Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  Then it all slid downhill when we moved on to the menu, and I got a taste of what Dinah went through planning her own wedding. When I proposed the idea of coconut shrimp for appetizers, my hair blew back from the force of the commentary.

  Your father doesn’t like seafood.

  It’s Florida so we’re having coconut shrimp, end of story!

  Forget the shrimp, fried food will kill your appetite.

  No, it absorbs alcohol.

  Fried shrimp gives me the toots!

  Really? Fried shrimp? What about an oyster plate?

  Absolutely not. One bad oyster and you’ll remember the day for another reason.

  Exactly! You’ll pray you only get the toots.

  Jay, don’t be vulgar.

  Don’t oysters have mercury?

  Three hours later, they had endorsed exactly one menu item—steak—and an impassioned debate had broken out around the choice of wedding cake. Fondant icing was vetoed as too brittle, carrot cake as too healthy, spice cake as too risqué. Fresh flower decorations for the cake were nixed because they might contain tiny bugs. To keep everyone happy, Tom and I eventually agreed that each tier would be a different flavor: chocolate, vanilla and raspberry, and lemon coconut. “And don’t cut the cake and smash it into each other’s faces,” said my mother. “It’s disgusting, it’s not a loving thing to do. Feed each other gently.”

  “And don’t wait too long to serve the cake,” said my father. “That always makes people impatient.”

  “When you say ‘people,’ do you mean yourself?” I said irritably. “It’s going to be just our immediate families, remember?”

  “It’s only a cake,” Tom said later as we drove home. “Why does everything have to be a landmark Supreme Court decision? I don’t know how you people get anything done. If this was a corporation, it would be run into the ground.”

  I sighed. “Get used to it,” I said.

  And so the months before our wedding were marked by reams of emails. Flowers? “Do all white because it’s timeless,” Heather wrote. “Colors go in and out of style.”

  Fine. How about lily of the valley? I suggested in a group—always a group—email.

  TOO EXPENSIVE, my father typed back in the capital letters favored by retiree dads. Two dozen emails later, the verdict came in: white roses.

  The “long dress or short” discussion grew particularly animated. At first they ruled that I should wear a cocktail dress, because at thirty-five, I was “no spring chicken.” Then, in a last-minute nod to tradition, it was voted that I should wear my mother’s dress, an unconventional but lovely vintage column of lace.

  Should I wear my hair up? Elegant! said my mother. Aging, asserted my sisters. Down is more modern. Exhausted, I compromised with a style of half up, half down by pinning a few front strands back. Take back your wedding, urged my friends. It’s about the two of you, not the fourteen of you.

  It was too late. As the wedding day approached, Tom and I were down to one decision: the intimate messages we would inscribe to each other on the inside of our wedding rings. When we couldn’t agree, Tom teasingly suggested I call my family for advice.

  “I already did,” I admitted. “They think we should keep it simple and just do dates and initials.” He shook his head in resignation.

  And so a few weeks later I found myself walking down a sand “aisle” on the beach at Sanibel. When I saw my family’s beaming faces, tears blurred my eyes, because I realized that they were having just as much fun as I was. They weighed in on my wedding not to aggravate me but because they shared completely in my happiness. Yes, the ceremony was technically about the joining of two souls, not fourteen, but Tom and I had a lifetime to be a duo. I didn’t want to take back my wedding. My family’s meddling drove me nuts, but in an increasingly disconnected world, I was actually glad that I had a group of people who cared enough to make twenty phone calls about veil placement.

  Of course, everyone has limits. When the wedding was finally over, Tom and I headed back to Brooklyn for a recuperative weekend. Then we began packing for our honeymoon, a long road trip down South.

  I held up my cell phone. “Maybe I’ll take this, just in case of an emergency,” I said casually.

  Tom took it gently out of my hands. “No,” he said.

  The Hidden Dangers Lurking

  in Your Bathroom Sink

  When I picked up my mail this afternoon, I noticed my mother’s familiar handwriting on one of the envelopes and knew, without opening it, what it would contain: a newspaper clipping.

