by Rachel Ament
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.
When my mom got home from Girl Scouts that day, she felt misled and confronted my grandmother in a bit of a rage, “How could you not tell me about this stuff?”
My grandmother didn’t say anything. She only unstapled those pages in the health book and hoped my mother would be savvy enough to seek it out.
My grandma was such a worrier that she didn’t let my mother cross the street alone until she was practically an adult. “It was ridiculous,” said my mom.
Guilt trips were used as readily as modern mothers use hand sanitizer. My grandma would drop everything to take my mom to ballet lessons every week and then get upset that my mom didn’t appreciate her sacrifice. “It was because I didn’t want to do ballet!” my mom said, exasperated. “I never said I wanted to do ballet!”
After dozens more tales, my mom finally sighed and leaned back in her chair. “So you see, I had such a Jewish mom that I tried to learn from that,” my mom said. “It was kind of a rebellion. I’ve consciously become the anti-Jewish mom in a way.”
She straightened her back and leaned in again, “But maybe I should have made you clean your room more,” she said, finally breaking into a small grin. “You are very messy, so maybe I went too far with that.”
During the conversation, I saw the frustration my mom had felt growing up, but I couldn’t help thinking that even though my grandmother was tough, I had to be grateful for Jewish mothers, because without them, my mom wouldn’t be who she’d become. But I couldn’t tell her that. What do you say in a situation like this? When you realize that your mother consciously fought against her very nature to make life better for you.
“Thank you,” I said. It didn’t seem like enough.
After a couple minutes, she felt a little better because we started to stuff dark chocolate chunks into our faces.
Things were all well and good after that, at least for a while. But it started to get strange a month later, when I returned to school. I realized something: my mother’s rebellion against her mother’s parenting style was also happening to me, but in a slightly different way. It happened when I got back to my apartment. Mara, you’re such a mess. Can you not get it together? It looks like the Tasmanian devil had a play date with the Hulk in here.
That voice, the judgmental monologue I’d had running in my head, was as intense as my grandmother’s. I’d rebelled against my mother’s laxness and created a vigorous, strict Jewish matriarch in my mind. In other words, if my mom wasn’t going to be harsh and smothering to me, apparently I needed someone who would be.
And then it hit me: Holy shit, I am my own Jewish mom!
It’s been ten years since my mother and I had that talk. I’m married now. My husband is a Jewish dude. I really didn’t think that mattered, and then all of a sudden it did. I still have that voice with me. You’ve got to marry a nice Jewish boy! The voice is unrelenting, but I’ve named her now. Her name is Pearl. To name her is to know her, and that way, when I hear her challenging, judgmental, and neurotic voice, I conjure up my mother’s perspective to balance it out. This technique helps to alleviate the pressure I’ve heaped upon myself.
PEARL: You’re thirty-one years old, and you haven’t done enough with your life yet.
MOM: You’re on the path. Just keep steady.
PEARL: You have hemorrhagic fever. That’s why you’ve been craving meatloaf for three days. Go to the doctor!
MOM: Hemorrhagic fever has nothing to do with meatloaf.
This mediocre method for trying to shush Pearl is not perfect, but it does offer some fleeting relief.
Now that my husband and I have been married for a year (and my ovaries are steadily decomposing), we are thinking about having a baby, and I can’t help wondering: who will I be as a mother? Will I exhibit the harsh traits I’ve inflicted upon myself? Will Pearl become me and, therefore, also my child’s mother? Will I be too neurotic? Give the kid a complex? Be able to control my desire to get my hands into everything?
I called my mom last week to talk it out, to tell her some of my fears about becoming a mother in the hopes that she could calm me.
“What?” my mom said, interrupting me. “A baby! You’re thinking about having a baby? I want you to have a baby. A baby! Oh, how wonderful, a baby! You should definitely have a baby…”
Basically, she went insane—the only kind of insane that prospective Jewish grandmothers can become. She couldn’t help herself.
While she carried on, I smiled and laughed to myself. And I realized that despite how hard she tried to suppress it, Jewish mom is in our blood.
“Have a baby!” she shouted.
All this time, three decades on Earth, and I was just starting to realize that “Jewish mother” could mean a lot of different things.
And I’m forever grateful for all that my mother is and is not.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Lauren Greenberg has written for Love You, Mean It with Whitney Cummings, the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, and Norm Macdonald Live on JASH. She occasionally blogs at Laurengberg.tumblr.com and frequently tweets @LaurenGreenberg.
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Sari Botton is a writer and editor living in Rosendale, New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, New York, Harper’s Bazaar, W magazine, the Rumpus, and many other publications.
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Abby Sher is a writer and performer, mother, wife, yogi, and big fan of mud. Her memoir, Amen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying, won the Elle Readers’ Prize and the Chicago Tribune’s Best Nonfiction of 2009. www.AbbySher.com
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Kerry Cohen is the author of six books, including Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. www.Kerry-Cohen.com
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Mayim Bialik is best known for her role in the 1990s sitcom Blossom and now appears in The Big Bang Theory, for which she has been twice nominated for an Emmy. Bialik is a blogger for Kveller.com, and is the proud Jewish mother of two young sons.
