A Life in Fifteen Lines or Less

From time to time I read the obituaries. Like just in case someone I know has actually passed away and I didn't know, or because I'm a writer and I read between the lines - looking at the birth and death dates, the life histories, the old people whose obituaries are accompanied by their picture from World War II. And sometimes I read them because we just need to pay attention. They're there and they memorialize someone's life and I can give them my time.

So I was really surprised when pricing obituaries yesterday, how much it costs to run one. Two hundred dollars for one day and fifteen lines. More for extra days and lines, and even more for a photograph. Somewhere in my naive little mind I thought these ran as community announcements, as community service. Not as ads.

If you read this blog back in 2009 and 2010 you may remember the madcap adventures of the elderly in my life - my Holocaust Survivor Jewish mother and my Ohio Farmer Methodist Stepfather. Her yelling and his deafness, which actually made an ideal combination; his constant puttering, gluing and winching, involved in dozens of mystifying projects around the house, like gluing together ice cube trays and winching broken laundry baskets, because nothing ever needed to be replaced, yet the house was still falling down around their heads. And my mother sat in her place on the couch in the family room, phones and remote controls in front of her - her command center - the living switchboard of our seven daughter family. Who knew those were the good old days?

But then there was decline and a decision that our mother needed to live with one of us due to her need for twenty-four hour a day care. Stepfather did not want to make the same move. He continued puttering about the empty house, still busy with projects, with ham radio, with driving his truck fifteen miles an hour down the road seeking garage sale finds. I saw him often, brought soup. But still I thought, he's 87. He can't live there alone forever.

There were a lot of options available to him, one of which was to move to be close to one of his daughters. And I swear he was alive and well this past January as he shuffled off with his kids, the yard sale items with which the house had been filled compressed finally into six suitcases and a mobile mini.

Who knows what it is that keeps a person in one piece, that keeps a person going? Who knows what strange collection of circumstances and location and relationships - and maybe glue and winches - keep a person going? Because by the end of March, and his 88th birthday, Stepfather was hospitalized, and on May 6th he passed away.

And on May 9th I was on a website trying to figure out how to condense the life of one man into fifteen lines and one day and found that it is impossible.

Rest in peace, Bob Milburn.

The Voice from the Bed

My mother was sick recently. Like really sick. Hospitalized sick.

First there was my mom at 80 - spry, the mall walking, seniorcizing ball of energy. Then there was her auto accident a little over a year ago and things changed. Suddenly there was my mom, her couch, her TV remote and her phones lined up in front of her. A smaller life and an older mom where suddenly taking a walk meant walking to the kitchen.

So she got sick like that, just sitting on the couch with not even a breeze blowing by and it was the usual mayhem in the hospital - seven sisters showing up here and there, and grandchildren and husbands and the nurses wondering exactly how many offspring one woman could have anyway?

I knew I had to leave for Chicago right before she was getting out since I was appearing at a Jewish United Fund event for my book but how was I supposed to leave her that way?

I was pondering that, sitting in the hospital room, the oxygen machine hissing away, watching the IV drip, when I suddenly heard my mom's voice from the bed.

"What are you wearing for the presentation? You bought something new?"

Like swimming out of the murky depths of old age, my mother suddenly reappeared before me, as evidenced by her lifelong obsession with the buying of clothes. I breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing could convince me my mother was on the mend more than her quizzing me about clothes.

(that's me in the center at JUF event)

"I have a great outfit, Ma. A brown sweater dress, Clark boot shoes, brown tights and a jacket."

She looks at me askance. She's unhappy, but not exactly with my outfit. She's unhappy that I've taken care of it already and out of my own closet without going shopping. Going shopping in my closet doesn't count. With my mother every event must be shopped for anew even if you have the clothes already. Then she moves on to a different event.

"What about for Joan Rivers?" Somehow, she can't remember how to boil an egg but she remembers my itinerary in Chicago with a mind like a steel trap.

"Gray dress, black jacket, black boots and tights."  
                                                               
She nods but I can tell that she's a little let down. She really wanted to plot out a shopping trip, a meandering path of me traipsing from store to store to store searching for the perfect outfit. Or, based on her history as a lifelong seamstress, her sewing it for me.

When I see that she's about to question me about all the other clothes I'll be wearing and, more importantly, whether I'll be dressed warm enough, I take over and I become the mother again.

When I return from Chicago, she's out of the hospital but back on the couch, the oxygen hissing next to her. But there's still part of her there. I visit her the morning after we return, sit down next to her on that couch. She says, "How'd the outfit go?"

Is there any one topic that your parent(s) love talking about or that you know when they bring it up that they're on the mend? Any aging parent issues?

