The Jewish Daughter Diaries (12 page)

Iliza Shlesinger

I often wonder how much my mother fits into the Jewish mother stereotype. My mother has never compared me to my brother (but she has compared me to my cousin, who went to Yale). She never nags me about marrying a doctor (maybe because I've never been married so there's still a chance), and she never makes me feel bad about myself (probably because, as a comedian, I do that job pretty well already).

Aside from sending me weekly chain emails about the State of Israel or the Holocaust (I know, Mom, “Never forget,” but I don't need to be reminded every Monday morning), she's not your standard Jewish mother.

But she is your standard New Yorker.

The popular misconception about New Yorkers is that they're rude. They aren't rude; they're in a rush. They're in a rush and they don't have time for your crap. Ya want an opinion? Ya got it. Ya don't like it? Ask someone else.

And my mother, with her tough, no-BS attitude and bluntness, would have seemed ordinary had I grown up with other New York Jews, but I didn't. Because when I was one year old, my parents moved from Manhattan to Dallas, Texas. Yee-ha. Or, in this case, Yee-cha.

New Yorkers have a certain bluntness about them that outside of the Tri-State area can come off as a little brash. It took me until recently to learn that snapping, “Give it a rest!” at someone who's being loud is considered rude.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a teacher, Mrs. A, who would always roll her eyes at me, no matter what I said. I told my mom, who
immediately
went down to the school to have a talk with her. Mrs. A's response was, “Well, I can't
control
my facial expression.” (This is the level of intelligence I was dealing with in a Plano, Texas, public school classroom in the mid-'90s.)

My mother simply responded with, “Is there something wrong with your muscles that you, as an adult, can't control your expression specifically when my daughter speaks?” Having probably never been called out on her less-than-sterling teaching tactics, Mrs. A was speechless and embarrassed. I could see it in her eyes.

Mom 1, Texas Public Schools 0.

Sarcasm was a big thing in our house. Whenever I'd tell my mom something of childish importance like “I have to pee” or “Sometimes I like to smell the inside of my own nose,” my mother would say flatly, “I'll alert the media”—a sarcastic nuance lost on five-year-old me.

Even as a child, I remember playing with a bag of confetti in the back of the car and my mother threatening me.

“Ya spill that in the backseat and ya dawg meat,” she'd say, and I literally thought she would grind me up and feed me to Tippy, our white mini poodle.

When I was seventeen, our physics project for the year was to design a hovercraft. (Go, private school!) We spent a semester building plywood discs with tarps stapled to the bottom, inflated by leaf blowers. The culmination of our efforts was a hovercraft race. The teams assembled in the school's cafeteria and had to race their creations around orange pylons. This was fun. Until Mark Stein, a genius who I never talked to because I wasn't in the genius classes (also he was weird), didn't take first place. Enraged, he picked up one of the orange pylons and swung it at another pylon—sending it flying across the room and hitting my mother…in the shin.

Oy.

I think most mothers, most people, actually, most non-guerrilla-warfare-trained people, would express their pain from being hit in the shin with gasps, whimpers, or, at most, choice words. And my mother did all that, for the first few seconds. Then the pain turned to rage. She got up and, wielding a pylon above her head, marched toward Mark, yelling, “
He
needs
to
know
how
this
feels!
”

I, being much stronger than her, was able to choke her out. Just kidding.

But I was able to physically hold her back and convince her not to hit my classmate in the leg with a piece of the obstacle course. (I know, I know, everyone has a childhood story like this.)

Side note: Mark Stein grew up to be hot. Kills me that we never knew each other in high school, and now the only thing connecting us is the memory of my mother's attempted assault on him.

But like most New Yorkers, my mother is not only tough; she also has a soft side. Growing up, my brother Ben and I fought a lot, and my mother did the best she could. Sometimes, out of exhaustion, my mother would take my hand and my brother's hand and force us to tickle each other. Then we'd inevitably start laughing and the whole episode would be over.

