I must say I was shocked when he went for my daughter and vice versa. It was a little too European shtetl for my liking, like marrying your cousin or something, as every one of my overly hairy relatives indeed did. My mother’s aunt was married to her own uncle (and by the way, I’m my own grandpa!). Two of my sisters are married to a brother and sister, and both of my sisters’ last names are Epstein-Barr. You can’t make this shit up, folks!
I was just so happy that my son-in-law took my fat daughter off my hands, and that he finds her so incredibly hot that he cannot take the time to put on a rubber before having sex with her, thus giving me four gorgeous grandsons who are the funnest people I have ever met. These grandsons know what’s funny. In fact, I would say that I have never personally appeared before a better crowd in my life! Lifting your leg and farting makes them howl for hours! Even the little one is amused when I do that tongue- thrusting, eye-rolling thing. I know how to entertain an audience. So don’t tell me that Roseanne Barr isn’t funny anymore, network executives. You guys can kiss my ass. You guys are complete fucking idiots, and I am writing this here because I know people of your ilk never read books. You read scripts and there is a fucking difference, okay? God, you people couldn’t tell the difference between a book and a good shit if people like Oprah weren’t telling you what to read.
Hey, Oprah, tell your fans to read Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Talk about a good, relevant read! Oprah has never done one show on economics or capitalism and that pisses me off. Not one show on how television advertising, which made Oprah a billionaire, makes money by keeping people in front of their TV sets while the guys at the top rob them blind! Are we supposed to ignore the elephant in the room? That YES, WE NEED MORE SOCIALISM AND LESS BANKSTERISM HERE IN AMERICA!
“Socialist” is what they called Dr. King and all the other activists. “Socialist” is what they always call me, too, erroneously—I am more of an antisocialist. I am completely antisocial and prefer my own company to any human contact that does not involve me standing in front of a happy, laughing crowd of respectable and intelligent bon vivants (or drunks who read literature).
But back to my family and weddings. Jenny, my big-legged daughter, was quite a handful as a child. She could not sit still, would tear things up, and she’d scream a lot, too. I, of course, am known for having an irritating voice, and she had a voice that made her mother proud. As soon as she started screaming in restaurants, people would get up from their tables and rush out to get their tubes tied. What a thrill it is for me to see that all three of Jenny’s sons (not counting the newborn alien, named Buster Lyle) are the dramatic types themselves. Sitting in a restaurant with little four-year-old Cosmo Dexter, watching him get irate at the waiter for not asking him if he would like a cocktail, too, I said, “Hey, dude, don’t act like your mother, okay?” Just seeing his mouth pop open as he laughs secretly with me behind his mother’s back is a gift of nachas (Jewish for “joy”) from God Herself!
My daughter still has quite the hot temper, as do I. But luckily for us our fat asses keep us grounded; we cannot physically lash out in anger at anyone, as it would require getting off the couch, and not just to go eat! Jenny claims I made her fat by always trying to force her to diet. It is true that her father and I put a padlock on the fridge once. There was nothing in there but pickles at the time, but she got in somehow and drank the pickle water—damn, girl, that’s h-u-n-g-r-y!
My daughter is too smart for me, though. She once blackmailed her babysitter to sneak her out to Del Taco after school. The baby-sitter, getting chummy with my kids after working for me for about a month, told my preteen daughter that she smoked PCP on the weekend but made it a point never to smoke it during the workweek. She smoked only pot during work hours. Jenny, who is conniving and evil, then said, “My mom would fire you in a minute if she knew you had told us these things. I am not going to tell my mom what you said as long as you go to the store and buy me two large cans of sauerkraut that I can keep in my bottom dresser drawer and run me to Del Taco whenever I want.” The babysitter was high on pot and understood about breaking rules, so she was cooking the diet meals for my daughter and moonlighting as a snack ho.