Linda Pressman
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie

My Mother's Closet (a Faceshuk post)

Daughter is now twelve. This means a few things. Like she's sprouted up to over 5'3. (Though, somehow, she still only weighs 89 pounds...) It also means adolescence - female adolescence - has set in causing her to fight with me each day like I fought with my mother before me.

But it also means this: her clothes doesn't fit anymore or they're too babyish, or not cool enough, or any of a thousand other reasons she can no longer wear them. She stomps into my bathroom while I'm getting ready each morning, says she needs to go shopping, and then goes shopping. Right then. In my closet.

On the one hand I know I should be pretty grateful she wants to go in there. I am 39 years older than her, after all. Also, I'm glad that we actually fit in some of the same clothes especially since I don't weigh anywhere near 89 pounds. But what's the chance of me having anything hip enough for her?

Turns out that the clothes that are now too young for me are just the right age for her. The clothes I monitor carefully, aware that there's a thin line between dressing well and looking like I'm longing for the 1970s and my own teen years. The stuff that doesn't make the cut gets trotted out for the tween.

This wasn't something I could do when I was a kid in Skokie. First of all, even if our mother's clothes had been attractive to us, I had five older sisters who would have gotten there first. Second, her clothes were never going to appeal to us. I was 12 in 1972, for goodness sakes. I wanted - needed - hippyish clothes, maybe a leather bandanna for my forehead, a halter top, bell bottom baggy jeans, maybe a fringed vest.

My mother's closet was not the place to find these items. The most noticeable thing upon opening its door was the smell of mothballs. Then there were the brocade dresses, the handmade suits, the torturous pumps, the foundation garments. My mother's clothes could actually stand up and walk around by themselves, they were that stiff, they didn't need a human body in them. For a free-wheeling 12-year-old who didn't want to dress like Jackie Onassis, that wasn't the look I was going for.

But here in Scottsdale, in 2011, with a mom who writes at home and has her professional clothes gathered neatly in one side of the closet, it's a windfall for the kid. She looks around at the clothes I think would be perfect for her, rejects them all, steals my favorite top off its hanger and sneaks off before I completely notice what she's doing.

As I'm exiting the bathroom I notice another thing: Bar Mitzvahzilla coming in half-dressed, insisting he also has no clothes to wear. The last thing I see is him heading off to his own shopping spree - in Husband's closet.

Did you ever "shop" in your mom's or sister's closets? Can you? Does your daughter "shop" in yours?

Thanks for reading!
Linda Pressman, author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indiebound, in many local libraries, and at Changing Hands in Tempe.
(The "Faceshuk" in the title and this code: 3daa678fe7c57f042a0645dfc6668578 are intended to establish my blog ownership on the Faceshuk site. Check it out!)

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?

Crashing Through

I've spent a lot of time at my mother's house over the last two-plus weeks, since she and Stepfather were involved in a car accident. I'm kind of their own personal adjuster since my old job, when I had a real job, was handling bodily injury claims for a really big insurance company for eighteen years.

There are things you discover when you putter around an old person's house with them each day. In the case of my mother I discover that, although she apparently has a inbred aversion to taking any prescription medication at all, instead taking horse-size vitamins impossible for me to sort into a pill container, she still somehow has saved every medication she's ever come across.

I open her medicine cabinet the night of her accident looking for Tylenol since one of the things I found out right away is that when you're eighty-five and eighty-years-old and involved in an accident, it might just be impossible to have someone really listen to you who's not related to you. Not the police officers and not the emergency room staff. No one. They'll take a look at your Medicare card, they'll make sure you're not dying, and then you'll be set on your way, even if you can't remember any one of your seven daughters' phone numbers. So neither of them had gotten a prescription at the emergency room.

In her medicine cabinet, however, were pill bottles dating back at least twenty-five years. There was one with my old name on it, from my ex-marriage, and I got divorced in 1989. It was like a pharmacy museum in there: old time pill bottles, typed up labels before computers were used, various treacherous caps that my mom would never be able to open now.

Then I spent some time with Stepfather. I found him outside a few days after the accident hanging up my mother's laundry on the clothes line with the radio blasting. Because we have a bantering relationship I said, "You guys must be very popular with the neighbors, what with the blasting radio and the makeshift clothesline," just a series of strings he had strung all over the patio from chair to chair. He laughed and explained the problem he was having with my mother overfilling her laundry basket and cracking the handles. He'd devised a fix, however, and took me to the garage to show me it. He'd glued the handles back together on both ends with some epoxy and was holding them in place with vise grips. Like twenty vise grips. I said, "Or you could buy a new laundry basket at the dollar store for a dollar, right?" Again, he laughed.

