book excerpt, humor

Things Mom Would Deny
By Tova Gabrielle

My mother would deny she married my father for sex. Yet, who could blame her if it were so? (How else was a respectable, young, Jewish woman to enjoy meaningful intercourse in 1943?) Otherwise, wouldn’t she surely have waited for someone more my type? Take Uncle Roy, for instance, the man us four girls all fantasized as being our father instead of Dad.

Roy, the comic shrink, was playful without being ridiculous, unlike Lonnie, the "chronic" war hero, who made dumb jokes, tickled too hard and basically had no idea how to meet kids on their own turf.
I’d always warmed in the easy rapport between my Uncle and Mom, who smiled and was able to laugh at herself when he came around, a welcome break from nervously fixing up hurts and figuring how to avoid and protect us against Dad’s temper.

While Mom was always rehabilitating Dad to be stop biting and someday stop barking, my uncle was already tame. In fact it was he who gave Mom advise: "When Lonnie does something that bothers you, Ella, tell him how it makes you feel."
Beloved Uncle Roy and Mom discussed psychology and politics; swapped advice, and argued happily over a Sunday brunch of bagel and lox, white fish and cream cheese. Meanwhile Dad sweated over blue-prints of the jet engines he was responsible for inspecting and chain smoked in the den.

I always felt cheated when my uncle would wipe his mouth and raise his mythically large frame (so unlike any one in my nuclear family’s) from the kitchen table, callously returning to his coveted life.

While my philosophy was to get what you want or die trying, Mom live by the Jewish advise about not wanting what you don’t have and wanting what you have (or at least, appearing to want what you have).
I never suspected that Mom shared my feelings for Uncle Roy, possibly because Mom never suspected it either. And while it wasn’t beyond me to attempt to raise her consciousness about what she [I] wanted, I had to choose my battles…. My mother, Ella's concrete denial grated against me in that unique way Jewish mothers have perfected; a smug overstated blame that could cause an unending, unscratchable itch in the very aggressive stem of the brain.
Of course, it was not limited to the animal brain of fight and flight alone. Oh no, Mom was thorough: such an irritation threatened to interfere with my total brain function. And that was a risk that I preferred to take on my own.

Eventually I almost got even and mom even paid the way. With her help, I obtained a graduate degree in psychology, so that I could finally out-"therapize" her....After that, Mom began saying to me, "I can’t argue with you, you’re smarter than me."
Yet, she was a shrewd mind-controller, able to shut even someone smarter than her up, for what could I possibly say to that?

My mother is amazed to this day that she and I are in the same family. I am everything she is not and vice-versa, although I have more vice and she more verse at this point....Mom was not ruled by reckless love or intuition, like me, but by a unique mix of fear and her controlling version of justice: She seemed to believe that if you and someone else were on a life raft and one of you had to drown, it had to be you. For, while doing the right thing could be costly, being at odds with yourself was even more expensive.
Hence, even if she had shared my affections for my uncle, that was no one’s business: You see, Uncle Roy had met her sister first.
You ALWAYS put your sisters before your self and you just stuffed any resentment about doing so. But of course, she had NO resentments, she was only doing what was right.

Me, I was doing only what was right in a world that would have made sense, certainly not the one into which I was born, her and Dad's world: I was born with a stubborn survival instinct that asked rude questions like, "Didn’t you need to have a self before you could give one up?" And, "how were you to not hate your sisters for all the little pieces of your heart you gave up to them, despite your best efforts at egocentrism?
However, I have to hand it to her: My mother, bless her soul, was not held hostage to her desires, tormented by visions of what could be, if only I could force others to comply.

Yes, Mom was right: We were, and in many ways continue to be, opposites: While she suffered from cold hands and feet, I complained about my sweaty extremities.
She didn’t whimper like me in my entitled new age quest of the seventies and eighties. Indeed she would never have approximated the middle class neuveau poor entitled daughter, who expected support for making my life into an expensive Vision Quest.

Nor did she purr, wail, or whine, like me. She was thrifty and singular, monetarily and emotionally anorexic. I was the glutton for attention and favors. I had not grown up in The Depression, as she had...and the depression that I was working on in my head apparently didn’t count.


ii. The Fight
"There is only one fight" is a well known adage in family therapy. Typically, ours was over control of my life....