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Meredith Hoffa is a writer in Los Angeles. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Maxim, and Esquire.com, among other places. www.meredithhoffa.com
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Anna Breslaw is a writer for Cosmopolitan.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Mothballs.
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Chaya Kurtz is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She was a
syndicated home and garden writer for a few years and now writes about Jewish stuff full-time.
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Iris Bahr is an award-winning writer, director, and actor. Her creative endeavors span television (Svetlana, Curb Your Enthusiasm), theater (DAI (Enough), Planet America), your local bookstore (Dork Whore, Machu My Picchu), and the Internet (Preggo Tips and various shady videos). www.irisbahr.org
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Jena Friedman is an American stand-up comedian, writer, and director. She is currently a field producer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and has also written for The Late Show with David Letterman.
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Rachel Shukert is the author of three books, including her most recent novel, Starstruck. Her writing has appeared in New York, Slate, Salon, Gawker, and the Daily Beast, among other publications.
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Leonora Ariella Nonni Epstein is the co-author of X vs. Y: A Culture War, a Love Story. She’s also an editor at BuzzFeed.com, working out of the company’s Los Angeles office.
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Jenny Jaffe is a New York–based comedy writer. An alumni of NYU’s Hammerkatz sketch comedy group, her past credits include staff writing positions at CollegeHumor and MTV’s Nikki and Sara Live. Find out more by following her on Twitter @jennyjaffe.
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Lauren Yapalater is a writer and thinker of many thoughts living in New York City. She is inspired daily by her dog. Her work can be found on BuzzFeed.com, where she is a senior editor.
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Rebecca Drysdale is an LA-based comedian who has worked with HBO, Logo TV, MTV, and the Jim Henson Company and currently writes for Key and Peele on Comedy Central. She owns and runs the Clubhouse, an independent improv theatre in Hollywood.
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Emmy Blotnick is a comedian, writer, and ice sculptor based in New York. She has written for MTV’s Nikki and Sara Live and Mental Floss magazine, and okay fine, she lied about the ice sculptures.
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Arianna Stern writes essays, humor pieces, and fiction in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has had work published in the Hairpin and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. Find her on Twitter @grayandgreen.
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Almie Rose is an anxious writer who just came out with her first ebook, I Forgot To Be Famous. Her blog is Apocalypstick, and she also blogs for Hello Giggles, Thought Catalog, and xoJane.
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Nadine Friedman, a Brooklyn-based writer and photographer focused on socially compelling issues, has been featured in Bitch Magazine, Biographile, the Hairpin, Inanna House, and the Daily Beast. She’s currently completing a book of portraits of individuals living with multiple sclerosis throughout the United States.
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Deb Margolin is a playwright, actor, and founding member of Split Britches Theater Company. She is an associate professor in Yale University’s undergraduate Theater Studies program and denies living in New Jersey.
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Gaby Dunn is a writer, comedian, and Jesse Eisenberg enthusiast living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Cosmopolitan, and on NPR’s On the Media and Nightline.
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Wendy Liebman has been doing stand-up comedy for more than twenty-five years! She won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up and has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
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Mireille Silcoff is a journalist and author living in Montreal. She is a columnist with the National Post and a frequent contributor to publications including the New York Times Magazine. Her next book, a novel, will be published in 2014 by House of Anansi Press.
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Iliza Shlesinger is the only female and youngest comedian to hold the title of NBC’s Last Comic Standing. Most recently she was the host of CBS’s syndicated comedy dating show Excused. She lives in LA with her dog, Blanche.
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Dylan Joffe has written for Hello Giggles and Thought Catalog. She is passionate about making the world a better place, which most recently has led her to nonprofit work in Boston.
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Mara Altman has written three bestselling Kindle Singles, including one about coming to terms with her inordinate amount of body hair. Her first book, Thanks for Coming, was optioned by HBO and translated into three languages.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Photo by Sara Mahler
Rachel Ament is a writer, editor and complainer living in Washington, DC. She has contributed to the New York Times, the Jerusalem Post, Oxygen, and AOL, among other publications. She was also a member of the writing staff for the New Orleans–based independent film Nola.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My massive thanks to my editor, Jenna Skwarek, and her team at Sourcebooks, Inc., for your enthusiasm, patience, and tremendous skill. To my agent, Monika Verma, for your endless kindness and perseverance. Thank you to Liz Funk, who taught me all I know about the publishing world. Much love to my dad and brother, my heroes, for showing me the way. To Allan and Deloris Ament for your heartfelt support. A special thanks to Chelsea Bowers, Allison Lipper, Julie de Carvalho, Lori Hawkins, Valerie Owen, Raquel Green, Aaron Fast, Becca Jonas, Zachary Terner, Jordan Michael Smith, Emily Geglia, Cassy Baptista, and David Rosen for your friendship and awesome ideas. My deepest gratitude to the collection’s contributors for lending their time and prodigious talents to this endeavor. But most of all, thank you to my mom, whose exceptional mothering inspired an entire book.