There have been a lot of frustrations over the last two weeks, a lot of doing something and then doing it again and again because of various problems in the process. But there are also several images that will always stay with me. There's the image of my stepfather sitting down silently next to my mother, in pain on the couch, and holding her hand. The image of them getting out of the car together when I took them to physical therapy, again walking hand in hand. And one I'd like to forget: that of my mother, whose Alzheimer's has worsened because of this, sitting beside me on the couch, but being nowhere near.

What strange things have you discovered in your parents' homes? Any strange collectibles, like prescription bottles? Witnessed any touching moments? Any heartbreaking ones?

R.I.P. BlackBerry

On Sunday my BlackBerry died.

It's not like I had time to think about it right then. I had just walked in my mother's house with her and my stepfather, having gotten them from the emergency room where they'd been transported after a car accident. So right then I had time to think only about this: my injured eighty-year-old mother teetering down the hallway, making her way to her bedroom to undress and somehow climb into bed with lacerations and bruises all over her body. So, even though I'm a slave to the blinking red light of my phone, hypnotized by its allure, unable to resist its blinking call, I ignored it and took care of my mother.

You know how you always hear these phone horror stories, like about people losing all their lists of contacts and phone numbers and why didn't they just back it up before that happened, before disaster hit? Well, of course, that's what happened to me. I didn't back anything up, mostly because I didn't understand the back up technology. Like, copy it to what? Online or a memory chip in the phone? Ack. Here was my backup plan: one day I was planning to sit down with my phone and handwrite all those contacts into an actual paper phonebook. With all the time I've spent procrastinating over the last few months, you'd think at least I could have done that one thing, which would have been useful.

Instead? Dead BlackBerry flatlining in my palm. Injured mother on the couch. Tow yards, body shops and insurance companies calling nonstop, doctor appointments to be made, all of these places wanting to fax something, email something, text something. Phone needed.

Providentially this happens to be four days before our plotted defection from Verizon to AT&T and, perhaps, an iPhone 4. So what to do for a phone in the interim? My husband gives me this thing he has laying around the house. A  flip phone. To text I have to go through the entire alphabet for each letter. No emails, no internet. I'm completely unwired in the daytime, like it's 1990 or something. It's like he handed me a chisel and a tablet and told me to scratch out messages.

But somewhere in my brain it's dawning on me that this thing I'm using is actually just what it's supposed to be: a phone. I now also know an incredible reason to have children, beyond the cute baby stage, beyond the make-me-proud stage. It's so when you're eighty and can't handle the small details of your life anymore and can't quite talk to strangers about how they're talking too fast and you don't understand them, it's a good thing to have your adult children standing like a fortress around you.

Do you back up your phone? Do you remember when you were really excited just to have a phone and now have to have a high tech gadget? Any preference between BlackBerrys or iPhones?  Have you had to become the "parent" in any circumstances to your parent?

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?

Essential Yiddish: Part One

I grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents. Of course, both of them were born in Eastern Europe so that makes sense. While they each spoke about five languages, Yiddish was the language they spoke to each other and, although the oldest sisters were fluent in Yiddish, they lost it when they started school. By the time sister number seven was born, my parents were forced to speak to their Yiddish-illiterate children in one language only: English. 

They tried to speak Yiddish to me but, as the number six child, you can bet I wasn't listening. As a American child of the 1960s, Yiddish was somewhat of an embarassment to me. I looked on it with some hostility since it was always used to keep secrets from me and because it was used for the incessant chattering of a billion uninteresting grown up conversations.

Of course, I changed my mind later. Too late. Long after my brain had frozen onto English and I only knew Yiddish adjectives and exclamations. But those Yiddish adjectives and exclamations color my world. I can't live without them. I teach them to my children and to my Amerikanish Jewish husband (his family? No Yiddish). And today, I teach it to you. Well, a first lesson, anyway.

Five Yiddish words you can't live without.

1) Drek - Crap or substandard junk. You can eat something and pronounce it "drek," or you can buy something shoddily made and declare it "drek." Needless to say, this one comes in handy.

2) Goniff - The jerk who sold you the drek - literally, a thief. A person who steals you blind. A pronouncement on his soul for being a thieving liar.

3) Schlmozel - You for being a hopeless dupe who got swindled by the goniff who sold you drek.
[Shl-mah-zle]

4) Schpilkes - How you feel inside now with your guts churning after you were such a schlmozel for buying such drek from that goniff. [Shpill-kiss]

5) Meshuganah - Crazy, insane. How you feel when you think about the goniff who gave you such schpilkes when he sold you the drek and made you into such a schlmozel. [Mesh-u-gah-nah]

Feel free to use these words however they fit into your life. You can pepper your speech with them for a little color. You can throw them around when you're angry so no one will know what you're talking about. Or you can do what my mom did: you can teach your children these words and then mutter commentary on the people around you under your breath so that only your children know that you have a steady stream of Yiddish criticisms rolling off your tongue while you're beaming at the synagogue ladies. 