Looking back, it's a weird thing to do: physically force laughter out of your child by prodding them with another child's reluctant limp hand, but hey, definitely better than a spanking. Ironic that, years later, I'd find a career in forcing laughter out of people with words, not my hands—although that is an inspired idea for hecklers.

My mother's patience stretched yet even further. She never made me feel stupid for saying weird things. And now I don't feel stupid saying them onstage in front of hundreds of people. I knew my mom was special because once I asked her, “If a witch turned me into a bug, what would you do?” Normal question for a kid to ask…except this was last week. She didn't blow me off and she didn't call me silly. Without missing a beat, she said, “I'd put you in my pocket to keep you with me always”—a really sweet sentiment. Until my mother revealed that when she dies, she would not only like to be cremated, but wants me keep her ashes in my underwear drawer, so “I can be with you always.”

Since New Yorkers are, inherently, always in a rush, they have to manage their time. My mom loves the idea of me going to bed early to get a good night's sleep but hates if I sleep in, thinking it's a waste of time. When I was growing up, she'd come in to wake me up just to “go be productive at something. Anything. Just stop sleeping.”

One time, and I swear this is true, I woke up to her standing on my bed, hanging a painting above me.
Couldn't wait, huh, Mom? Had to get that painting hung up and centered for the big gallery opening in my room?
Another time she made only half my bed…because I was in the other half,
still
sleeping
!

When she visits my place now, it's not out of the ordinary for me to wake and find she's rearranged all of my downstairs furniture. I'll say, “Mom, I don't want the table there,” and she'll say, “Who cares what you want?” And then I'll go back to sleep in retaliation.

In theory, I love the idea of being organized and neat. In practice, my subconscious has rebelled, and now, as an adult, I keep all my stuff in a constant state of disarray. I'm a novice hoarder—unless Mom is visiting. Then I clean up and pretend that it's always like that.

My mom also has a very New York attitude about health. She is consumed by it, which makes sense, given all the horrible diseases we can or have already contracted. And yes, Mom, you already regaled me with the tale of “The Woman in My Development Who Got the Plague, Can You Believe It? Such a Freak Thing. So Remember, Wash Your Hands and Stop Kissing Your Dog on the Mouth.” (Never!)

But, now that I live on my own, my mother's good intentions have become mere echoes of suggestions. As an adult, I've found the phrase “I pay taxes; I don't have to listen to this” to be most satisfying in terms of abating my mother's inquiries about what items I keep in my refrigerator. Mom, I'll come clean. You know what I do? I order, like, a hundred dollars' worth of takeout on Monday and just pick off it for a week. That's what I keep in my fridge. I'm a vulture. Also? I keep candy in my car and sometimes don't eat all day, then go for Chick-fil-A at 1:00 a.m. Last week I only ate carnival-themed food for two days!
Taxes!

No less than two times a week, my mother calls me to extol the virtues of keeping frozen dinners in my freezer “just in case.” (In case what, Mom? A sad, single-girl convention needs to have an emergency meeting in my living room?)

“Lean Cuisines,” she'll say, “they're easy to just heat up when you're busy or have a late-night show and are hungry.” After that, she will rattle off the benefits of keeping Lonely Girl frozen dinners on hand. (Lonely Girl portions are smaller than Hungry Man, just with a bigger serving of cheesecake.) She'll then go on to tell me that they're “
sometimes
five for ten dollars at the grocery store.” (Not to get your hopes up.)

• • •

Growing up, we always had a ton of food in the house, all healthy stuff. I was in high school during Y2K, and my mom and stepdad (my parents divorced when I was seven,
spoiler
alert!
) kept a decent amount of extra food…just in case. But they bought random items. Looking back, no one was going to survive the apocalypse on a diet of grapefruit juice and three bags of Kirkland Trail Mix, but it was a decent effort.

However, when I visit their house now, I find no food. My stepdad likes to go out for meals so they don't keep a ton of food in the house anymore. My mother is tiny and requires very little to sustain herself. On one trip home, I went to their kitchen and only found bottled water, carrots, and a life-sized hamster wheel.