Jenny is quite a painter and artist and poet herself, but because I encouraged her to go to art school instead of getting married and having children, she chose instead to marry her brother’s odd yet handsome friend and have a baby every single God-blessed year. Clearly, she inherited her rebelliousness and her weight problem from me. She is the most wonderful mother I have ever seen, though. I did not want my daughter to suffer from being a fat girl like I had been, and I guess I went overboard. But I was just trying to help her, and I hope that someday she will understand that.
It is not easy to be the fat mother of a fat daughter in this society! If you and your kids are fat, you can never go to another all-you-can-eat buffet for as long as you live unless you want to be shamed by everyone around you who, as they eye you and your little ones, say things like “You’d better take your kids to a gym and not a buffet, lady!” I would walk right up to them and that shocked them—I guess they thought that a fat person would rather cower behind a buffet than be confrontational about their rudeness. I would say, “Don’t talk about my kids, pal, and don’t talk about their mama!” Of course, the smart fat family learns that Tuesday night is the night that all the real, real fat families can shamelessly go to the buffet and not be alone because it’s Taco Night (this is a fat mom top-secret alert—after reading this page, tear it up and eat it) and we can all smile at one another instead of looking down at the ground to avoid judgmental eye contact from the furiously fit.
The second daughter to marry was my oldest daughter, Brandi, whom I did not raise. She was married in May 2003 in Manitou Springs, Colorado, and her wedding day was overwhelming in so many ways. It was the first time that I had met her adoptive mother’s family and the first time that my mother met “My Baby Mama.”
My daughter’s other mother, Gail (Brandi was given up for adoption by me at birth, and then reabsorbed into my crazy family twenty years ago), is a wonderful person. I could not have hoped for a better woman to be “My Baby Mama,” as I call her. I love Gail. We are girlfriends who have worked it all out. Gail divorced Brandi’s adoptive dad when Brandi was younger, and he has since married a woman who, though not Jewish, controls his every waking act quite nicely.
Our daughter Brandi married a Jewish fellow from Saint Petersburg, Russia, who looks exactly like Putin, and whom she met on JDate. Russian Jewish males are incredibly intriguing people, I have found. They are left wing in a crazy right-wing way. I used to write letters to the Soviet government when I was part of the Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry, asking them to let my people go. The USSR was no match for the thousands of Jewish American women who wrote and sent those letters, and soon they gave up and allowed all the Jews who wanted to leave Russia to go. (A word of advice: Do not get Jewish women started if you do not want to stir up trouble for yourself. Just do what they tell you and do it quickly, and everything will be okay.) We all know what happened after that—their economy collapsed and so did their central government.
The collapse of their economy frightened the Russian people so badly that they actually allowed the Jews who stayed in their country better comforts than they had allowed them before, which is good for civil rights of minorities, something Russians are no better at ensuring than Americans. I am all for civil rights, and I love minorities because I am part of several minority groups myself, from the female to the Jew to the fat to the lefty to the feminist. Being rich is another one of my favorite minority groups, though, I must say. And still, within that infinitesimally small segment of the population, I have found that being a rich person who gives 20 percent of her money to charity annually makes me a member of a minority group of fewer than ten people! There are almost no others like me!
Governments are run by the smallest minority in the entire world—the rich or the royal 1 percent. And since I a
m part of a group of fewer than ten people—a fraction of that 1 percent, which is the world’s smallest economic group—I must claim some land of my own somewhere and become its benevolent ruler. My son-in-law Vladmir and my daughter are in real estate sales, which means they like capitalism. I do not like capitalism at all, and consider it a Ponzi scheme that the entire Western world is at the mercy of. In my utopian fantasy there would be no money system at all, just drinking and singing and partying, bartering goods, growing gardens, and making art.
