Chapter Four: Other Daughters

My young friend Lisa tells me her mother is certifiably insane, and to prove it she hauls out three boxes of gifts her mother has sent over the years: jars of spices, plastic tablecloths, little porcelain angels and doves. These items couldn’t seem more discordant in Lisa’s urban loft or further from her lifestyle and habits if they’d come from an Egyptian archeological dig. By the time she empties the box of its last écru lace doily I’m rolling on the floor. But Lisa doesn’t think it’s funny: she’s bewildered and somewhat insulted by her mother’s odd presents.

I’ve known Robin for over 30 years, and all that time she’s been complaining about her mother, a woman who survived the holocaust in Austria, escaped to America, and built a successful career before it was common for women to do so. She gives a good deal of her financial gains to her daughter who, despising her, feels guilty—which doesn’t stop her from taking the money. Unlike a lot of women whose relationships with their mothers begin to heal after they have their own children, the birth of Robin’s daughter only intensified her rage. She hovered about monitoring her mother’s interactions with the child, jumping on Grandma if she said or did something offensive or inappropriate. Under threat of being cut out entirely, Grandma learned to walk on eggshells around her granddaughter.

Traveling with my friend Heather, we stopped overnight at her mother’s house in San Diego. I was amazed to see my friend, an effusive woman who gives great bear hugs, visibly shrivel from her mother’s welcoming kisses. A lonely, garrulous widow, she took pleasure in regaling me with stories of her daughter’s accomplishments—until Heather, normally the soul of diplomacy, rudely interrupted her with a cold That’s enough, Ma!

I never met Shar’s mother, but I feel like I know her, at least in relation to her daughter. Shar talks about Mavis all the time, but not the way my other friends talk about their mothers. When Shar mentions Mavis, her eyes get soft and wistful. Her longing is almost palpable: anyone can see that every minute they’re not together—and they live thousands of miles apart—Shar is missing Mavis. On one of my mother’s visits to San Francisco, I invited Shar along for dinner. On our way to the restaurant, I was walking beside her while my mother, who suffered from emphysema, trailed behind. Shar was aghast. “You’re letting your mother walk by herself!” she scolded. Embarrassed, I slowed down to let my mother catch up.

Shar is an only child whose mother seems to have done double duty as sibling/best friend. Consummate femmes, the two play at being girls together: they talk about clothes, do each other’s nails and hair, shop. Working-class women, they might have served as models for the gal in the Peggy Lee song who can change a tire, cook up the grits and put on lipstick all at the same time. Shar might appear physically delicate, but her inner core is like steel, and in a nanosecond she can pull a butch attitude. In The Femme’s Guide to the Universe she redefined the whole concept of femme. At least some of this mojo must have come from Mavis.

The first item on Shar’s mental list of how to spend her wealth when she makes it (doesn’t everyone keep that list?) is to help her mother. It grieves her that Mavis’s life has been one of hard work with few luxuries, and if she could, she’d send her to a health spa once a month, buy her a dishwasher, hire a housekeeper. While I admire all this, it pushes my buttons: I wish my daughter felt like that about me. Then again (says an accusing little voice in my head), it’s my own fault for not fostering that kind of relationship with Stacy. Very few mothers do, though, and such mother/daughter friendship is rare, at least in my experience. Most of the women I know seem to view their mothers as Public Enemy Number One. They avoid seeing them, and when they talk about them, it’s to complain.

Four powerhouse women are gathered around a conference table, working on a budget for the nonprofit organization they run. The Executive Director is in her mid-fifties, a petite, energetic woman who built the agency from scratch, knows every prominent pediatric neurosurgeon in the country, and has testified before Congress. When they’ve finished their work and are packing up to leave, the Director says, in a long-suffering voice, “I won’t be around next week (groan); my mother’s coming to visit.” The other women give her knowing looks, and one sighs empathetically, “Yes, we all have mothers.” She says mother like it’s a four-letter word. All of these women are themselves mothers.

Not even feminists are immune to mother-bashing. Think of it: these are women who’ve made it their business to analyze the way sexism has formed and malformed women’s lives, yet when it comes to their own biological mothers they develop a big blind spot.

In the 1970s I worked with a feminist theater collective called Womanrite. The plays we performed at women’s’ centers, colleges, and on city streets were created from our own life experiences. In one vivid scene, four women speak in turn while ironing, reiterating throughout their soliloquies the line I feel guilty. The line is never embellished; nobody explains what she feels guilty about—yet this moment resonated for every woman in every audience.

Guilt is so seamlessly woven into the tapestry of mother/daughter relationships that half the time we’re not even aware it’s running us. Where does this guilt come from? What is it about? I’m not talking about the guilt of mothers for what they have or haven’t done to and for their children, but something much more elemental, much harder to pinpoint. I have guilt feelings towards my son as well as my daughter, but they’re qualitatively different, and the latter more closely resembles what I feel towards my mother.