When I visit and tell Mom I'm hungry, I get the pleasure of watching her dart around the kitchen, collecting what few items are in stock and trying to make them sound appealing to me.

“You want tuna? I have a little bit of tuna salad. Ooooh, smoked whitefish, you want that?” After I reject a variety of whipped fish flavors, she moves on to “You want me to put cheese on matzah? How about a hard-boiled egg? I have a delicious bell pepper. Sometimes I'll eat a whole bell pepper for lunch, fills me right up.”

Mom, in no world do I want to eat a bell pepper, a hard-boiled egg, and a giant cracker. It's lunch, not a compost heap.

• • •

Sometimes I feel bad for my mother. It must be difficult to act normal and sane when you have so much New York energy brimming inside you. But I never get annoyed at my mom when she worries about me or warns me about things I already know, like “Stop showing men pictures of your dog. They're gonna think you're crazy” or “Have an apple before your date. That way you won't eat too much” or “Don't drive late at night. There are nuts on the road.”

All this coming from a woman who, even with a car that has a camera built in so you can literally see on a dashboard screen
where
you are backing up, has still managed to back into several stop signs, effectively puncturing a giant hole in the trunk and costing her around five grand in damage.

My mother warned me about all the other nuts out there. Mom, I know a nut when I see one. I grew up with one…and I own a mirror.

Dylan Joffe

When I was nineteen, I went home with my college boyfriend to meet his family in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was so nervous about it all—about what it
meant
—that for weeks before, my friend would sing “Shiksa Goddess” to me from
The
Last
Five
Years
.

“I'm breaking my mother's heart/ The longer I stand looking at you/ The more I hear it splinter and crack/ From ninety miles away.”

I was nineteen and I was madly in love. My entire flight to Knoxville was spent wondering how I would appear to his parents. I wanted them to like me; I
needed
them to like me.
Hey! Hey! Shiksa goddess/ I've been waiting for someone like you.

As an insecure teenager, it felt like everything I did wasn't enough.

I wasn't pretty enough for their son.

I wasn't smart enough for their son.

I wasn't Jewish enough for their son.

“Our son tells me that your father is Jewish. Did you have a bat mitzvah?” No, I didn't.

“We're going to light the candles now. It's okay if you're lost.” I wasn't.

“Some people might not refer to you as Jewish because your mother isn't. It's okay. You'd just have to convert if you wanted your children to be Jewish.” His mother said it nonchalantly, and no one else reacted. I unconsciously put a hand over my nineteen-year-old uterus. Children? I was a child; a child was not something I was having.

One night at dinner, I said the word “shiksa.” It was in reference to my mother; I was trying to be funny. I was nervous. It slipped out, Freudian-style. I saw his mother's body tighten. I felt my words become thick. They were humidity in the room, a rain cloud above our dinner, above their son, above his unclean abomination that would say such vile things.

I remembered my grandmother's face, looking up at me. Her words echoed in my head.

“You will meet people in life who don't like you. You don't need to help them by using such offensive terms.”

• • •

My grandmother was the first person to ever tell me not to say the word “shiksa.”

עסקיש
/ Shiksa

Historically, shiksa is a derogatory term. It was meant for non-Jewish women, to call them unclean. An abomination.

At the age of twelve, I had only learned it in its more popular usage, meaning a non-Jewish woman (and an incredibly irresistible one at that).

I had heard it only in playful ways—a friend to a friend about a new girlfriend, a term of endearment to a loved one, a sense of pride from one woman to another.

I am the daughter of a New York City Jew (my father) and a Christian missionary from a farmhouse in Maine (my mother). My parents met at graduate school and shared a passion for helping people and Bob Dylan. While religion wasn't ever something that ran through our family tree growing up, tradition was.

From all sides, we had tradition. Tradition after tradition.

We had Christmas songs that my mother played on the piano while we all gathered around and sang along. We had green onions with which to whack each other while singing “Dayenu” on Passover. Sometimes our traditions would overlap, interacting with each other and creating hybrid practices just for the four of us: my parents, my brother, and me. I remember the first year Easter and Passover were in the same week—from then on, we adorned out Seder plate with Easter eggs every time the two holidays got close enough.

