a statistics of unknown and unnamed lives and deaths year in and year out.

 

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Sisterly love and torment

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So, back when my sister was dating her now husband, I would of course tell him, “look I am not getting any younger and I want to dance at my sister’s wedding!”.  So, I am at the gym having a training session at the same time my sister is working out.  She interrupts me with this awe-struck look on her face and I know, I KNOW, that her boyfriend proposed.  She motions to whisper in my ears.  Excitement builds — I think, Mom, I wish you were here for this moment.  She whispers that the man next to her on the elliptical machine blew his nose on the floor and it was so gross that she had to tell me.  This is why I love my family.  It is always a David Lynch type Hallmark moment.


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Kids

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We had a 7th birthday party for our son. 17 kids doing gymnastics at Chelsea Piers. The screams of joy and peals of laughter are still echoing in my head — like a migraine. I can’t wait until mid-week when the pain is gone and I look back on the party fondly.

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To have a voice in this chaotic world

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I often wonder why I wanted to start a blog. Probably because in this loud, crowded world I wanted to carve out a space for my voice. Today was a weird day for me. We are a gay family — two women with a young boy.  Our synagogue sent a general email burst to tell us that a religious hate group — the same group that celebrates every death in Iraq and picketed at Matthew Shepard’s funeral — were coming to protest at our synagogue this morning. Now, let’s think about that. We are a family and members of a synagogue, and today we were having a birthday party for our son. Imagine, the Cleavers (only not so much) with the Beav — we work, we pay our taxes, we are good neighbors, we have the grandparents and aunts and uncles to dinner every Sunday night, we do and give charity, we try to balance career with family, our son’s education and health comes first and his job in life, among others, is to do more for the next generation than we did for him. Why again is anyone protesting my life? My loving family somehow undermines the lives and futures of a poverty-level family without health care and without job training? If I were Republican I could see how my political, social and economic views would undermine that family. But I am a Democrat, willing to pay extra in taxes for universal health care, for prenatal care, for job retraining. And I assure you that amount I pay in taxes every year would shock that family. So, I am a tax-paying (and willing to pay more), synagogue going, hard-working, family woman who loves her partner and her son more than anything in the world. Oh, I am a lesbian. Ahhhhh, THAT’s it. Whaaaaaat?

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Remembrances

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I  think about my mother all of the time but most especially around my son’s birthday. She died when he was six months old. My mom was a woman of uncommon strength with a deep concern for humanity. She believed in the American dream — opportunity for all who wanted a better life. She was a product of the American dream. Mom loved a good protest, voter registration drive or a lively dinner time political debate with family and friends. She believed that people could do small acts to heal the world. I remember thinking that I was glad she didn’t live to see the Iraq invasion. And I knew her pride in this country would have soared if she were able to vote in the Clinton-Obama Democratic primary. She, like me, would have been torn by the choice but thrilled that such a choice were even possible. And once Candidate Obama became President Obama, she would have cried at the ability of our nation to see past old prejudices.  And then she would worry about his safety. And then she would want to scold him for smoking. And she would be grateful for the opportunity to set a new course for our nation and the world.

Mom would not “get” blogging or twitter. She would say, “get up from the computer and see the world and do things”. And she would rail against the dangers of typing on those raspberry gadgets while walking on the street. (She was never good at names or idioms). I would say, “BLACKberry, Mom!!” And she would wave me off with a quick retort, “DEEEtails”.

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A Family Pilgrimage

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So, we needed to go to Uncle B’s unveiling one recent Sunday. The previous Thursday, I received a call from cousin B. who wanted a ride because he and his wife want to see Uncle B. I wasn’t sure whether he remembered that Uncle B wasn’t going to be there.

So, on Sunday during the first hour of the trip, my sister and I tried to ascertain whether cousin B was going to freak out that no one told him Uncle B was dead, whether he actually knew but was using shorthand or whether he would start forgetting why he was there. Imagine, my sister’s and my asking questions in that way that people in the Saturday Night Live “Pat” skits tried to ascertain Pat’s gender. (He remembered.) But I digress.

My sister and I spent the day before bracing ourselves for my dad and Cousin B in the same car. Why, you ask? Because Cousin B talks about the intricacies of his bodily functions in such exquisite detail that it is a little disturbing and my father spontaneously breaks into “When Johnny comes marching home again”. No joke. No idea why.

My sister and I devised a counting system: my sister would get a point every time cousin B referred to prune juice as an elixir which he discovered, or how he is sledding downhill on a fast sled on an iced-over mountain. I would get a point every time Dad spontaneously broke into When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, or The Chicken in the Army. What we need to include next time is cousin B’s constant complaining — I ruined his good knee because there was not enough leg room — and Dad’s need to read every sign on the highway and, for fun, putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble. Total travel time, 3.5 hours each way plus a few hours at Uncle B’s son’s house for the obligatory food orgy.

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Life as a daughter

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Act I:

Ok ok ok ok ok. Dad’s in the ER. My sister-the-doctor is in Holland. I am now Dr. E in a cab going from one side of town to another in rush hour. The recession has made this less harrowing. The upside of the downturn. I spoke to him on his cell and he seems able to talk notwithstanding a thickness sensation in his throat. Sounds like anxiety that his doctor daughter is away and the lawyer daughter is the only progeny available for a consult. Nevertheless, time to get comfy because it’ll be a long night in the ER for an 89 year-old having an anxiety attack and his daughter who is not THE doctor.