Does your family have any vestiges of an Old Country language it still uses? Any secret language? Will any of these words come in handy? Did your parents try to give you something you cast off but later appreciated?

Ship to Shore

There's this book I used to read my kids called "Are You My Mother?" In it a squawky-looking bird falls out of his nest and goes looking for his mother so he can find his home. It's the kind of book young children love and parents find a little repetitive since the bird has to find the wrong thing over and over before he finds the right thing, saying, is this his mother? Is that his mother? Is the steam shovel his mother? The kids love it because most of the things the bird questions are very obviously not his mother so they get to yell out a resounding, "No!" each time.

Fun, I guess, unless you happened to have misplaced your mother, as I have.

February 6th she went gallivanting off with Stepfather, bound for South America on a Holland America cruise. That day sister number one got a phone call. They were on the ship resting and they would be sailing shortly. After that? No word.

So I'm like that squawky bird, faintly irritable, looking for my mother.

I get somewhere early and am waiting in my car so I think, hmmm, I've got a bit of a wait; should I call my mom? Or I gather up tidbits of news and I think, I need to tell my mom about this. I think I'll give her a call. Or I get home, plop on my bed, the phone nearby, and I think, okay, time to give mom her daily call.

But maybe it's about time I faced the fact that it's not really her daily call at all - it's my daily call. Because I end up calling everyone else - just like the bird in the book - is this sister my mother? Is Husband my mother? Who will fill in during the cruise month? Who wants to hear all my stupid crap, the odds and ends, the accumulated junk that only a mother could be interest in?

I'm not the only one feeling vaguely disoriented. First there were some inquiry-type emails going back and forth among the other members of our seven sister litter. Then we started getting alarmed. I had a vague concern about the boatload of senior citizens marooned in South America, perhaps all completely computer illiterate, all arriving in the ship's "Internet Cafe" and wondering how they could order some Folger's.

Finally, at sixteen dollars a minute, one of the twins got a message to her, attached as the greeting to the  manicure she had to purchase just to communicate at all. Then our mother called. She left a message. They're having a great time. They're rounding the tip of Peru. Don't call back.

How annoying is it when you miss someone and they don't miss you? Or you are missed but you're having too much fun to think? Do you save up conversational odds and ends for certain people? Have you read this book to your kids?

Love of a Mother

Twins, Mom and me, the baby, in 1960.

Dear Mom,

It's occurred to me lately that you just may not be immortal. Besides depressing the hell out of me, this has  made me realize that writing a love letter to you just may be the best topic for me to write about for the Momalom Love It Up challenge.

I sat beside you on your lumpy couch this week and became concerned. Very concerned. First of all, you, who never stop talking, weren't talking. Second of all, your TV, normally blasting out old Westerns from the 50s, was on mute. One sister told me that you tried to change the TV channel with the phone. And even though we handled this little medical crisis with a quick change in medication, it brought to mind your fragile mortality; after all, you'll be eighty in June. So here's the deal:  I may be turning fifty in four weeks, but I'm not ready to be an orphan.

Flash back thirty-five years ago, to March 1st, 1975, six days before my fifteen birthday. Dad dies suddenly,  leaving you a forty-four-year-old widow. From then on - all the way till now - I am waiting, with paranoid anticipation, for the other shoe to drop, and you're the other shoe. One parent disappears around the horizon with no warning, no goodbyes, his clothes still hanging in the closet, his shoes just standing there, his wallet and keys on the dresser, his car in the driveway. Gone. Who's to say it can't happen to the other parent?

And, of course, it can. So I've guarded you these past thirty-five years. I've been your amateur doctor, calling you daily, living nearby, writing your story, trying my best to live this Jewish life. But I can't stop you from aging, can't stop little pieces of you disappearing one by one, and I can't stop you from eventually disappearing altogether. No matter how meticulous my care and that of my sisters, it will happen and then, when I reach for the phone each day to talk to you, ready to share my successes and my failures, I'll have to pull my hand back from the phone, remembering that you're no longer there.

I've written about you a lot on this blog. I've poked a lot of fun - at your wreck of a cactus-strewn acre in Scottsdale, at the way you pack, the way you drive, the way you talk on the phone. But when you strip it all away, the humor, the writing, the blog, there's only one fact that's left standing: I wouldn't be able to write about being a mom without having known the love of one.

Happy Valentine's Day, Mom.
From your number six daughter, Linda

Do you ever feel your parents' mortality like an oncoming train? Did you ever have a loss that made you wary, like things were suddenly very precarious? How much are you still and always a daughter (or son) and how much a parent? Or do you instantly turn back into a kid when you talk to your parent?