Needless to say, the Russian son-in-law and I find each other peculiar. He thinks I am a loudmouthed, disillusioned female who is intent on defying patriarchal order—and of course, he is right, on paper. I think that he is confusing me somewhat with his own mother, who took him to Denver, Colorado, when he was ten years old so that he would not be forced to serve in the Russian army. Of course, I had always heard from my own grandmothers about how their Russian mothers and grandmothers attempted to put a firewall between their own sons and the Russian army in creative ways for generations, but I had never met one of them in person. (What’s the difference between an immigrant, Russian Jewish mother and a pit bull? The overly dark lip liner and the lipstick, though they both have the loud and terrifying snarl.) My daughter’s mother-in-law and I have physically fought over who hogs our grandson the most. Can you imagine a crazed Russian woman acting like that? Me neither, and that is why I punched her fucking lights out!
On the night before our kids’ wedding, I made a joke to my daughter about how happy she would be once the wedding was over and she could start regaining all of the weight she had lost to fit into her wedding gown. The Russian, Vladmir, got a little too upset by that small joke, I thought, and he said, “I thought about what they say about how in twenty years your wife will look just like her mother. But I figured out that you did not really raise her, and her adoptive mother is very thin, so I took that into account and I will marry her anyway.”
I was completely floored that the Russky had the balls! I threw back my shot of wodka, and in no uncertain terms told the boy that his wife shares my genes and would one day be fat just like me, so he better get used to the idea. He looked me in the eye and said, “I will not allow her to get fat.” I said, “You won’t be able to stop her.” He said, “I will stop her or we will get divorced.”
It was the way he said it that sent shock waves through my body. There was no fear in his eyes at all! He knew of my volatility, and yet he dared to challenge me in spite of it. His eyes flickered and his back straightened, as if he were bracing himself for battle. I had not seen a man stand up to me and get in my face like that since the time my first husband told me that he was not the marrying kind, and that I should stop bugging him about it. Of course, I cheerfully made him rue the day he was foolish enough to make that claim by employing various types of emotional blackmail and torment that eventually led to our beautiful and meaningful wedding at the courthouse in Golden, Colorado, in 1972.
I was about to haul off and give my daughter’s intended a piece of my mind, and start toying with him rather like a cat does a bird she is stalking, when my daughter began yelling at us both to stop drinking wodka and arguing with each other or she would get pissed and leave the dinner table. Things calmed down for some time after the nuptials. But later on I told him that I expected him to bring my daughter and grandson Ari out to visit me on the nut farm in Hawaii for Thanksgiving. He informed me that he would get back to me. The nerve!
He went on to say that his family would do as he wished them to, and not as I wished them to, since he is the papa and I am only the grandma, and that I should learn how the world really works in that regard. I became enraged and said to him, “It might work like that over in Russia, where people have to line up for bread every day instead of just baking a variety of useful preservatives into it so that it will last for several weeks. But here in America, you might want to look into how things really work in the real world of Jewry’s matriarchs, son!” He said, “No, it is yourself who is in for quite a rude awakening in this world. No woman, old nor young, will tell me what to do.”
I just had to shut my mouth. Never before in my life had I allowed a man to make me back down. I am a strong, Jewish woman from Utah, but I had to admit that I was no match for the fucking Russian, or any grown man who has the power to keep my grandsons away from me. This shocking problem is a very, very common one for the women of my generation, who have learned to be bossy alpha bitches who, after driving all male partners and suitors away, then attempt to control the only men left in their lives—their sons. We are simply no match for the men in our daughters’ lives, let alone the men in our grandsons’ lives. Sad, really.
Oh, I suppose that I am not an easy person to have for a mother-in-law. No, really! I don’t like my kids all that much, and I have also learned to soundly doubt their judgment, since anything I ever tell them to do causes them to roll their eyes, cluck their tongues, and say, “Oh, really, Mother? Well, why should I take your advice, after the way you . . .” Blah, blah, blah.
Also, I am not easy to get along with because I don’t like to listen much to others’ likes or beliefs because it bores me, and I don’t have a lot of patience with people who disagree with the things I say. And I can be hard to make plans with, as I never know what whim might strike me or when I might run off on some tangent. Still, I cannot understand why any man would not want to make it his life’s purpose to do as I decree he do to keep me happy at any and all costs, since it will ultimately just make it easier on him if he insists on continuing to be a player on my life’s stage. Disagreeing with me makes no sense to any rational human being.
