The Jewish Daughter Diaries (13 page)

Mara Altman

I grew up in San Marcos, a southern California town so devoid of Jews that most people didn't even know what “Jewish” meant, like they thought it was a rare type of salami or mistook it for an ephemeral state of being. As in, question: “Are you Jewish?”

Answer: “No, I'm actually kind of hungry.”

Somehow, even some of my teachers in grade school hadn't heard of Judaism. One day in second grade, we were preparing for the holiday season, which to most meant Christmas. Our assignment was to make Santa Claus ornaments. I told my teacher that I didn't celebrate Christmas. “Then what do you celebrate?” she asked.

“Hanukkah,” I said.

She then asked me which colors were used for this Hanukkah holiday thing. I told her blue and white. “Great. No problem,” she said.

Later that day, to my mother's amusement, I brought home a miniature blue-and-white clay Santa Claus.

Because my mother was the sole Jewish mother I knew, it took me until adulthood to realize that there was a stereotypical Jewish mother. Without other Jewish mothers around, I assumed the following equation was how Jewish mothers were made: Mom + Jewish = Jewish Mother. So it's true, my mother was a Jewish mother—maybe not in the traditional or stereotypical sense—but I didn't learn that until later.

As a child, every way that my mom differed from my friends' moms became distinctive Jewish characteristics. She was obscenely obsessed with dark chocolate. If women could marry chocolate bars, my father would probably be a Ghirardelli chunk. That was Jewish. She didn't watch TV except for
Star
Trek: The Next Generation
. So apparently, Jewish mothers only watched sci-fi. She didn't shave any part of her body. So clearly, all Jewish moms loved sporting hairy pits and limbs.

The list of her quirks went on. My mom let my two brothers and me eat sugar cereals like Frosted Flakes and Cap'n Crunch for dinner. Food was always available but never pressed upon us. We'd leave food on our plates—everything from strips of flank steak to florets of broccoli. Her motto when it came to food was: “Kids will eat what they need.”

She made sure I knew how babies were made before most kids knew how to wipe their own tushes. It was one of those things I just grew up knowing—knowledge I took for granted—like the fact that humans have two arms or that we live on a planet called Earth or that Jewish girls will often be afflicted with unibrows as well as pubic hair that grows halfway down their thighs.

My mom believed that parents who talked about their kids all the time were boring. The only thing more boring than bragging about your kids was talking about body aches and pains.

“Mara, no one enjoys hearing about your toe blister.”

I mean, implementing a rule that one shouldn't kvetch about his or her aches and pains is basically sacrilege in the Jewish culture, but I didn't know about that then.

“But—” I'd begin.

My mom could anticipate my next question. “No, Mara, your toe blister is not a tumor.”

I didn't know that Jewish moms were supposed to be anxious and overbearing, because my mom never once yelled rote parental warnings at me like, “You're gonna catch a cold if you don't wear a jacket!” In fact, she promoted taking nude mud baths in the backyard regardless of the weather.

She didn't worry that my heartburn might actually be the precursor to a heart attack or that I might have early onset glaucoma. The likelihood of alien abduction didn't even cross her mind.

So, to me, Jewish mothers were mostly calm and collected. They didn't sweat the small stuff (unless you ate the last of their dark chocolate bar).

See, but someone had to worry, so I did. I couldn't help myself; it was almost as if this tendency toward neurosis were encoded in my genes. I was stricken with hypochondria strong enough for the whole diaspora. I became a gold-medal fretter. When I developed a little bump on my forehead, I suspected it was cancer and left a movie theater mid-watch to make my mom inspect it in the sunlight. I was probably the only tween in modern history to be relieved to find out that I was experiencing the dawn of adolescent acne.

At age fifteen, when I started dating, my mom continued on her distinct parenting path. She told me that I could have my first boyfriend spend the night.

“Have him stay over, if you want,” she said. No other moms I knew were saying stuff like that. These Jewish moms were totally bonkers.

I stared at her, horrified. “In my bed?”

She nodded.

I think that's when the voice started to develop in my head. At least, that's when I can best pinpoint its origins. I found myself talking to myself and being critical of her judgment.
Does
she
not
know
how
irresponsible
that
is, having a boy—a boy with a schmeckle—spend the night?

As mentioned earlier, I already knew what those things could do.

The internal monologue kept going—in a female's voice, like mine, but gruffer and more critical.
You
could
get
pregnant
and
then
what
about
your
future? Have you thought about that, huh? Your future?

“You don't have to put it in capital letters,” my mom would say. “It's just fun to spend the night with someone you like.”

And sure, my mom cared about education, but it wasn't sacrosanct. She took me out of school once every couple of months for a mother and daughter day, but it was hard for me. I'd feel guilty. “But Mom,” I'd say, “we're learning about parabolas that day.”

“What do you think you'll remember down the line?” she'd respond, “One more day sitting in class or going out with your mom?”

Part of me thought it sounded awesome—ditch class, wahooo!—but I'd have to fight that voice in my head, which by this time had grown even stronger.
Don't be derelict in your academic duties, Mara. How are you going to get into an Ivy League with those truancies?

As I matured, the voice continued. It seemed to have my best interests at heart, but it was never satisfied with my accomplishments—always wanting more and better.
Oh, you think you're going to get an A in biology if you go to that party tonight? You better stay home and study.

Sometimes the voice would just be flat-out judgmental and cruel.
You
should
eat
more
of
that
cake; you spent a billion years making it,
it'd say, followed by,
Too
bad
you
ate
so
much
cake. You'll never fit into your new culottes now.

I just couldn't win.