My grandmother once visited when I was in middle school. I was in that phase when I was trying to act older than I was, desperate to be accepted by my older brother and his friends and to get my own phone line at our house. I was sporting a new vocabulary, learning sarcasm, talking about how horrible the Bush administration had been in its first year. At twelve years old, I had a lot of opinions.

It was a small comment. I was on the phone with a friend. My grandmother was in the kitchen, which attached to our living room through an open walkway. I sat on our living-room sofa, my feet curled against the overstuffed, flower-patterned cushions.

“Dad didn't want a Seder this year and then changed his mind at the last minute. Mom had to run out and get all the stuff for a dinner party. She forgot—because she's such a shiksa—and got two loaves of French bread. It was hilarious. We just laughed about it and she made me promise not to tell Dad. She had to use Lipton chicken for the matzah ball soup!”

My grandmother walked in and sat silently in the living room as I finished my phone call. She waited for me to get off and asked me to come sit next to her. I slowly got up and crossed the room, joining her on the other couch. She explained to me that what I had said about my mother was inappropriate, not just in reference to my mother but in reference to any woman. That it was rude, but more importantly, as women, we needed to respect each other.

That was when she told me that I would meet many people in my life who didn't like me for being a woman, or for being Jewish, and that I didn't need to help them by using such offensive terms.

I was confused. I was an adolescent. I remember thinking that my mother, by all definitions I knew of the word, was a shiksa. And based on their relationship, I had no doubt that my grandmother thought my mom was one. I thought my grandmother had always been upset by my father not marrying a Jewish woman—what had changed? I apologized and nodded my head. I promised to never say it again. A guilty promise, one that I broke seven years later at a dining-room table in the South.

It was my first real lesson in feminism, served to me by my eighty-seven-year-old grandmother.

• • •

Thirteen years later, I was lying in my bed. The sun was peeking through the blinds in my room, which were always closed to protect me from my neighbors. The man I was seeing lay sleepily next to me. He had a protective and warm hand on my back as I woke up. We had played hooky that day—calling out of our jobs and hiding beneath blankets together. In a few weeks' time, I would be going home with him to stay in his childhood house. I would be going to meet his family and his friends.

I was calm about it, as my nineteen-year-old need for approval had somewhat subsided. He came from an incredibly wealthy family, and his friends were generally cut from a different cloth than mine (which were his words, not mine). He had told me numerous times that he wondered about his own friends—if they were actually the type of people he wanted to spend his time with. He had met my friends and my family—and he has been shocked.

“You come from a different world than I do. You need to understand, people don't usually get along with their parents like you do. It is—you are—weird.”

When he was trying to be playful, he would tell me I fulfilled a role for him. We were a mismatched pair to begin with. He would joke that when I finally moved on from him, he would tell stories of the “liberal from Maine” he dated when he was in his twenties.

The night before, in preparation for my visit, I had told him about my other experiences with boyfriends' families. I told him about being in college and visiting my boyfriend's parents in Tennessee. I told him about feeling out of place, about feeling alone, about the shiksa comment.

“Don't worry about pleasing my family,” he said. “You don't stand a chance to begin with, so it's silly to focus on it too much.”

That morning, he held me. As we woke up, he wrapped his arms around me and pressed his warm body against mine.

“How does it feel? You're going to be the shiksa again—except this time with a WASP-y family,” he cooed in my ear. “Good morning, my little shiksa.”

My body tensed. I thought of my mother—of my grandmother.

“Please never call me that again.” He noticed how cold I had gotten and immediately backed off.

I lay by myself and thought. From saying the word, from telling the story, I had given him permission to think of me that way. I had accepted that I was playing a role—a temptress, an abomination. I was allowing myself to be deemed “not good enough.”

I thought about how the word sounded coming out of his mouth. I thought of the S and the hard K and I thought of my grandmother again. She had passed away that year at ninety-nine years and six months old. I remembered her words to me thirteen years before, and for the first time truly felt them.