  “What now,” I muttered to my two cats. I work at home alone, so I talk to them a little too often. My cats are my version of office workers—or, if you take a less charitable view, a nutball posse for a semi-deranged person who spends way too much time by herself.

  I extracted a clipping titled “Beating Back Nature’s Furry Intruders.” It was a story about enormous rodents called nutrias, described as “giant rat-like swamp creatures” with “voracious appetites and explosive reproductive capabilities.” Originally natives of South America, the article went on, they were imported to the United States in the 1930s for their fur. When they were eventually released into the wild, they started chomping through the wetlands of Louisiana, breeding furiously and invading the entire Gulf of Mexico. Now they’ve even been named as a culprit in global warming.

  “Who knew?” my mother had scrawled on the top of the paper. I wanted to write my own question, which was “Why are you sending me this?” I don’t live near the Gulf of Mexico. I live in New York City, where, as far as I know, there are no wetlands, beyond the streets flooding, and there are already giant rats. What machinations in my mother’s brain caused her to read an article on giant rodents and send it to me was a mystery.

  But this has been a regular occurrence in my life ever since my parents retired. Over the years it’s grown from the occasional bulletin about disease prevention to a veritable deluge of clips. They seem to be a way to say both Thinking of you and Who else but your caring mother would be interested enough in your digestive workings to take the time to send “Five Steps to a Healthy Colon”? as well as I may be retired, but as your parent I still have valuable wisdom to dispense, such as this article on litter-box microbes.

  This compulsion to clip ’n’ send is a well-known phenomenon among retirees with adult children. One friend of mine from California receives regular clippings from her father from the Los Angeles Times, a publication he knows she already reads every day. “I think he believes I just skim it,” she says with a sigh. “I guess he doesn’t want me to miss anything.”

  The clippings I receive differ slightly, depending on the parent. My mother’s are more wide-ranging; my father’s are much more predictable, falling under a few general categories:

  • If you don’t heed this article, prepare for a grisly mishap in your own home, where you’ll use your last breath to wheeze out your address to 911 before you collapse and die. This would include any and all inflammatory stories on the perils of walking down uncarpeted stairs in socks (“You don’t want a nasty fall!” he had scribbled), as well as the importance of having one’s chimney cleaned annually to prevent the house from burning down to a few smoking cinders (I don’t have a fireplace) and keeping curtains away from electrical outlets, which can shoot out harmful sparks (I have blinds, not curtains). Over the years, I’ve received warnings in the mail about “deadly household tragedies” such as unattended candles falling on the rug and setting an entire house ablaze in seconds; carelessly ingesting cough medicine without checking the expiration date; having a faulty seal in your refrigerator door, which can encourage hazardous bacteria growth; and cooking in loose clothing, which can easily burst into flames and turn you into a screaming, capering fireball. Usually these missives are accompanied by a cheery, reassuring note like “Remember that accidents can happen anytime, anywhere! XO, Dad.” If the headline contains the word lurking (“The Hidden Dangers Lurking in Your Bathroom Sink/Art
ificial Sweeteners/Dog’s Ears/Home’s Foundation/Tea Bags”), then he feels he has done his job.

  • If you don’t buy this item from my favorite catalog, Improvements, with its not-at-all-hectoring slogan, “There’s always something around your house that could use Improvements,” well, then, best of luck to you. Best of luck. Products that are carefully marked with my father’s treasured highlighting pen might include fingerprint-activated door locks, mattress protectors that shield you from gangs of marauding dust mites, and something called a Blackout Home Safety Kit. Heather tells me that my father recently paid her a visit and was horrified to discover her bathroom window did not have any sort of curtains or blinds. Arriving promptly in the mail was a clipping from Improvements offering a classy, opaque stick-on film that fitted over the window. (“Will put off those Peeping Toms!” my father had scribbled.)