• • •

As my mother had suspected, I got into college despite my multiple truancies. College was immediately revelatory, but not in the way I expected. I met other Jewish peers for the first time and hence was introduced to other Jewish mothers and, finally, to their lore.

I had expected to finally have something in common with these new friends and to be able to bond—“Your mom has hairy legs, too, right? Ohmygod, isn't it wild?”—but instead that's when I finally discovered my mom was an aberration. An anomaly. We're talking opposites. So different, in fact, that under “Jewish Mother” in the dictionary, you might see my mother's cute little face pictured under antonym. Apparently my math had been wrong; my equation—Jewish + Mom—didn't actually equal “Jewish Mom.”

Other kids' moms were described as smothering and overprotective and fixated on accomplishments. These ladies also, I heard, got all hardcore about their Jewish daughters marrying Jewish boys.

Even that piece didn't match my own experience. All these guys I'd been dating—all the males I'd grown up with—hadn't been Jewish, and my mom never gave a crap. She thought that love should come before a religion or cultural affiliation, though she had mentioned I might have something in common with Jewish boys to help make a strong relational foundation. “You both grew up on bagels and lox,” she said. “That could mean something.”

Then she'd be quick to add, “But it's really up to you.”

I would even eventually move to India and date a Muslim. His father was an Imam and all his sisters wore burkas. My mom didn't even flinch. She never met him but saw a picture.

“What a handsome man,” she said approvingly. “He sounds wonderful.” Her openness was completely dumbfounding.

The differences kept cropping up, so many that they couldn't go unaddressed much longer. Something was wrong.
Who
was
this
lady?
For example, I met a guy in class who told me that his mom called him every other day and would get huffy and wish holy bloody nightmares upon him if he couldn't talk. He said most Jewish moms were that way and kind of shrugged it off. I couldn't relate. I called my mom more often than she did me, and when I did, she often wouldn't be able to chat.

“Sorry, sweetie. I'm busy. Call you shortly.”

WTF?

Was my mom even Jewish? Was this some elaborate hoax she'd been playing on me? Maybe by telling me we were Jewish, she was trying to get me to understand and be sensitive to the life of a minority. I mean, all the things I thought were Jewish—the no pressure, no worry, and even the
Star Trek
–loving—turned out not to be very Semitic at all. I always thought that once I met other Jews, it'd all make sense, but instead I found myself more perplexed than ever.

So during my first summer break, I had to decipher this discrepancy. With some reluctance, I sat my mom down and asked. “Mom, how did you become this way?”

I didn't even have to explain what I was asking; it was like she already knew that this conversation was coming. She sat across from me with a cup of tea snuggled between two palms and began to answer circuitously, telling me about her childhood in much more detail than ever before.

“Your grandparents were…”—she said, pausing to find the right word—“characters.”

“Wait,” I said, “that's not what I was ask—”

“Hold on,” she said. “I'm getting there.”

She explained that my grandparents were second-generation Jews of Eastern European ancestry. In the early '50s, they settled with their young family in a two-story house near Culver Boulevard in Los Angeles. My grandpa owned and operated a small retail plant nursery called Fuchsia Land. He crushed snails—the nemesis of his darling flora—with his bare hands, and he watered his plants so often that his pointer finger became deformed—permanently crooked—because of the eons he spent with it bent over the spigot of a hose.

Before that, he had assembled sandwiches at Canter's Deli, a famous Jewish deli on Fairfax Avenue. He'd got his start in the culinary world by working as an army cook during World War II. There were so many cockroaches skittering around in the kitchen that he had no other option but to bake with them. He told the soldiers that the muffins were blueberry.

While my grandpa was outside with his fuchsias, my grandmother, a muumuu-wearing five-foot woman with fiery red hair, ran the household. By the time I was a conscious human being, she had Alzheimer's, but my mom explained that in her heyday, “Jewish mother” flowed through her veins as readily and excessively as plasma. She was an expert—we're talking full-blown professional—at smothering her children with love and guilt. To wit, my mother's two siblings are both doctors.

As my mother continued to explain, she began to lean forward and clench the table. She was getting revved up. It turns out that my grandma was quite a dramatic figure, and my mother was finally ready to let me in on her strange, often outrageous past.

She said that my grandma watched over her and her siblings like a drill sergeant at boot camp. She slept in the living room on a foldout sofa bed and used it as a command post in the mornings (and at night to catch anyone if they stayed out past curfew with a date). If my mom showed up ready for school with a skirt above the knees, she'd quickly be dispatched back to her bedroom to change into something more appropriate. My mom eventually adapted, learning to stuff the clothes she actually wanted to wear in her purse so that she could change at school.

My grandmother was so overprotective, my mom said, that she even had an intercom system installed in every room in the house so that at will, she could listen to each of her kids' conversations. My mom learned to whisper and lip read quite well.

“I know it was out of love,” said my mother of that experience, “but it was difficult not to have any privacy.”

She explained that they had a health book in their home, and my grandma stapled the chapter about reproduction together.

“Your grandmother never spoke about sex,” said my mom. “It was very hushed. An embarrassing thing.” My mom, at eleven years old, was so clueless that when her Girl Scout leader held up a box of Kotex and asked the troop, “Does anyone know what this is?” my mom leaped up with excitement, stretching her hand into the air. “Pick me! Pick me!” She flailed her hand.

The Girl Scout leader pointed to her. “Yes, Deena?”

My mom stood up, smugly cleared her throat, and then answered, “It's a
box
!”

She looked at everyone haughtily.
Dummies
don't know what a box is!

She soon realized that she'd misunderstood the question entirely because she heard snickering followed by another girl explaining something my mother had never heard about before, something about a “monthly visitor.”

That's when it dawned on my mother that she was living in a different universe, one that was protected by a Jewish mother.