I didn't really believe in God when I was younger, unless I was It. But Mom did answer to some vaguely, irrationally just being-- Whether it was her father or God, however, is uncertain.
When I would scream and threaten in response to being denied things like sleep overs and dates, more would do everything from revoking my social privileges to covering her ears. Once I had that bone of a thought in my teeth I was like a pit bull. She’d cried out , "You want what you want what you want!" and I would be enraged, because; well, what else could a person could possibly want?

Once when I was driving her somewhere, and we were behind a car with a New Hampshire license plate, that boasted, "Live Free or Die," Mom said, "Whenever I see that, I think it’s telling me to die".
I didn't know what to say. I thought it was a cop-out that Mom wanted to live within her limitations. But that was before I got hit with mid-life exhaustion from all the fighting that I continued doing even in her absence.


iii. Mom raises us twins:

Mom would escalate her efforts from trying to teach, to trying to force me to put Celia first, because she was the less resilient of us two. When I refused to let Celia play with me and my passionately possessed cousin Jane, Mom called me cruel. When I took from the drawers the shirt that Celia had wanted to wear and refused to give it up no matter how much Celia wailed, I was "selfish". And when we both liked the same boy and I won his affections instead of Celia, she dubbed me "Sadistic".
Finally I gave in and did my best to prove her right. I ended up marrying a man who had dated Celia years before, a man who was just like Uncle Roy: funny, well liked, and a people-person. But when I was in my twenties and my uncle suddenly divorced Dorrie and dropped his adoring nephews and nieces without so much as a "goodbye", I became even more confused and depressed than I was already.
Roy's only explanation was to Mom: "Ella...I promise more than I can deliver".
I should have realized that the men with great acts were simply great actors; and not the loyal soul-mates I’d romanticized them to be.
Still, like my Jack, Roy’d hung in there like a barnacle for decades, pretending, if nothing else, that one day he’d make good on his vows to love, honor and obey a wife who unnerved him.

iv: Mom as the Feminist Wife

I have to hand it to her, regarding her philosophy about men, however: Mom said that all men are fixer uppers and Mom didn't take shit from them. When I complained to Mom about my husband, Jack’s sabotaging my efforts at raising the kids appropriately, she’d responded, tongue-in-cheek, "...Doesn’t he know to obey you? Lonnie always obeyed me!"
As explosive as my father, Lonnie had been, she’d worked on educating and reforming him as if he were one of her later learning disabled students, who didn’t know better than to use force.
But Mom was patient with men only to a point: regarding my husband's laziness, she said, "What, he thinks you’re a stand in for his mother??"

While she might not buy me presents, she would always dole out money for therapy. "They’re all broken when you get them", she said .
Mom said that no man knows instinctively how to treat a woman right because of the way they were raised. She acted as if men were abused children who, when they were bad couldn’t help it because they didn’t know better.
Mom let Dad compensate, though, like hiring her a woman to help with the kids and chores. But when we became too old for a Nanny or maybe the nanny got smart and left, Mom wasbe plunged into Motherhood Hell.

iv. Feet Karma

Mom had suffered from foot problems as well as Dad, with his shrapnel trapped ankle from World War ii. She didn’t believe in killing pain, as Dad did. Her fashion was to embarrass her children by donning her discomfort for the world to see and making them do likewise whenever possible. The podiatrist gave her "Space Shoes"; special black, veined, and hideously shaped shoes, so she wouldn’t tip over, I guess. They rather grossly resembled feet with huge corns, replete with bulging veins, hills and valleys.
Mom dragged me along to the podiatrist's office, to be fitted for further embarrassment. While waiting for her, as was my life’s main occupation, her doctor took one look at my own feet and sentenced me. I would be a cripple by the time I was forty if I didn’t commence wearing Space Shoes too. Naturally, I chose going cripple.
My arches are flat and my feet look to me almost as if they’ve been bound: they are child’s feet. But what did comfort have to do with women’s shoes?
Now that I’m all grown up, though I’ve managed to avoid high heels all together, I can sometimes walk without pain.

At age 40, mom finally got up off the couch where she’d lie exhausted begging for foot rubs in spite of the space shoes. Then, unexpectedly, she pursued a new career with a tenacity I’d not formerly seen, studying what she quipped was "Sadistics" (math) with nothing but enthusiasm.

She changed her career from dental-hygienist to teaching reading, and her job expanded from saving dad or us, to the more realistic arena of educating the world and rehabilitating inner-city Gang Leaders.