  Finally, if my dad finds out that I am buying any sort of appliance, or thinking about purchasing a new car, or considering any form of home upgrade whatsoever, a sheaf of cuttings from Consumer Reports will reliably show up in the mail. My father carefully files his Consumer Reports to prepare for the emergency of one of his daughters blithely buying a product that has not been rated number one by Consumer Reports’ impartial testing lab.

  Tom and I recently decided that we were going to get a new refrigerator and, after a little research, had settled on one brand, but of course I couldn’t commit until I had vetted our choice with my father. Imagine my alarm when I caught Tom cavalierly dialing up the appliance store one day to check prices. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said when he hung up the phone. “Do you want to break my father’s heart? Do you?”

  He laughed. “But I already went online and Consumer Reports approves of this brand.”

  “Tom. Please.”

  Mechanically, he dialed my folks’ number. “Hi, Jay,” he said woodenly “How are you? Oh, the Giants are on? Who’s winning?”

  Ask him! I mouthed, making my eyes bulge out in what I hoped was a menacing manner.

  “Listen, we’re thinking of buying a new fridge, and we wanted to know if you had any thoughts.” Oh, yes, my father most definitely had some thoughts. “Mm-hmm,” said Tom. “Right. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Right. Yes. Right. Hadn’t thought of that. Well, I was wondering if you might have any Consumer Reports lying around that feature the best refrigerators.”

  “Why, of course!” I heard my father say happily.

  Tom looked at me. “He’s going to get his files,” he whispered.

  “Thank you,” I whispered back.

  My mother, meanwhile, tends to send ideas that she harvests for me to write about in magazines, some of which have proven to be useful (a recent clip was about a new kind of recumbent bike, noted with “So interesting!”). Other categories include:

  • Funny!!!: This is a broad human-interest category, often culled from community newspapers, but the common thread is that my mother will scribble “Funny!!!” on the top. Animals behaving badly are always a hit, because my suburban folks see the natural world as something to subdue and love when a rebellious creature gets its comeuppance. (Recent headlines: “Woman Gets into Tussle with Aggressive Deer” and “Raccoon’s Crime Spree Finally Comes to an End.”) But it can also include humans behaving badly, especially if an “area nude man” is discovered mowing his lawn, or holding up a convenience store, or cheerfully driving a golf cart. (“Dummy!” my mother will scrawl gleefully.) If something unusual is being deep-fried at a state fair (Twinkies! Pickles! Oreos!), I will read about it. If a report surfaces on a hamster who saves a family trapped in an overturned car, into the envelope it goes.

  • Inspirational: “Dying breeds” are popular with my mother (“Newark Family Doctor Still Makes House Calls”). So are stories of an entire town rallying around some down-and-out person, or the tale of a wizened ninety-five-year-old woman who still shows up early every day to work as a secretary in an elementary school and enjoys a daily double martini afterward (obligatory quotes about meeting President Calvin Coolidge as a girl a bonus).

  • Completely and utterly irrelevant to my life: “Celebrity-Inspired Drinks Not Always Toastworthy” I don’t go to bars. That’s because I don’t drink. So I wouldn’t order a cocktail, whether it’s celebrity-inspired or not. “Raw-Food Diet Has Pros and Cons.” I’ve never been on a raw-food diet. That’s because I like my food cooked.

  For any parent, clippings can conveniently substitute for discussions they’d rather not have. A recently divorced friend of mine just received a torrent of clips from her mother on the exciting joys and high effectiveness rate of Internet dating. And my folks know they can only push me so far in their relentless quest for a grandchild, so an inflammatory headline that childless women are more likely to get breast cancer furthers their cause nicely without bringing up the issue directly. As medical fearmongering is a consistent theme of these missives, they can innocently claim that they just want me to live for a long time—is that such a crime?

  One night Dinah phoned. “You know how Dad keeps trying to convince me to tell Patrick to get a gastric lap band?”

  “Yes.” Her husband, Patrick, has been fighting his weight forever. Making matters worse, he’s a chef. With diabetes.