For me, feminism added yet another layer of complexity to the whole conundrum: I felt not only guilty, but hypocritical for my anger and resentment. I wanted to practice what I preached, to be able to understand the ways in which my mother’s life had been shaped by sexism and thus forgive her—but most of the time her behavior made this impossible. I could have forgiven her for how she treated me as a child, but I could not forgive her when she continued to treat me badly as an adult. Thus, I resented her all the more for keeping me from becoming a model feminist.

I’m in the same bind writing this memoir: here I am, criticizing women for trashing their mothers—yet if I’m going to show the truth, I have to do some trashing of my own.

A few years after I moved to California I became involved in the most serious relationship since my divorce. When my mother made one of her pilgrimages to San Francisco, we went out to dinner with James and my friend Sondra, and at one point I excused myself to go to the bathroom. The next day Sondra called, conflicted and upset, compelled to tell me what had transpired in my absence. The minute I left the table, she told me, my mother turned to James and said, “I don’t know how you put up with her.” James tried to turn it into a joke, saying something like “what she puts up with from me.” Sondra was so flabbergasted she couldn’t say a word, and was mad at herself for not defending me somehow.

Sad to say, I was not the least bit flabbergasted. My mother’s statement was entirely consistent with the way she’d always treated me, as well as my sister. I knew what she’d said had been a feeble attempt to bond with James, mutual dislike being the only way she knew how to bond with anyone. Which didn’t mean I wasn’t hurt and appalled: I was. I waited for James to say something, but he never did. Only years later did I finally ask him about it. Maybe it’s a gender difference, but he just never gave the event as much weight as Sondra and I did.

The more he got to know my mother, though, the more James observed what went on between us, and eventually he pinpointed what he saw as the heart of the problem: she was, he said, the most oblivious person he’d ever met. She had no idea of the effect of her words, not only on me, but on anyone with whom she interacted. In her attempts to be amusing, she often made sarcastic remarks that others found insulting. She could be downright scary: when a waiter at the Four Seasons Hotel in SF tried to hand her a dessert menu, she literally shouted at him to Get that away from me! causing the poor pretty boy to jump back three feet. She thought she was being cute by turning down sinful dessert; when I told her she’d frightened him she said, That’s just too bad! A New York waiter wouldn’t have been frightened. While it’s true that my mother’s sense of humor is decidedly New Yorker-ish, I seriously doubt that even a waiter in Hell’s Kitchen would’ve laughed—and even if she was right, so what? In her mind, though, the waiter, not she, was at fault.

It was the same with anyone: if I was hurt by something she said, she told me I was too sensitive–adding insult to injury. She didn’t have to change her behavior; I had to change the way I responded.

It became routine for James to patch me up after visits with my mother. I’d go down to Florida for the week-long struggle, then come back and cry in his arms for days. It was a relief to have someone who understood, more or less, what I’d been through. It didn’t seem as much of a betrayal to talk to James as to someone with whom I wasn’t so intimate. Still, I felt wretched hearing my own miserable words, as nasty as anything I’ve heard from any knee-jerk mother-basher, and despised myself.

As a child my solution to feeling unloved by my mother was to mentally trade her for my aunt. I adored Aunt Janice, and would fantasize about her the way children fantasize they’re adopted, believing their “real” parents will come rescue them. I didn’t really believe Janice was my biological mother, but I derived comfort from pretending that she was. By seven or eight I’d already developed a rich inner world—my chief recurring fantasy was that the best friend I’d left in the Bronx, Jeffrey Manus, would suddenly show up in our Queens apartment, arriving via a secret passageway in my bedroom closet. Somehow I understood that my dreams of being Janice’s daughter existed in the same realm—which didn’t prevent me from becoming thoroughly immersed in them.

Every year for my birthday, Janice made a chocolate pudding cake that I thought mysteriously exotic and the exclusive purview of my aunt. Janice’s skill at baking served to highlight Rhoda’s lack of enthusiasm for any sort of food preparation—our standard family dinner was a hunk of meat roasted or braised, potatoes mashed or boiled, and canned peas heated in a saucepan.

In this, as in so many other areas, Aunt Janice was everything my mother was not: affectionate, kind, and genuinely interested in whatever I had to say. Although she fought a lifelong battle with her weight, I thought she was beautiful, with her pink silken cheeks and an upper lip that rounded gently where my mother’s spiked. My mother wore alarming red lipstick; Aunt Janice wore pastel pink. Lines formed and deepened around my mother’s mouth at an early age, an effect of having her teeth replaced with dentures; Janice’s soft face never seriously wrinkled. To a ten-year-old, these physical attributes signified harshness in my mother, gentleness in my aunt. I glowed with pride when relatives said I resembled Aunt Janice. I would only begin to understand their relationship in another 40 years—around the same time I discovered pudding-cake recipes on every box of store-bought cake mix.