The Ins and Outs

The culture of my birth family is that of estrangement. Growing up, my aunts, my mother’s much older sisters, didn’t speak to each other. As children who were born within two years of each other, the story goes that even as small children, my aunts stopped speaking to each other when one received a chalkboard easel as a gift and put it in front of the fireplace so that her younger sibling would have to stand in the fireplace in order to use her sister’s new prize. I always knew that we never saw my aunts together – we’d visit one for some holiday and perhaps the other would show up for the next. I never really gave it a second thought. Its just the way it was.

Eventually, I did see my two aunts together at my grandfather’s funeral. They argued loudly that day over which direction the toilet paper should be hanging and then stopped speaking once again. That was 30 plus years ago. They still haven’t spoken.

Other family stories involved my overbearing great-grandmother, my mother’s grandmother, who had no contact with her own family and fancied herself a landlady, collecting rents door to door wearing a small red wiglet over her own grey hair. My grandparents moved out of their Bronx apartment, their red and white haired mother-in-law’s personality becoming too much for them to deal with on a day to day basis. I recently was contacted by my long lost cousins, relatives of my great grandmother’s brothers who had become estranged from their sister so many years ago.

Fast forward a few decades to my mother’s own 11 year estrangement from me. Its certainly not the first time she’s spent months that have turned into years not speaking to me. She was once angry with me for not being able to go to the theater with her when my father, her somewhat estranged husband, refused to join her for a matinee. That afternoon she screamed at me on the phone about what a terrible daughter I was and I pointed out to her that it wasn’t really me that she was angry with, that she was really angry with my father and should take it up with him. Always resentful of my ability to connect with my dad, she exploded, “Don’t pull that psychological bullshit with me,” and promptly hung up the phone.

A few months later, on a hot summer morning, I received a phone call from my mother. In those days before mobile phones, she had tried to call each of my three siblings and my father and no one was home to answer the phone, so in desperation and as a last resort, she called me, her eldest daughter.

“Gen, I’m in the hospital down the shore. They think I broke my hip. No one answers the phone. Where is everybody? Can you come and help me?” As surprised as I was to receive the call, my sense of duty kicked in and I asked her for the name of the hospital, got in the car and drove down there. When I arrived, my big bad mother looked small in her ER hospital bed. Small and scared.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was walking the dogs and they wrapped themselves around my legs. They saw another dog and they both pulled and I fell. I fell on my hip. A neighbor saw it happen. And now I’m here.”

I asked her about surgery and doctors and then we sat in silence. I began to tell her that I had just arrived home from a study abroad trip to Italy and we chatted a little about that. I spoke with the doctors and continued to try and reach my siblings. By nightfall, mom was in surgery, the siblings had arrived and home I went. We all spent the next few weeks caring for mom and getting her to and from physical therapy. Life went on. Business as usual.

My father, on the other hand, called me with an unpleasant task.

“Do me a favor. Go over to your mother’s house. Go in the mailbox. They’ll be some divorce papers in there – an envelope from an attorney. I need you to go get them out of there. I don’t want her to have to deal with this while she’s recovering.”

How considerate of him. “Nope, not going to do that. You can go get them yourself if you don’t want her to have them. I’m not getting involved.”

Frustrated, he said okay and goodbye and hung up the phone. I was used to expressing myself to my father. Often he overlooked whatever it was that I said that he disagreed with or we’d debate and spar on various topics. Today he just accepted it and I think it was because he knew I was right.

So some 10 years later when I found myself facing down the barrel of yet another estrangement from my mother, it was not a surprise to me, though the reason certainly was, though I can’t say she didn’t warn me.

Two years before, when I began dating my husband, my mother told me, “Its fine that you’re dating him but there’s gonna be some real trouble if it gets serious.” I honestly had no idea what she meant by that at the time. “He’s Jewish and his family will never accept you. They’ll always be talking about you behind your back,” she informed me, though where she was getting this news headline from, I had no idea. My parents had many Jewish friends that we would frequently visit while I was growing up, so this bias was not something I was used to from her.

“Mom, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

I repeated this ominous warning to my then boyfriend, now husband. He was as irritated by the conversation as I was and we both had a laugh trying to conjure up what type of “trouble” there would be. We both agreed that I needed to remind my mother at some point that Jesus was, in fact, Jewish.

So the months went by and as holidays came and went, we’d talk about how something seemed off. We’d sit down at the table and others, including my mother, would get up and go to the other room. We’d hear about summer parties that we didn’t get invited to. And then we decided to get married.

My 6 month engagement was filled with not-so-motherly words about marrying outside of the family’s non-practicing Catholic faith. Words that became hateful and included stereotypes and anti-Semitic lectures. I didn’t – couldn’t- include my own mother on the traditional search for a dress because of this hateful attitude. Finally, a week before my wedding, the conversation came to a head. I did in fact remind her that Jesus was Jewish. I also asked her if she preferred me to marry an Irishman who beat me over a loving Jew. She chose the Irishman. She also told me (as my brother did 10 years later) that Jesus was not Jewish.

My final words to my mother were these: “If you are not happy that I am getting married, please do not attend my wedding.”

She told me that she could read between the lines. I told her there were no lines. I wanted her there but not like this. She hung up the phone and two weeks later, my mother was not at my wedding reception, though her place card held her space at Table 3. That was almost 11 years ago.

There’s more to this story for another day, but I leave you with this. A year ago, I spit in a tube and sent off my saliva for DNA analysis. I was hoping to learn about my heritage, particularly my father’s very Irish father, who had left town before his birth to search for work, so the story goes. My father spent the better part of his life searching for this mystery Irishman.

When my DNA results were emailed to me, it was a Saturday morning and my husband was in the shower. I logged into the website using the link they provided, hoping to find some matches with people who I might be related to on my missing Irish grandfather’s side. What I discovered instead was that I am 25% Jewish, on my paternal side, meaning the missing Irishman was actually a missing Jewish man. Which means my siblings were also 25% Jewish. Which also means my mother herself had married a man who was 50% Jewish!

My still damp husband and I laughed and joked and had the best time with this news. My connection to my dear guy was only made stronger with this news and the estrangement with my mother, and subsequently my siblings as well, was only made to seem more ridiculous.

Post-Script: I will leave you with one more story. My daughter married 6 years ago and wanted her grandmother at her wedding shower. Taking the high road, we invited her. I spent the days before the shower worrying about what I was going to say and whether or not I was going to say anything at all. My anxiety level rose to the point that it was crippling and then it came to me.

As my mother walked into the restaurant with my sister by her side, I walked up to her and embraced her in a hug. As I pulled her near I greeted her, “Shalom, Bubbeleh…” Greeting/Peace, dear one, in Hebrew. I knew she knew what the words meant, as she had strangely used that term sweetly to me when I was growing up. I knew at that moment she could either laugh about the silliness of it all and we could move on or it would be more of the same old, same old. I felt her body stiffen and she did not return the embrace and walked away from me. And that was fine. She was the same old, same old.