Mother, Interrupted

Here's what happens when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At least if you're me. There's this total scoffing at the doctor's diagnosis. There's the trotting out of a hundred tiny facts your mother remembers even better than you and you're thirty years younger than her. There's the railing at a system of treating the elderly that throws them into categories: one gets dementia, then next Alzheimer's. Next!


Then you notice that she loses a few words here and there. Easy words like the names of her favorite restaurant or the word "checkbook." Then you notice her conversation becomes a little constrained, topic-wise, like she only wants to talk about food, she can talk about it for hours, yet she only says the same thing over and over again - how good it is. You find yourself missing your mother and she's sitting right in front of you.

Then maybe there's an interim event - a fall perhaps, or maybe a car accident, in your case. And then there's no more room for denial. Denial packs a bag and slithers away in the middle of the night. When your mother is recuperating from her injuries, which means she's finally left her convalescing couch, her world becomes constrained. She stopped cooking during her weeks on the couch and now, she tells you, she no longer cooks. Nor your stepfather. Food just magically appears every day and, anyway, they don't eat much. Some rice, some noodles, maybe a piece of challah. And, yes, it's good. Very, very good.

The mother you had - the annoying, argumentative one, the one you used to butt heads with, the one who used to find a way to interject a Holocaust story into every conversation until you were sure you too had lived in the forest running from the Nazis, that mother has been interrupted. And in her place? A different mother. A different kind of mother. A mother and a daughter and a child all at once.

Interrupted.

Have you ever had diagnostic news where your first reaction was denial? Have you ever had a relationship interrupted abruptly due to illness or otherwise, something other than you had planned?

Past Tense, Present Tense

My mother and father, wedding day 1951

Once upon a time I was a fifteen-year-old with no father. This had happened very suddenly. Like as suddenly as a heart attack, mainly because it was a heart attack. My father was alive one second and dead the next.

When I was a kid and I first realized that there was such a thing called death, the first thing I thought was that I couldn't bear to lose my parents. I knew my grandparents would die one day because they seemed very old to my young eyes, but not my parents. It was absolutely beyond my imagination that my parents would someday not be there. It was something best not thought of. So even though my father had had a minor heart attack before we moved to Arizona from Chicago, I never dwelled on his mortality. He was strong like an ox, he was stubborn like an ox. The word "ox" came up a lot when discussing my father. And yet, he was gone.

At fifteen I looked around and I saw that I was pretty much alone in this strange new world of half-orphans. Everyone else my age had fathers. No one else had to redo the way they spoke, to eliminate the word "parents" from their vocabulary and replace it with the word "mother." No one else had to start using past tense when speaking of their dad.

And now it's just the opposite. The years have passed. The language has changed. When you're fifty, everyone speaks of their parents in past tense because almost no one has a parent. If we meet up at a reunion it's never, "How are your parents?" There's more gingerly touching upon the subject, a more careful question: "Do you still have your parents?"

And suddenly, the exact opposite of myself at fifteen, at fifty I'm overcome by my abundance. Somehow, I still have a mother. I'm one of the few who doesn't have to mark her life by the days she lost one parent and then the other. Beyond all reason, all my doubts, all my fears, there she is, alive at nearly eighty.

So even though there's something a little quieter about her now, and something slowing down, and something that's definitely leaving, I think of that fifteen-year-old who thought she was so unlucky, and I think of this fifty-year-old who is so lucky, really. Because eighty is good. If she almost got killed at age twelve while running from Nazis in the forest of Belarus and instead of dying she's almost eighty, that's good.

Do you remember realizing your parents were mortal when you were a kid? How distressing was that? Was there ever a time when you had to change the way you spoke about your family, due to divorce or death, at an awkward time?

The Merchant of Phoenix

I come from a long line of merchant Jews. We're kind of the middle class type Jews, not the rich ones and not the Torah scholars. We're the ones who own stores and laundries. As a matter of fact, my father owned a laundry in Chicago. My grandfather? A shoemaker. My great-uncle? A tailor. My great-grandfather? A woodcutter. Like in Little Red Riding Hood.

Once my relatives came to the United States, they were a little pushy about their occupations. They knew that the riches of America were theirs for the taking, but first they had to take them. That meant that they had to let people know what they did for a living, how their product or services could change the customers' lives, how things could be so much better with clean laundry, a well-made pair of shoes, or a finely tailored suit. 

Of course, I was mortified by my relatives. I felt if they had just been American-born, they would not have been so pushy. They'd have been more polished, more reticent, maybe less embarassing. To me.

Since I'm a little slow, I want to tell you what I figured out today that made me think that maybe I have to be a little pushy today on my blog. On Poetica Magazine's website where I'm the Blog Editor, I'm hosting a writer this week who writes quite movingly about interviewing children of Holocaust Survivors and how she's spent some time reading the literature they've been producing. So all day long I've thought, "Oh, that's me, right? Children of Survivors and the literature they're producing. Me." Gulp.

