Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  Actually, I wasn’t. I was trying to get her to stop nagging me. She desperately wanted a grandchild, and I, by my late thirties, desperately wanted to be a mother, but not a single mother, and I had no partner. Not that I wasn’t looking—but there are things in life you can make happen with will and determination, and others, like love, that seem determined by some other fate. Mom didn’t really want me to be a single mother either. Both of us knew how hard that fate had been for her. But that didn’t stop her nagging, scheming, and occasionally taking action. Once, when I came down to visit, I found her in the process of composing a personal ad for me to be placed in the local Jewish newspaper. Out of curiosity, I asked her what it said.

  “I’ve gotten as far as ‘Divorced Jewish female, highly intelligent …’ ” she said.

  I questioned whether highly intelligent was going to be a big selling point. (I have a clear memory of cuddling on the couch with her when I must have been seven years old, asking her why I didn’t have any boyfriends. I believe we were watching the Miss America Pageant at the time. “Boys don’t like girls who are smart,” she said. “Boys like girls who are sweet.”)

  I reminded her of this advice and suggested that her ad was not strategic. “And did it occur to you that you ought to at least mention the part about being a Pagan?” I asked. Since I was a well-known author of books on the Goddess movement and earth-based spirituality, since I spent my life writing and speaking about these topics, creating rituals, training priestesses of the Goddess, traveling all over the world doing workshops and lectures and Witch camps on the above topics, somehow the cold, stark “divorced Jewish female” didn’t seem to cover it.

  Mom brushed the comment aside. For her, my career as author and Witch, although it had lasted by then for a good fifteen years, was never more than a phase I was going through, a slight digression on the path she was convinced would lead me ultimately to becoming a rabbi. Or failing that, a psychotherapist, like her.

  Her desire for me to be a rabbi was a bit odd, because my mother was not very religious. She had rebelled against her own Orthodox parents. We didn’t keep kosher, went to synagogue only on High Holy Days, lit the Friday night candles only sporadically, and never kept Shabbos. She tended to dismiss the more observant members of the family—at least the younger ones—as hopelessly old-fashioned and to view the ultra-Orthodox as anal.

  I don’t know that my mother really believed in God—of any gender. For her, the mysteries were found in the depths of the human psyche. Why do we do what we do? What unconscious impulses move us? What hidden memories shape us?

  When I was small, my mother seemed like a wise oracle who knew the underlying reasons for things. It was she who suggested that the boys who teased me and made me cry might actually like me. We’d snuggle in bed, and she’d tell me about her cases, about their childhood traumas that still hampered them as adults. Each was a fascinating mystery to be probed for clues that would explain their unhappiness.

  Over time, my mother developed a near-religion of her own, a deep faith in the healing power of grief. Grief, she maintained, had its own process, its own timetable that could not be hurried or ignored. Grief is our healing response to loss, and if we let ourselves fully feel it and go through all of its stages, it will bring us through rage and despair, back to acceptance and restitution. She wrote a book about it (A Time to Grieve, by Dr. Bertha G. Simos) and became a sought-after expert in the field.

  She came to her interest in bereavement out of her own terrible grief for my father, who died when I was five and my brother Mark was only nine months old. He was only forty-five at the time, but it was his third heart attack that carried him off. So death haunted my childhood.

  There was nothing funny about my father’s death. He had two older sisters who were albinos—perhaps a factor of their parents being cousins, a common practice among Eastern European Jews of their generation. Not, as among royalty, to preserve some inheritance (they all barely scraped out a living either in America or back in the shtetls of what they always called Russia, but we now call Ukraine), but rather, I suspect, because they didn’t get out much. My mother’s parents were also cousins. When my grandmother Hannah came to this country at sixteen, she stayed with her Aunt Jennie in Duluth. Jennie’s nephew Sam liked her, and when other boys came to call, he told them she wasn’t home. So, they married, making myself and my brother as inbred as a pair of thoroughbred race horses, albeit not nearly so slim or fast on our feet.