Destination - South America

My mom called me a few weeks ago and asked me if she could borrow one of my suitcases. Because I'm the daughter who lives closest to her, I'm the one she calls first for everything. If I can't help her, then and only then, will she move back onto her daughter list, calling everyone else.

But a suitcase? Sure. Husband and I are virtually leg-shackled to Phoenix since we own a store, so we can never get out of town, leaving our suitcases unused in our closet. 

I said, "Sure, when do you need it?"

She said, "Right away."

"Where are you going?" I knew she was leaving in a month for a cruise to South America, but where was she going right then?

"Linda! We're going on the cruise!"

"Wait a minute. Are you telling me you need the suitcase a month ahead of time for your cruise in February?"

Silence. Busted.

"We need to start packing."

"A month ahead of time?"

"I'm going to wash all my clothes and then fold them and see if they fit in the suitcase. Then I'll decide what I'm taking. If they don't fit, then I'll see what I can fit, wash it, fold it and fit it again. Then I'll try it all on right before the cruise to make sure it fits, wash it, fold it and pack it one final time. Then Bob will take the suitcases down to a place and have them weighed full so we'll know if we have to pay the airline."

What did I ask her again?

But now it's February. Her trip is days away. She sits in her house, strangely immobile. I call her to check on her, to see if she feels okay. She says she does but she's not leaving the house. I hesitate before asking why. Do I really want to know why? Do I really have to ask why? Why do I get hoodwinked into these conversations over and over again? But I can't help myself. We're attached like twins, this mother and me.

And of course, the answer is that she packed all of her clothes and now has nothing to wear. Also, she doesn't want to risk getting sick in the cold January Arizona air by going outside.

I say, "Ma, today it was 72 degrees."

She says, "To you that's nice. To me, it's cold."

I nod my head. What'd I expect? I tell her I'll come by this week to say goodbye. She says, "Hurry already. We're busy!"

And I do it again. I ask her, "Busy with what?"

And she says, "Final packing." 

Are you a last-minute packer or more the girl scout type? Am I the only one who gets sucked into conversational quagmires? Are you attached at the hip to your mother?

Seven Things

Because Chris over at A Deliberate Life awarded me the Beautiful Blogger Award, I get to tell you seven things you may not know about me. Here goes:

1) My mother, for some reason, named me Jane, not Linda. Then my uncle came to see me at the hospital and decided I was not a "plain Jane" (no insult intended to all the Janes out there) and decided my name should be Linda. Despite the fact that my name had already been entered on my official Cook County Birth Certificate, my immigrant mother undertook the name change all by herself: she took a pencil, picked up the unofficial hospital document with my footprints on it, and wrote in the name "Linda" above the name Jane with insert marks. This caused a lot of problems years later when I tried to get a passport.

2) Because of the Holocaust, my parents had a troublesome relationship with Judaism - like they were pretty much atheists. How I ended up being such a believing, faith-filled, goofball of a Jew is almost incomprehensible. I can only attribute it to the fact that sometimes, with Holocaust Survivor parents, you can get to a point of Holocaust Overload, when your parents have told you too many stories, and you shut down and become a blacksheep for the very thing they dislike: Judaism.

3) I had a miscarriage and infertility and Husband and I had just signed up for an adoption home study when, the next day, I found out I was pregnant with Bar Mitzvahzilla. Then came more miscarriages and infertility and then infertility surgery, and guess who was conceived on an operating table? Daughter. Luckily she looks like Husband and not like the doctor.

4) One time I sang sad Patsy Cline songs at the Moose Club in Las Vegas with my boss at the time who played in a Country Western band there. For just a moment I imagined a career as a Jewish Country Western star - I just wouldn't sing Jesus songs.


5) I was married once before, in 1986 at the Little White Wedding Chapel on the Las Vegas Strip with a scratchy record playing the Wedding March and holding a dusty plastic bouquet of flowers. I was divorced very uneventfully three years later at a City of Phoenix Courthouse.

6) After my dad died when I was a teenager and we lost our family business, my mom got the bright idea to get food stamps since we were flat broke. We were easily the only Jewish family in Scottsdale in the 1970s on foodstamps, and for sure the only Jewish family driving down to the food stamp office in an aging Lincoln Continental each week, me hiding in the back.