Act II:

My dad is not a sympathetic patient. He is impatient. He wants the VIP treatment because my sister is a doctor. The daughter-who-is-the-doctor is half a world away but he is invoking her aura. He is uncomfortable but can certainly breathe without effort. The discomfort is episodic at most. I don’t wish to be uncharitable about this but if he goes to an ER (as opposed to make an emergency appointment with his any one of his various doctors during the day), he has to wait. The good news is that he isn’t sick enough to go to the top of the list.

There are kids with masks (swine flu no doubt), crazy people and really sick and hurt people. Dad looks like he is just in from Florida and got separated from the tour bus.

I have to use the facilities but I am too scared of the gross public bathrooms here.

Act III:

Ok, so the doctors discharged Dad. We have dinner at a gross neighborhood diner. Ok not dinner, “eats”. I’ll let this pass (like kidney stone).

I suggested (in that way I have of being less than politic) that he see Jeff, his internist (a lovely man who is my sister’s colleague and has known Dad for over 20 years) tomorrow. He mentioned that he thought of that earlier but decided to go to the ER. I then suggested (in THAT way) that maybe (in the future, G-d forbid) he should think to call the doctor and have him meet him in the ER. I say this because Dad had time to go to the periodontist in between gasping episodes. Ok ok ok ok ok. So I suggested that tomorrow Dad call and get a walk-in appointment with Jeff tomorrow and Jeff will walk him over to a specialist (there all share offices in those hospital doctor’s office suites). Also he stopped taking some blood pressure pills (rightfully so, because they were making him dizzy) but he didn’t tell THAT doctor that he had stopped. Ok.

So I took him home and we had a lovely chat about Obama and the gross things in his (Dad’s, not Obama’s) fridge. His former colleague called to see how he was and suggested that Dad call and get an emergency appointment with the internist tomorrow who will walk him over to a specialist. Where did we hear that before???? But DR. COLLEAGUE is more persuasive than DR. DAUGHTER-who-is-a-lawyer. Hey, I may only be a lawyer but Dr. COLLEAGUE knows SQUAT about Dad’s condition.

Dad was feeling fine and so I am on my way home. He didn’t feel like getting into his jammies, so he will call me before he goes to bed. I hope he doesn’t stay up too late because I am exhausted.

Oh and in response to his asking if I was in a meeting when he tried to reach me, I said that I was glad he called me and that I would drop anything if he were in trouble. To which he responded, “well I had to call because you wouldn’t have called me tonight, so how would you know anything had happened?” Shoot me.

Epilogue: the next day

I lost a night’s sleep thinking I left my father alone, but he sounded good last night when he phoned and he sounded great this morning. I woke up in the night choking on my saliva in some sympathetic response to his condition.

Dad went to the doctor and he had xrays and it might be a reflux-related spasm (I had also mentioned that the yesterday, which he dismissed out of hand because I am the wrong daughter to have these ideas). He will have a swallowing test but he is in good spirits.

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The downturn and the ramifications

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So this blog isn’t just about the humorous and the mundane, it is also about the disappointments.

Most people my age have younger parents. My parents were in their late 30s and early 40s when they had us. They were visionaries because, one generation later, most of my friends and I were that old when we had our own kids. My parents were born in the 1920s to immigrant, semi-literate parents. My parents lived through the depression, the wars and made the galactic leap beyond the Lower East Side and Pelham Parkway (in the Bronx) to settle down in midtown Manhattan where they sent us to private school, camp and schlepped us up to a weekend house. Now, it wasn’t exactly to the manor born because we lived in a tiny apartment (what did my parents know about personal space since they lived two to a bed and five to a room growing up?) and a rambling, ugly country house where there were no other weekenders. But we had all of the advantages and none of the handicaps of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations. My grandfather would shake his head — anything is possible in America.

My whole generation (one my father’s side) had a choice — doctor or lawyer. You could be any type of doctor you wanted or any kind of lawyer you wanted (except medical malpractice). So, choose already because the elders had to talk to the next cousin and make sure that no two cousins picked the same field. Redundancies do not make for a robust web of intra-family professional courtesies. There was a method to this madness.

We were raised to expect to work hard and succeed. Success was the inevitable end of hard work. You could miss Mother’s Day or a family celebration — even great uncle Lou’s retirement party — if you were working. (But you couldn’t miss a funeral or a shiva because even if you didn’t like the person alive, G-d forbid you wouldn’t pay your respects after the end.) But I digress.

Success was measured by your ability to give more to your children and community than your parents did. A Nobel Prize was not required but not off the table either, so to speak.

So, here I am, a formerly successful lawyer. In 2006 and even into 2007, I was feeling entitled and self-satisfied and as if I were paying it forward more than my parents did when, all kind of a sudden, the financial backbone of the world gave way. Like a retaining wall giving way and taking the building and neighboring buildings with it. I am one of the neighbors in the building next door. I had everything given to me and then it was all taken away. The difference is that what I was given was given with love, optimism and a significant amount of expectation and what was taken was taken by systemic hubris and greed.

My parents had the “suck it up” view of life — no matter what, we are responsible for our lives and fear of homelessness is good. Fear is a motivator. Ok, I am fearful but I can’t come up with an exit strategy. Hopelessness is the enemy and must be repelled ast all costs. I try to imagine that I am the protagonist in a Robert Ludlum novel about an anemic looking, gray-haired, 40-something desk jockey — ok, work with me — who fights against the great evil of NO HOPE.

So call me Joan Bourne. Because I want my family to live in comfort and I want this world to be a better place for my having been born into it. But I am still digging out of the mud from the destruction of the retaining wall. Speaking of retaining, my ankles are retaining water and I didn’t give birth to my child. And I can’t sneeze with any sense of security (pause, for the women readers to understand). So, let’s face it — not having given birth didn’t save me from any of this and I didn’t get the larger breasts.
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