  My father’s sisters suffered from bad eyesight and poor health, and Ida, the eldest, finally succumbed and died. They lived in Minneapolis, and we lived in Mishawaka, Indiana, where my father directed an institute for disturbed young people, a new post he held for just six months. I have only a few direct memories of him: how I loved the smell of cigarette smoke that clung to his clothing and how when he’d pick me up, my mother, knowing his heart was fragile, would get anxious. He was writing a book, completed shortly before he died, and I remember wanting his attention and being told, “Not now, Daddy’s writing.” It left me with the impression that writing a book was somehow a sacred activity, valued beyond all else, something to leave after you, like a child.

  My father flew back to be with his mother after my aunt died, and my mother, baby brother, and I followed shortly after. I remember the plane ride—how the houses and cars below us looked like toys. Maybe I remember walking across the tarmac in my little blue coat, or maybe I just remember my mother, in years after, telling me how proud my father was of that little figure, how his eyes beamed at me.

  That night, he had a heart attack and died. He and my mother were sleeping on the hide-a-bed in the living room; my brother and I were on the hide-a-bed in the dining room around the corner. We slept through it all—the cries, the ambulance.

  In the morning, my mother came in and woke us. “During the night, Daddy got sick,” she said and paused. My mother always had an irritating habit of pausing in the middle of her sentences, but this was somehow different. I knew, waiting in the bed, looking up at her, that something was deeply wrong. Something was about to be said that would change everything forever after. “And he died,” she finished.

  I remember little of the rest of that day—just hustle and bustle and tears. My aunt’s funeral was scheduled, and all the relatives were on the way—most unaware that they would find two coffins, two to mourn for. My father’s old friend Elmer took me and his daughters to the zoo—my mother in consultation with the rabbi decided the funeral might be too much for such a young child to witness. Wandering around the zoo, I felt as if an invisible gulf shut me away from those two girls. They had a father—I did not.

  Loss changes us. Somehow in the night, I had become a different person, no longer a fortunate child, princess daughter of the king of our small world, but a figure of tragedy, The Girl Whose Father Died.

  Ever after, my mother felt that she’d made a mistake in not letting me come to the funeral. I had a hard time grappling with the reality of my father’s death—from my point of view, he had simply disappeared. Perhaps he was really still alive? Maybe he was a spy working a mission in Cold War Russia so secret he couldn’t let anyone, even my mother, know. Unlikely, as my father and his brother constituted the Communist side of the family, but of course that was the secret that at five I was far too young to know. My mother didn’t tell me until I was sixteen, a young antiwar activist going to demonstrations, arrested with Santa Claus for handing out balloons in Beverly Hills that read, “Peace on Earth: Stop the War in Vietnam!” She told me then how much fear they’d lived in during the McCarthy years, fear that someone would find out about my father’s radical past (he’d disavowed the party during the Stalin purges) and that he would lose his job. She swore me to secrecy. I immediately ran out and told all of my friends, “This is so cool—my father was a Communist!”

  My mother herself was not political—that is, she had political sentiments that were liberal and progressive, but she didn’t act on the
m. She scarcely had time. Left at thirty-nine with two small children to raise on her own, she went back to work as a psychiatric social worker. We rented a small house in South Bend. I started first grade, where I was the smartest kid in the class, but soon learned not to flaunt it, but to act sweet instead. I was not so sweet at home, however. I resented the housekeepers who looked after us. I had lost my father—now I wanted my mother back.

  But my mother was working, and grieving, and depressed. We had our moments of closeness, punctuated by more and more fights. By the middle of second grade, my mother decided she’d had enough of being a working mom. She packed us up and moved back to Duluth, where we lived in the flat above her parents and she could make do with my father’s Social Security money. She wanted to be home with my brother, now age two, starting to talk and almost indecently cute. And I wanted a mother who would be home when I came home from school, with cookies hot from the oven like the mothers on TV.