7) Bar Mitzvahzilla was born a pound and a half preemie, though he is now much, much bigger than that. He's big enough, and big-mouthed enough in fact, that after sassing off to me very badly yesterday, he wrote me this lovely apology: "Dear Mom, I am sorry for being so rude, spiteful and snide to you. It was wrong of me and I will try to never do it again. But I'm an adolescent so I may fail at that part. So anyway, sorry and I hope you can forgive me. From your only son who you will ever have that you shouldn't be mad at forever because he's your only son, Bar Mitzvahzilla" [that's not really his name, just fyi] 

So here I'd like to say thank you to Amber over at Making the Moments Count for giving me a Lemonade Stand Award, awarded to bloggers with attitude and gratitude, because getting a note like that from my former preemie fills me with both.

Any naming stories of your own? Faith against all odds? Fertility close calls? Snotty teen apologies? (I won't ask about Las Vegas Weddings, Moose Lodges, or Food Stamps...) 

Eight Greedy Nights

Well the eight days of Chanukah are over at sundown today.  It's been exhausting.

Because I had such a ludicrous Jewish upbringing, I've always tried to make my kids' Jewish holidays incredible, including Chanukah.

My Chanukah as a kid:  all the motley crew of cousins come over - there are the foolish cousins and the egghead cousins, the bucktoothed cousins and the Bryl creamed cousins.  Some of them are actually being raised Jewish and expect that there will be a lit menorah.  My mom is under pressure now.  She has to pretend she's raising us Jewish.  She has to find our menorah and candles. 

She snakes her arm into the cabinet above our stove and finds what passes for a menorah in our house:  a miserable, metal, tilting thing that Goodwill would throw out.  Then she snakes her arm up there again and finds a box of candles.  Since it's stored above the stove, the candles are melted together into one blob.  It's a candle brick now, and she has to snap off the candles that she needs, one by one. Broken candle shards.

My mother, being Old Country, is mystified by the idea of Hanukkah presents. When pressed, she enlists the aid of my grandfather.  He gets a great idea, laboriously rises on his diabetic legs and fishes around in a pocket so big it's like Mary Poppins' purse - I'm thinking he'll probably pull out a floor lamp. He comes up Eisenhower dollars all around. Chanukah gelt.

I go off to school very excited by this whole gigantic silver dollar thing, this whole Zayda as Mary Poppins thing, this whole mystery of the blessing over the candles thing. I'm confronted, however, by the children of non-immigrant families all showing up with presents identical to each others, like they had coordinated it or something.  They all have lovely Jewish stars on necklaces.

Flash forward to parenthood.  Flash forward to eight greedy nights.  The kids and I set up an elaborate eight-day calendar every year, Bar Mitzvahzilla on one line and Daughter on the other, the days of the week on the top. Then we assign themes. Not all are gift nights, one is tzedakah night, where we give to others, and another is menorah night, where we light just about every menorah in the house and start a veritable conflagration. Last night, the lighter not working, Husband helpfully lit a blow torch to help me light the menorahs.

Flash forward to a lifetime of lists now that are like a time capsule of my kids' lives:  Lego Day, Spiderman Day, Hello Kitty Day, High School Musical Day, and now, much to my chagrin, Xbox Day and Moshi Monster Day.
 
And flash forward to the thing I love the best:  my light up menorahs sitting on my front window sills lighting up our windows just a little, telling the world about the miracle of Chanukah.

Desert Ruins

My mom's been burrowed up inside her house for about a week, since it got cold in Arizona. This would be fine except that, based on how it's built, it's probably colder in there than it is outside.  Her house, built in 1973 with construction methods that can only be called a little primitive, was built to keep cold in and heat out, not really helpful in the winter.  There's basically the wall of cinder blocks, then there's the sheet rock, and then there's my mom, shivering inside and wearing a coat.

When we moved to Arizona, we had quite a job finding a house.  There were seven girls - six unmarried - and my parents, so we needed like ten thousand bedrooms.  In Skokie we had somehow gotten by with three bedrooms, which made for a very intense home life.  There were the Parents in one bedroom, and then there were the seven daughters split into the two remaining bedrooms: two sets of clawing, fighting sisters battling it out for every inch of space.

The whole move of ours turned out to be quite a shock anyway.  Going from four seasons to two seasons, from snowstorms to duststorms, from trees to cactus, was all quite a shock. And going from a home that had some substance, like a basement and a second story and bricks, to a house that looked like a flat domino that had been thrown across the surface of the desert, that took some getting used to.

My parents searched and searched.  The house had to be just right:  not too close to the Jewish community, not too far.  Kind of more in a Jewish expatriot community.  One day, after we overheard our own real estate agent use an anti-semitic term to refer to negotiating, my dad stormed out of the house we were looking at.  There, across the street, was a billboard for the neighborhood in which we ended up:  Rich Rosen's Hacienda Del Sol.  Perfect.  A street of sixteen houses, all filled with Jews.

We just needed some basic information.  How many bedrooms?  Five.  Was there a pool?  Yes.  That was it.  Who needed to ask about construction methods?  It was Arizona, not the Antarctic!  We drove back to Skokie, loaded up the car and moved.