And since I realize that Holocaust Survivors like my mother are becoming rare and soon all the world will have are the children of survivors and the stories we have of growing up with our parents, I wanted to do something I would normally shy away from doing: direct you to two venues where my writing is appearing in March. Even though that's, um, pushy.

I haven't written too much on this blog about how crazy it was growing up one of seven sisters in Skokie, where it was assumed that my mother was deranged for not stopping at two children. After all, what was she trying to do? Repopulate the world after the Holocaust? One of my stories, called "Seven Sisters," an excerpt from my (unpublished) book Seven Sisters is appearing on my friend, Sandra Hurtes', website for the month of March. Spend some time while you're there looking at Sandra's work. She's a brilliant essayist and child of Holocaust Survivors whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and is forthcoming in Poets and Writers. I highly recommend her collection of essays, On My Way to Someplace Else, which can be purchased on her website.

If you can imagine what it was like having parents whose greatest thrill was going on vacations to visit other Holocaust Survivors all across the country so they could sit and cry for hours over all the misery in the world while their children stuck to plastic-covered sofas, then you can imagine what my childhood was like. A story of mine about vacations with my parents, called "Holocaust Vacation," is being published in an anthology of the work of Children of Holocaust Survivors coming out in March, called Mizmor L'David (Psalms of David). Even ignoring my own work, the Anthology is filled with some fascinating cutting edge work from writers who are children of survivors.

 

There, I did it. Now we'll get back to our regular programming.

Do you come from a long line of merchants, like me? What are you doing with your writing life? Any ambitions? Does anyone know a great literary agent?

My Mother's Forest

My mother called me up recently to tell me she had heard about a movie about the Jews who had hidden from the Nazis in the forest during World War II, just like she had. Have I heard of it?

She runs all these things past me because I'm the Super Jew in the family. Of course, there's a very low bar on Jewish adherence in my family. In this family, just subscribing to the Jewish newspaper means I'm some kind of Jewish fanatic.

But I do keep on top of the Jewish world, so I say, "Sure, Mom. It's called Defiance. It came out awhile ago - over six months. I just bought it on DVD."

This gets her very excited because if my mother can combine her two favorite things in the world, the Holocaust and television, this is a good thing indeed.

She says, "Can I borrow it?" And I say yes even though I haven't watched it yet. I bought it because of my family's history and because I know I should watch it, but, really, I have no intention of watching it. Having been raised in my mother's Holocaust immersion school of child-rearing, I can't stand to purposely subject myself to it. But to my mother? Pure unadulterated pleasure. Nothing can be better than two hours of complete abject misery - watching and crying, crying and watching.

I bring it over to her house and she says, "Oh, good! I'm going to watch it right now! Can you put it in the machine? You want to stay and watch with me?" I swear part of her thinks that maybe she'll see someone she knows.

Of course this wasn't even tempting to me. I say, "No thanks. Two hours of Jews being chased through the forest by Nazis who are trying to kill them? That sounds like my childhood."

"What? You were safe in Skokie!"

"Ma! You told us about it everyday in Skokie!"

"Oh."

Later she tells me she watched but she didn't like it very much so she stopped before the end. It wasn't exactly what she thought it would be like. It wasn't exactly about the part of the forest she had lived in; the family portrayed wasn't exactly like her family; they didn't live through exactly the same experiences she had lived through. So when another of my sisters came over to her house, my mom loaned my movie to her.

Then she turned on Schindler's List instead.

Full House

Today I was sitting in my weight-related 12-step meeting listening to a share when suddenly I realized I felt full. And I don't mean full of food. I mean that for the first time in my life - 49 years - I don't feel like I absolutely need something that I don't have.

I don't mean to make a big deal out of nothing but remember, I'm Jewish, the child of Holocaust survivors, number six out of seven daughters. Want is my middle name. I was born fighting my way to the top of the family, born fighting for food from a mother who never bought enough, and apparently born ready to buy everything else.

But lately there is calm. I take no credit for this other than after what I hope to have been my last compulsive shopping trip ever, I came home with a set of filled bags hardly knowing what I'd bought and hid them in my closet and realized I was very sick. I then walked around the house with my camera and photographed the evidence of my shopping sickness: too much furniture in every room (because one day I might move into a house twice as big and I'll need it); the closet filled with empty bags, each with a receipt in it (because I might return everything); books piled everywhere, even duplicates; my kids, turned into compulsive shoppers themselves, toys everywhere in their rooms; my living room now a storage warehouse, filled with all the paintings I never put up, an antique mirror collection, and enough furniture for two living rooms. The wreckage of my past.

It's just been about 28 days right now. Baby steps. But full is good. Full is something I never felt before. Full means that I might be somewhere near gratitude, and that sounds like a pretty good place to live.