  “Ever since Dad saw a segment on 60 Minutes about how it can stop diabetes, he’s been obsessed. But he never tells Patrick, he tells me. And I keep fending him off by saying that Patrick’s trying to lose weight on his own. But Dad couldn’t wait, because a clipping just arrived for Patrick about laparoscopic surgery.”

  “Dad meant well. It’s like his phantom form of communication.”

  She sighed. “I know. But I like the articles about Roth IRAs better, or that one about the pig that likes to go surfing.”

  I can’t bring myself to toss out some of these little pieces of paper, so I often save them until they’re yellow. They’re stuffed in a drawer in my bedside table, and one of them, a collection of lucky numbers that my mother sent me to play Lotto, falls out of my wallet every time I pull out some cash. I suppose these clips are a way of maintaining a bond with a nonstop flow of the comfortingly mundane. Most are about everyday matters, the sorts of ordinary things that I would discuss a lot more if I lived closer, rather than in the next state, and could just drop by for a visit (whereas when I chat with my folks on the phone, we tend to stick to the big topics). It’s a way for us to pretend we live in the same neighborhood—which, by the way, my father would love. Many times when I have visited them, he has taken me for a morning spin around their New Jersey town to point out the houses for sale that I might like. (Then I return home to a torrent of clippings from the real estate section of his paper, with wheedling notes in the margins that say things like “Check out this state-of-the-art kitchen! Open house this Sunday if you want to see it in person. I’ll pick you up at the train station!”)

  After a clip has been mailed by either parent, I often get a phone call to ascertain that the clip was received. The other day, when my father phoned to inquire if I had any thoughts about the article he sent on early retirement planning, I asked him why he felt the need to send so many clippings.

  “Generally, I find information in an area you don’t read about,” he said. “No matter how old or mature my daughters are, I think you might have missed something. And obviously I’m worried about you, about your safety. At your age, you think you’re immortal, and thank goodness. At my age you’re trying not to slip and break a hip. I guess as you get older, you anticipate things like that more. When you’re younger, your tendency is to react to a situation, but when you get older, you’re in the preventative stage. So I try, as much as I can, to ward off bad things from happening, both to me and to you girls—try to prevent things two moves out, as chess players say.

  “Like the crank radio that I keep telling you girls to buy,” he continued. Oh, no. Here we go. Not the crank-radio speech again. “I bought one, as you know, and I really think everyone else should have one, too.” Here comes the phrase �
�substantial power outage.” I can feel it. It is coming ’round the corner. Predicting the next phrases he will use is a helpful mental game for staying awake when he goes on one of his jags. “If there’s a substantial power outage or a national emergency, most radio stations will be operated on generators. The only way you’ll hear them will be with a crank radio. How are you supposed to get your information otherwise? You’re completely cut off.”

  “You’re right, Dad.” As I hung up, I felt a little sheepish. As much as my sisters and I made fun of him and Mom for their eye-roll-inducing clippings, it was clear that my father was genuinely plagued by the thought that I might be trapped somewhere, surrounded by rubble, with no way of knowing what’s going on. If he couldn’t live near me to race to the rescue, then this was the best backup plan he could manage.

  And, God help me, I’ve begun to clip, too. Last year I read an irritating article in the Wall Street Journal on home owners who install a second laundry room in their McMansions in order to save themselves the bother of actually walking up or down the stairs to wash their clothes. Ugh, I thought, reaching for the scissors.

  “Do you believe this?” I wrote on the top, adding a new “What will people do next?” category to our family clipping oeuvre. Then I stuck it in an envelope, which I addressed to my folks.

  “Just this once,” I said to the cats.

  They Don’t Make Designer

  Colostomy Bags

  My father has spent his entire adult life surrounded by strong women. In family portraits, he always looks happy but a little dazed. Our cats were females. We even had a lady hamster. With little escape for him beyond trips to the hardware store and quality time with his beloved television, no wonder his annual golf trip was so eagerly anticipated.