Add thirty-six years to that and there my mother sits still.  The billboard gone.  The expatriot Jews back to their homelands, my mother's house, built like a refrigerator, a crumbling ruin around her ears. 

No Clowning Around

My mother is sick, but just like everything else with her, this illness is unique, it can only be handled in her own way.

First she refuses to go on antibiotics.  This goes on for days and days.  Then she suddenly decides she needs antibiotics but rather than go to the doctor, she treats her house as a pharmacy of first choice.  She searches the house from top to bottom and finds one old, moldy bottle of pills left over from who-knows-when that's laying in the bottom of a drawer somewhere with a label on it that's barely legible.

She calls me up.  "Linda!" Coughing and hacking right into the phone.

"What?"

"What are these pills I found?"

She reads me the name.  I'm not sure, but I think it's a bottle of pimple medicine one of us took.  From the 1970s.

I try to tell her this but I'm interrupted by more coughing and hacking.

I say, "Ma.  Are you there?"  I remind myself never to touch her phone when I come to visit.

She gets back on the line.  "Can I take the pills?"

"No.  Do I have to call poison control to get them away from you?  They're forty years old."

"Okay.  I'll look for something else."

I'm about to tell her to stop clowning around and go to the doctor to get some medicine from this millenium but I'm drowned out by the coughing and hacking. I hang up. New mental note:  stop by mom's.

A Deck of Daughters

My mother has two interesting characteristics when it comes to the weights of her seven daughters:  she has complete myopia for any weight gain, and she has supernatural, xray vision for any type of weight loss. 

I've been both fat and thin, or rather, I've been both thin then fat, then thin, then fat, then thin.  Multiply that times ten, because this went on for twenty-five years, so I know what I'm talking about here.  When I was fat, my mother saw only the good in me, which was very, very nice.  She was complimentary, encouraging, and accepting.  Rather than see me miserable, she'd go out shopping with me for a fat wardrobe.

But if I lost a microscopic fraction of one pound, she was all over it like a wolf.  In my twenties I'd slunk in the house from my weekly torturous weigh in at Weight Watchers and I don't really think she had a spycam on my house, but let's just say that somehow the phone would ring immediately.

"How'd you do?" No beating around the bush for my mom.

"A pound, Ma.  I lost a pound."

Then I'd hear her real estate amortization calculator clicking and clacking in the background as she did the complicated math.

"If I average your gains with your losses and amortize that out over 52 weeks, by this time next year, you'll be down thirty pounds. Can you imagine?"

And I'd kind of get a little caught up in the fantasy. "Thirty pounds?"

"Just in time for the wedding!" For awhile there in the 1980s, our family seemed to be having a lot of weddings. "Maybe we should buy a dress now. Saks is having a sale. You don't want to wait till the last minute." And then, caught up in the excitement of that one pound weight loss, I'd buy a dress that never fit me, ever.

But she's not fooling me, what she really loves is thin.  Not too thin, like not anorexic. She doesn't want to worry about us dying, after all.  But to have a bevy of daughters to brag about, to brag about the size of clothes we wear, this is what really lights her fire.  Forget the personal accomplishments!  Forget the college degrees, raising our children, forget everything.  Let's get down to the important stuff:  what size are our pants?

And, of course, that's what happens to me.  I'm at our Thanksgiving Day party and I hear the yell across the room, "Linda!  What size are your pants?"

I glare at her wondering if she'd like me to take them off so she can examine the size label herself? 

But I know that to my mother, her seven daughters are like her resume - our beauty or lack thereof, or thinness, or lack thereof, are a direct reflection on her.  She wants to have a card deck of beautiful thin daughters to fan out in front of everyone she talks to to show what she made.  A full deck, a straight flush, a deck of daughters.

Hold the Mayo

My mother and I have an ongoing argument going about medical care.  The main topic of our argument?  Mayo Clinic.

Like other seniors, my mother swears by Mayo Clinic.  If she stubs her toe, she goes to Mayo Clinic.  To her, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Hospital we have here in Phoenix, are like those one-stop clinics they have in drugstores now.  There's no problem too minute to go shlep out to Mayo Clinic to have an expert see it for her.  She'll pop in any time.   

Our argument always starts with some kind of medical discussion, maybe I need an evaluation of some type or one of my kids do.  Her response? 

"Go to Mayo Clinic!"

"Mom, you know Mayo Clinic isn't covered on my insurance." It's never once been covered on any insurance I've ever had.

"I don't care.  Pay for it yourself.  You have plenty of money."

Why does this make me nuts?  Is it because now I'm in two arguments?  There's the one about Mayo Clinic and then there's the new one about whether I have any money.  To not go to Mayo, I have to prove to my mom that I'm poor.