  I knew the other kids in our neighborhood were poor because there were six, eight, or ten of them in their families, and their houses had a distinctive, sharp acidic smell—the odor of poverty. The Catholics, on the other hand, had lots of kids because of their religion, but their houses didn’t smell. I played with the kids in the neighborhood, but my mother got me a scholarship to a better school on the good side of town, run by the education department of the local university.

  She drove me there and picked me up, which meant that she wasn’t waiting for me when I got home, she was putting away the car. She wasn’t the mother I had pictured in my mind, warm and cozy. But it wasn’t really the warm cookies I missed; it was that something between us had ruptured with my father’s death, and we never quite got it back. I wanted something I couldn’t name or express and that she could no longer give me: I wanted her undivided, loving attention, I wanted my Dad back, I wanted to feel again that I was a fortunate child, surrounded by rock-constant, unassailable love.

  I had dreams that my father came back and made everything all right. In the dream, he usually said that I could have a dog. I wanted a dog almost as much as I wanted a father, but my mother was not an animal person and didn’t want another source of stress in her life. I didn’t know it consciously then, but having had many dogs since then I recognize what they give us—exactly that rock-solid, unwavering, uncritical affection I so longed for and couldn’t get from a Virgo, for whom nothing was ever exactly right.

  After two years, Mom was dying of boredom in Duluth. We went out to visit her brother George, who had moved to L.A., and she found herself a job in California.

  California! The very name implies the wonder of oranges growing in lush abundance in midwinter. Moving to L.A. from Duluth was like moving from the cold, frigid hell of the Scandinavians to paradise, albeit a smoggy one. My mother loved L.A., and her love for the place never wavered. When she got sick, she resisted my efforts to move her up to San Francisco, where I lived. “I hate the hills,” she’d say. “They remind me of Duluth!”

  My mother thrived in L.A. She worked as a therapist for many years for Jewish Family Services, then went back to school at age fifty and got her doctorate at the University of Southern California. She taught in their School of Social Work and then went into private practice, where she began making enough money to move us from lower middle class to solid middle class.

  When I was fourteen, we bought a house in West L.A., and I finally got a dog, a puppy I named Jezebel. My mother’s best friend Jeanne and her daughter Karen rented a smaller house on the same lot, and Karen also got a puppy. We bought them from a roadside stand, not knowing enough to realize it was a puppy mill and that both puppies were infected with distemper. I held Jezebel through the long, terrible day when she died, locked in the bond I’d longed for, her eyes fixed on me with a dumb trust I could not fulfill. I held the puppy as I did not get to hold my father, helplessly. We had other dogs later, but none was mine in the same way. One of my mother’s clients gave her an older mutt named Mister, who had a bad habit of escaping and chasing cars. I spent a lot of evenings in the middle of the street crying, “Mister! Mister! Come home, Mister!” I don’t know what the neighbors thought. After Mister chased a car that caught him instead, we got a dog from the pound named Argus who humped everything in sight, attacked mailmen, and barked furiously whenever I came home, usually long past the hour I was supposed to. If my mother were sleeping, he’d wake her. More often, she’d be lying awake, anxious, and working herself up to a new round of fury.

  “Stop worrying about me!” I’d yell back at her. I was taking drugs and sleeping with strange men. From my point of view, those were not things to worry about. “I’m fine! Let go!”

  Letting go, as I said, was not her strong point. Letting go is a spiritual good that goes with detachment and trust in a higher power. Her values were psychological. She believed in feeling her feelings and expressing them, at volume—not trying to release them.

  I, however, was spiritual even as a child. The night my father died, I dreamed he came to me as an angel and told me not to worry, that he still loved me and he was all right. I asked to go to Hebrew school at an early age. My mother, though lacking faith in God, believed that religion was an important part of our identity. I think in her secret heart she also believed that if I grew up to be a nice Jewish girl, it would redeem her own rebellion, so she dutifully joined a temple and drove me to and from Hebrew school.