Anyway, my middle daughter, Jessica, who is actually the oldest daughter in my first marriage, married a Mexican named Christian, whose Hebrew name is Yacov, according to the Las Vegas rabbi who married them. Despite his name, I am thrilled with him, as he has raised a gorgeous little shiatsu named Kobe, who is cuter than any other dog that has ever lived on this earth.
As you may have guessed, I don’t really care much for dogs or other living things that didn’t come, at least indirectly, out of my own vagina. But this dog, this precious little dog, is to be the crowning glory in my postmenopausal incarnation. My son-in-law Christian has consented to letting me dress the dog up in little outfits and cart it around town with me! My own Barbie dog! Is that crazy or what? I mean, in this crazy life that makes less sense to me every day. Thank God for a lighthouse of sanity and a safe port in an endless hurricane of horror—I now have a little dog I can dress in a matching ballet outfit at my parties and receptions! These are the blessings that save my sanity. What’s left of it, that is. Well, that and the transfats and the Headline News channel (HLN) with Miss Jane Velez-Mitchell and the Oracle of Crime, Nancy Grace!
I also really love and adore Christian because being around him makes my daughter strangely calm and almost rational! I told Jessica in her earlier years, after she had wrongly accused me of racial prejudice because I was not thrilled with her choice of Mexican-American dating partners, that it was actually not because they were Mexican Americans that I did not like them, it was because they were unemployed Mexican Americans who smoked crack all the time.
This is an important distinction. There is real ethnic prejudice, and of that I am not guilty. I am, however, completely guilty of not being thrilled by unemployed crackheads who just happen to be Mexican Americans dating my daughter. I explained the difference to Jessica after her many irrational accusations regarding my racial insensitivity, but she wasn’t having any of it.
She also accuses me of being prejudiced because I do not like pit bulls, which are quite a popular pet choice for Spanish speakers. They are all the same and could snap at any moment for whatever reason—pit bulls, I mean, not the Spanish speakers—and therefore they are not suitable family pets. I refused to allow my daughter’s pit bull, Rufus, to ever come into my home. He had to be tethered in the backyard or garage when she came to visi
t (to ask me for money). Of course, I was right. One day, Rufus escaped and ran to the park, where he started trying to bite men on bikes and was arrested by the dog police, put on trial, and given the death penalty. I know a thug when I see one.
Now, I like tattoos, as everyone who knows me knows—I have several of them on various parts of my body. I can, however, spot a jailhouse or prison tattoo at five thousand paces, and I was not all that thrilled about seeing my daughter with a guy sporting a tear-drop on his cheek and a spiderweb on his elbow. But again, there are various distinctions to consider in that subgroup as well—someone with a teardrop and a cobweb who has gone to AA meetings for forty years is better than someone sporting the drop and the web who smokes crack, is unemployed, and wants to hang around my kid. I tried to be as clear with my daughter as I could be. I told her she should go on JDate, like her older sister had, and meet a nice Jewish boy, too. I explained that because she was half Scots-Irish, she could now return to the Jewish gene pool safely, with little chance of producing nerdlike offspring, and that I had decided that sharing a common cultural identity based on the genital mutilation of sons was a good way to go.
She said, “Mother, you are the last person on earth whose advice I would ever seek on matters of matrimony or relationships of any sort!” and then laughed with that snorting noise she always makes. But she ultimately signed up for JDate, and who responded but a man born in Mexico City named Christian, who always felt that his birth parents had been Jewish! Some things are just karmic.
Christian actually takes my advice, and tells my daughter to do so as well. And that coupled with the fact that he has raised the most perfect little dog that ever lived makes him a fantastic choice in a son-in-law. They have promised to have a little brown granddaughter for me, but I think they should just stick to dogs. I tell Jessica just to travel and party because having children will ruin her life forever. I say, “Trust me, I know what I am talking about.” And I do.
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