The Mother of Them All
Let’s face it! “Mother’s Day” is the most fake commercial holiday ever. It’s totally ridiculous. Think about it. After nine months of varying levels of comfort/discomfort and labor, long or short, so intense it can permanently alter your perception of reality, this delivered mass of human flotsam becomes your responsibility twenty-four hours, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year…. depending on your ethnic, religious, cultural and national traditions, for the rest of your life.
Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t read the fine print, either.
On the one hand, I can’t believe I think a lousy card and flowers once a year is an acceptable thank you. On the other hand, I am someone who cries at supermarket openings.
Just think about it. You could empty Fort Knox, melt frozen assets of Oligarchs and countries like Iran, Russia, China, etc., and it wouldn’t touch what mothers are owed by their children. All right, already, we know there are plenty of Mommy Dearest exceptions. However, I think there are many more like me who realize that no matter how many books I read, no matter how many classes I took, no matter how many psychics I consulted, I didn’t know how dumb I was as I raised my children.
The mother-daughter conflicts seemed endless and unforgivable. But wait… as my children began to have their children and climbed some of the same sand mountains that I had climbed, in time, they became much more forgiving. Life is funny that way!
In the spirit of that irony, I want to share a little of my mother’s story.
Anna and Louis birthed eight children. Only three of the original eight remain. Growing up, we all had different versions of who our parents were. By default, since I’m the only one with computer skills, my version of “Mom” is the only one that counts. Also, at long last, David, Arlene, and I recognize that truth, like beauty and justice, is in the eye, the good one, of the beholder.
In 1974, my mother passed away. In my heart, this was never supposed to happen. Once you have a live mother, she is a live mother forever. Right???
My mother, good, bad, indifferent, was going to live forever. She had to.
How could she die before she said to me and to the world around me and most especially to my seven other brothers and sisters, “I love Sally-Jane best of all”?
When she died, her children gathered at the house I had left to get married in 1954 in Westchester County. Raymond, Allyn, Marilyn, Elliot, Lucille, David, and Arlene, all seated around the dining room table, began discussion and division of the family booty. To escape the negotiations, I pulled down the stairs and the light chain and climbed up into the attic. I found boxes of fantastic photographs of my mother’s family dating from the late 19th and early 20th Century. I love history. I settled down to look at the passing parade. Next to the boxes of photos was another box, falling apart from age. Gently, I opened it and discovered a hidden treasure. Letters between my mother and my father during their first year of marriage, 1919.
My mother, Anna, was 26, and my father, Louis, was 25, not kids. Louis worked for Anna’s father, David, a master cabinet maker and office furniture designer as a “messenger-man” at his factory in Brooklyn while going to City College part-time and aspiring to be an actor. He delivered a message to Anna from her father. One look at the handsome, six-footer, and it was all over… for Louis. Louis might have thought marrying the boss’s daughter was a good thing. It wasn’t. David, Anna’s father, always thought of Louis as the “messenger-man” who was marrying his “spinster” daughter for her and/or his money. In an attempt to get out from under the thumb and debt of Anna’s rich father, Louis shelved his dreams and found a job in Chicago.
In his very distinctive handwriting, Louis promised Anna he was on his way to a successful business career. He would provide for her and their future family better than her father ever could. Unwritten was the sacrifice of his dream to be an actor. Beware those unwritten, unspoken sacrifices. I can guarantee personally that they will surface at the most inappropriate times and spoil the souffle.
In her very distinctive handwriting, it almost sounded like she wanted to support his promise for their future but couldn’t quite go the distance. She fell back on what was familiar and made her feel more secure. It’s the old sleight of hand mixed signal trick. Anna made the necessary noises that appeared to support Louis’ dreams as she established a life that made her feel secure and safe by remaining in her childhood home after they married. A house that was owned by her father. Whatever major expenses our family had, the mortgage, utilities, school fees, bar mitzvahs, weddings came from Anna’s father’s pocket. Louis' salary could only afford hot dogs with mustard and sauerkraut for his children’s amusements.
After Anna and Louis married, her father, David, feeling secure in Anna’s loyalty, moved from the house he owned to a suite of rooms in a good hotel in Manhattan. He was an unusual widowed immigrant playboy. His Ukrainian accent was so thick as to be incomprehensible. Not to worry. David carried the best translator of all time… money.
Anna and Louis, two unrealized souls pretending to be who they were not for the sake of their “love”, were on two separate tracks going in two different directions. She reserved a private room on a train for a quick visit to Chicago.
Previously, they had agreed they would have no children until Louis' success was assured. I swear it’s in the letters. Consciously or unconsciously, she went to Chicago to get pregnant. She succeeded. She returned home. She was shocked when Louis suggested “doing something”. Louis was forced to leave Chicago and return to Brooklyn. He came home to become a father and my mother’s consigliere.
I brought these letters down from the attic. Excitedly, I showed my brothers and sisters what I had found. I wanted to read some of the letters. No one was interested. To this day, I do not understand why. Don’t tamper with the family mystique? What mystique? We were a large Jewish family, maybe more dysfunctional than most, only because there were more of us to be dysfunctional.
I left with the box of letters, which, over the years, gave me the dimension and detail of a personal and intimate portrait of Anna and Louis—pure gold.
I wasn’t fast enough. My parents died before I got a chance to talk things out with them. I’m not sure even if they were alive that would’ve ever happened. But it was OK. These letters connected some very important dots. Over the years, with partners, children, friends, I struggled to be heard, to be understood. In this correspondence, I saw a very human Anna and Louis, not the pillars of perfection they had pretended to be during my lifetime, struggling to do likewise with each other.
In the middle of the night recently, apparently my best time for rumination, I asked myself, “Hey self, if they were not your parents, would you like to get to know your mother or your father?” Naturally, that question kept me up all night. Damn, the sacrifices I make for art. After a sleepless think, here’s my conclusion:
My father would be fun and amusing for the short haul, but it was my mother who really interested me. With Anna, I would be on an endless journey through the caves and caverns of her restless and provocative mind. One didn’t ever ask her a question if you didn’t want to know what she thought. She felt privileged enough to be on the wrong side of many issues.
Our family was lifelong Democrats. In 1952, Eisenhower was running for President, and Nixon was his Vice Presidential candidate. He was accused of financial improprieties. Duh???? Can you believe how innocent we used to be? Recently, we had a Congressional Representative who lied about everything he ever was and did. What am I talking about? We might have a President who governs us from his jail cell.
In that Eisenhower-Nixon campaign, Nixon went on television crying and pleading his case. My mother voted Republican for the first time in our family history. She didn’t hide that fact from anyone. She told my father and anyone who would listen. “A grown man that cries is telling the truth. Liars don’t cry.” Apparently, she forgot what actors are hired to do.
In her 60s, after we had all left and married and her husband had retired, her restless mind decided it was time to finally graduate high school. She commuted from Westchester to New York City every day for two years. She wanted to go on to college. Her retired husband said, “Enough!”
Beware those unwritten, unspoken sacrifices.
To answer my question, if I didn’t know her, would I have enjoyed getting to know her? Yes… if I wasn’t her daughter.
As I said, my mother’s death was the beginning of the perfect storm in my own life. I was FREE. She was never going to disapprove of anything I said or did ever again.
This freedom thing is tricky. I can’t believe some of the choices I made. But that was when I was smart and had all the answers. Oh, my friends, in the short term, ignorance really is bliss.
Love, Sally-Jane
P.S. ONCE A MOTHER. ALWAYS A MOTHER