  She was delighted that I had a bat mitzvah. As a child, she’d envied her brothers, who went to Hebrew school while she, as a girl, did not. They got bar mitzvahs, with all the attention and presents; she got nothing. Her parents took her out of her first year of college in order to enroll her thirteen-year-old brother in a yeshiva, a religious school that would ultimately prepare him to be a rabbi. It took her another decade to go back to school herself. She was filled with anger at the sexism with which she’d been raised—one more thing she never let go, but that I dismissed.

  Oh, Mom, that’s ancient history now. Get over it! I thought.

  Years later, it was in part that same sexism that drove me into the arms of the Goddess. At the same time, Judaism began to open up to new roles for women. When I was invited to speak at a Jewish Feminist Conference in the late ’80s, I decided to ask my mother to be my guest. I thought we might bond there, and it would be a way of tacitly saying, “You were right, Mom.”

  She was happy to be invited. But after she received the conference information, she called me in a fury.

  “Do you know what they wrote about you?” she yelled on the phone, livid. My mother was fond of unanswerable rhetorical questions. Since I hadn’t yet seen the schedule, I didn’t know.

  “For everyone else, it says, ‘So-and-so is the director of Hillel, so-and-so has a PhD in this and that,’ and you know what it says about you?”

  “What, Mom?”

  “It says, ‘Starhawk is a nice Jewish girl who grew up to be a Witch!’ ”

  I took a deep breath and practiced one of the calming and grounding techniques that I teach. “Mom,” I admitted, “that was what I told them to say,” and held the receiver away from my ear as she screeched into it.

  “What? Don’t you know that you have to list your credentials? How is anybody going to know who you are? You’ve written books, you have a degree—you have to list your credentials!”

  We hung up in anger. I was mostly mad at myself for thinking I could invite her into my life and that we could recover some moment of that closeness I longed for.

  But a few days later, she called me back.

  “I talked to the rabbi,” she said.

  “Which rabbi?”

  “Laura Geller.” Rabbi Geller was one of the first women to become a rabbi, and she was an old friend of my mother. “We were driving down to a meeting, and I was telling her about my daughter, the Witch, and how I wished you’d become a rabbi like her, and finally I mentioned your name, and do you know what she did?”

  “No, Mom, tell me.”
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  “She pulled over, right there, and stopped the car. ‘Bertha,’ she said, ‘are you trying to tell me that your daughter is Starhawk?’ ”

  “ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!’ And do you know what she said?”

  “I can’t possibly imagine,” I replied.

  “She said, ‘Bertha, let me give you a piece of advice. Leave your daughter alone! She’s famous. She doesn’t have to list her credentials—everyone at the conference already knows who she is. And besides, she’s making a great contribution to Judaism doing just what she’s doing.’ ”

  Just as I was basking in this affirmation from Rabbi Geller (may her name be forever praised), my mother went on.

  “And do you know how I felt?”

  Proud, surprised, and relieved came to mind, but I knew enough to simply murmur, “No.”

  “I felt so hurt! I felt so left out! You’re famous, and I didn’t even know! You never told me!”

  I wanted to say a number of things, like, “I don’t feel famous” and “I think ‘famous’ is overstating the case—I’d say ‘known in select circles.’ ” But I contented myself by saying simply, “Would you have believed me if I’d told you?”

  My mother thought for a minute. “No,” she admitted, “you’re right. It had to come from the rabbinate.”

  Given the rabbinate seal of approval, I took my mother to the conference. We sat through the opening plenary, where a noted Jewish feminist scholar considered the question of how we, as feminists, can pray. Suddenly, she veered into an attack on the Goddess feminists whom, she said, lacked an ethical base. I sat there getting madder and madder, and my mother reinforced every verbal jab with a sharp poke in my ribs from her elbow.

  Then the speaker ended her tirade by saying, “And, of course, in all of this I exempt Starhawk, whose commitment to social justice is well known.”