I wrote the following piece on August 11, 2004 when I was only 44 years old. How did five years fly by? It is now August 28, 2009 and I am searching for ways to fill up my Blog so I can get current on my countdown to the Silver Anniversary of my own Life. I am simply surfing through my documents treating my own words like an interesting website I discovered while flying through the internet in search of something else. What the “something else” is I never know. All this aimless wandering and all these tragic digressions lead nowhere… no book, no collection of short stories or essays, no job as a freelance magazine writer, no MFA Degree, no job at the Onion. Perhaps by re-reading my own words I will find out why I feel so stuck and suddenly a light will go off and a door will open and I will figure a way out of the maze. That would be A-MAZING!!
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“Nothing new or different” my mother says for the first time in months in response to my usual morning question of “how are you?” Typically, she moans and says “I don’t want to say anything, but I have been very very sick” and then adds one of the following:
a) “I was up all night urinating”.
b) “I had diarrhea something terrible” (as opposed to diarrhea something wonderful).
c) “I thought I was having a heart attack I had such pains in my chest.”
d) “I’m just no good anymore.” She says this as if she is a piece of fruit that spoiled or deli meat past the expiration date. Two things that would never deter her from consuming them, but definitely make most other people weary about the possibility of food poisoning.
Or, the most popular response since 1989
e) “My legs are killing me. I’m just afraid I won’t be able to walk much longer. Then, my life is over.”
I always respond to this lamentation with the logical solution which is “we could get you a wheel chair.” And, at that point she informs me she would rather die. I try not to take it too personally. Life in a wheel chair is worse than death. Even though her grandchildren and I are around I must admit there have been moments in my life when death seemed like a better alternative than life. But now, I have small children to think about. My mother has children too, but hers are not small. However, even when we were small, her talk of impending death warranted a daily mention/threat. We had to toe the line, or my mother might just collapse right there in front of us, life sucked out of her by our fighting, needs, complaining, demands, frustrations, etc. .
But today is a landmark day and I had even forgotten this particular “line” from my mother’s repertoire (script for life) so the moment she says it I start trying to recall the last time I heard it. I know it is not new, but it certainly has that new car feel and smell. “Nothing new or different” meant my mom was feeling pretty good. After all, what could be better than “nothing new or different?” It meant nothing has changed since the last time we spoke 24 hours ago. As if we had all been frozen in the matrix with Keanu Reeves – but instead of being caught mid flight in the splits, one arm bent back and one extended straight forward, Becky and I were frozen in our imaginations only. Physically, we could still both move even if one of us was in chronic pain.
“Nothing new or different” translated in our own mother daughter language to “no one died in the last 24 hours.” At least no one we knew or cared about. It also meant that even though interest rates were going up, so far the great old USA was able to keep a real economic depression at bay, only teasing us with a recession. No men jumping off buildings, no sad unskilled workers like my mother’s father being forced to walk along the rail road track looking for coal.
I savored the moment on the phone with my mother like a school girl savors a compliment from the boy she has had a crush on for years. I was walking on air. But I am smarter than some young school girl. I know it isn’t going to last. It may be tomorrow, or the day after, or next week and my mother will say the one line I have dreaded since the age of 18. It was the line that prompted me to write her a letter threatening suicide if she ever used it again. She stopped using the line for years after finding that note on her pillow. But by then she had already been saying it for 9 years, which is exactly how long my other parent had been dead. The damage was done. I was a head case. Eventually, she did start using the one line again, but by then I learned to treat it like the practical joke it was. Thus began the second phase of relationship as a comedic team, the likes of which had never been seen before.
I remember my mother saying the one line while semi-chuckling in response to a new tenant’s cheerful & rhetorical “how are you”. The young woman was coming down to the basement to do a load of laundry. She became just another innocent by-stander caught in the cross fire of my and my mother’s peculiar relationship . She walked in, laundry basket perched in front of her and found me and my mother cleaning out the shed for the 3rd time in less than 2 years. My mother sitting comfortably on the chair I had carried in from her kitchen across the hall while I dragged boxes and items being saved and sorted for some charity auction/bizarre at her synagogue. “Earning fund” was some crazy concept thought up by old people trying to keep their community alive. Bring in so many dollars “worth” of merchandise for re-sale at the annual fundraiser, and you get a “free” ticket to the annual dinner dance that only included dinner and not dancing. Things had to be divided up so she had enough donations each year for at least 10 years. My mother would not let me throw anything out. She sat there giving me orders as my 8 month pregnant swelling stomach held her first biological grandchild. I was 36 and she was 77. Not getting married until I was 34 meant I was already behind my mother Becky’s schedule. She spent her nights worrying about my status as an old maid until the day I wed at the tender age of 34, which was even older than she had been when she got married. The one thing my mother had convinced me of during our restless nights in separate apartments at 6242 North Rockwell was that my getting married and having babies would give her a reason to live and bring her more joy than she had ever known. So why would she say it in front of me as I worked diligently both externally cleaning the shed and internally making this baby ….but it came out just like it had so many times before.
“How are you.” The young tenant asked.
“Oh you know”, my mother replied “One foot in the grave and another on a banana peel.”
No wonder I eventually had to go on bed rest during the last six weeks of my pregnancy. Some of it might have been due to high blood pressure, but just like my mother always held her kids accountable for her various physical ailments, heart problems, high blood pressure, nerves, I have to believe my mother had something to do with my physical problems. It seemed only logical that 2 years later, after my first born would turn one, it would be me doing the splits… “one foot in Buffalo Grove, and the other in West Rogers Park, an old version of West Rogers Park that existed only in my sappy nostalgic memories having nothing to do with the dirty overcrowded neighborhood it had evolved into.
I grew up believing the concept of evolution meant things became better, more sophisticated. This was not the case during my initial exodus from the West Roger Park Shtetle I had grown up in. Perhaps gentrification would be happening some day soon, but in 1997, the neighborhood, along with my mother showed significant signs of deterioration. My regular visits between my new suburban home, and my mother’s apartment, that had once been my “home” often meant leaving a Polish cleaning lady on our bathroom floor in Buffalo Grove while I wiped the shit off the tile at 6242 North Rockwell. Only one of us was being paid, and it wasn’t me. Meanwhile, I thought of all my new acquaintenances, their money, their expensive homes, their young mothers who take their children on cruises, the way their snobby noses look down on my tired old face, and I can’t help but feel bitter. I was popular in High School. It never dawned on me that I would returning to high school at the age of 37, and coming back as less than my once glorious reign as a funny, loud mouthed girl well liked by all the a other girls and blissfully ignored by most of the guys.
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Neither my mother nor I managed the balancing act very well. And I thought it was only a matter of time before she was going to slip into that grave, and I was going to slip into the Suburban Malaise.
Fortunately I was only half right. My mother Becky is 90 today and while I indeed slip into the Suburban Malaise, losing my “self” in the process. Luckily, the story is not over yet and I am beginning to believe a "self" is something that cannot only be lost, but can also be found.
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