"Mayo Clinic isn't the only place to go in the world, Ma."

"It's the best!"

There's a pause during which I fume and try to figure out where she got this prejudice.

My mother's history with doctors is unremarkable.  As a young mom in Skokie she treated almost exclusively with her obstretrician, the one who delivered six out of seven of us, and who apparently failed to adequately discuss birth control options with her. Then there was the pediatrician who used to show up at our house and examine all seven of us in a row, mixing up our names. Later, when I became a sickly asthmatic, she used to drive like a bat out of hell to a town two hours north of Chicago and a doctor who had one of the only nebulizer machines in existence in 1973, so huge it took up an entire room. She'd take over the waiting room regaling the other patients with the dramatized Story Of My Asthma while I spent the day with the nebulizer.

No Mayo Clinic. But did Mayo Clinic beckon to her from Rochester; did she think of it as the clinic of last resort if, finally, the gigantic nebulizer didn't work, if, finally, I turned blue with the lack of oxygen?

Then she says, "And anyway, the food in the cafeteria at Mayo Hospital is the best food anywhere. Bob and I try to eat out there at least once a week."

"Ma, it's a hospital cafeteria."

"They have a chef."

Okay, that's it.  The conversation has descended into inanities.  Also, I'm dangerously close to finding out exactly what she ate at each meal and I'm not going to fall into that trap. 

"Well, maybe we'll try it some time."

"The Clinic?"

"No. The cafeteria."

Her turn to fume.

Apple of My Eye

My daughter is very thin. People look at from Husband to me and back again and then declare without any qualms that she gets her thinness from Husband.  Apparently, my body is teeming at its restraints, just waiting for me to overeat one day at which point it will suddenly bulge out and I'll be wearing a wardrobe of circus tents.  When I was fat I used to go to Weight Watchers - twelve years in a row without ever achieving Lifetime Member status - and the leader would say, "You didn't gain it in a month, you're not going to lose it in a month!"  But she didn't know me.  I did gain my weight in a month, each time.

But not my kids.  Daughter's weight, for example, hasn't changed in a couple years, and it's a weird weight, 59 pounds.  Every time she gets on the scale, exactly 59 pounds. And her hunger is odd.  She's not just hungry before meals, that would be too normal.  Instead, she stands up after meals full but then immediately announces that she's hungry again.  I say, "What? You just told me you were full!"  And she says, "I'm full of what I just ate, but now I'm hungry for something else."  The strange, twisted labyrinth of the ten-year-old mind - both full and hungry at the same time.

In the immigrant household in which I grew up, there were none of these nuances.  We sat and ate with our only desire being how quickly we could escape from our mother's constant food pushing.  She stood by the table, waiting for a plate to empty - like a vulture perched overhead - and then swooped in to fill it immediately.  This is how a few of my sisters ended up chubby; the skinny sisters ran from the table as her spoon was descending. And it didn't help that dinner was the standard Eastern European Jewish diet:  anything made out of rendered fat, or out of animal parts that we weren't sure were actually edible.

There was no eating after dinner was done. Mom shut down the kitchen, like it was a store. And anyway, being an immigrant, she didn't understand the concept of desserts.  In her small town in Eastern Europe there were no such fancy concepts as "desserts."  You ate or you starved, nothing in between.  If she was feeling extravagant, fine, we could have an apple.  Wildly extravagant?  Fine, she'd bake some apples.

So Daughter finishes another meal tonight, announces that she's full.  Stands up.  Walks over to me a second later and tells me she's hungry.  What can she eat?  I don't even try to offer her more of our dinner.  I say, "Baked apples?"

Hurry Up and Wait

My Mom was going out to eat with my sister's family the other night. I wanted to see if I could swing by and drop off some stuff before she left.

"We're not going to be home."

"But you still have an hour before you have to be at the restaurant."

"We're leaving now."

"But Ma, it takes five minutes to drive there.  What are you going to do with the other fifty-five minutes before they get there?"

"Well, we have to park."

"Yeah?"

"And walk in."

"Right."

"That's it."

"How long could it take to park and walk in a restaurant?"

"Well, Bob's driving."  Right. Half an hour to pull into a parking spot and half an hour to find the door.  Not that I'm that much better.  Today we went on a high school tour with Bar Mitzvahzilla and I led us to the wrong parking lot, like on the garbage bin side of the high school, not the front door side.  We had to hike a mile to get to the door.  Then we went to his basketball game after school and I directed Husband to the wrong school.  So I can relate to this stuff.

But an hour to drive five minutes? 

There's no arguing with my mom.  I tell her I'll drop the stuff by the next day and agree with her, saying "You'd better hurry up."