Alive, But Dead to Me
Mother's Day and Hallmark holidays for those of us whose mothers can't be there and never could
Hey everyone,
This weekend is Mother’s Day—shout out to all the moms out there! I hope you all have a joint or weed bubble bath, completely undisturbed, because it’s nobody’s goddamn business but yours. Or maybe you’ll actually be celebrating it at brunch with your kids—whatever feels right, it’s your special day!
Me? No kids and haven’t spoken to my mom in years, but I will be at the 2nd annual Catskill Cuisine weekend signing books and toasting foodie moms alongside all of my very best celebrity friends Andrew Zimmern, Michael Symon, Scott Conant, Marcus Samuelsson, Anne Burrell, Geoffrey Zakarian, and Melba Wilson at Bethel Woods. Big thanks to Sullivan Catskills Visitor Association for having me!
Mother’s Day is weird, right? It’s like Christmas and Easter: fine in theory, but just doesn’t feel right celebrating it. It’s like, do I talk about my relationship with my mother, which is fractured? My relationship with myself, as a woman of child-bearing age and could-be mother with viable eggs, standing at the verge of peri-menopause after being advised that I should have frozen my eggs yesterday, five years ago, having to determine if I’m in or out? How I feel about potentially bringing a child into a future generation of big titty lactation cookies and what that says about me as a feminist? The unexpected loneliness of being both completely untethered and somehow also liberated at 39?
Why is Mother’s Day so existential for me and why can’t I just enjoy brunch anymore?
It’s become a day that's too real for many. Maybe a decade ago on Twitter, I started noticing a normalized pattern of preaching online decorum, specifically around Mother’s Day. “Please respect that this day is hard for some people,” they’d ask. “Be considerate; it’s tough for some” as if Twitter was the last frontier for a world forum of manners and universal code of conduct being developed in real-time at our fingertips that should be catered to every single trauma victim. Sometimes the request for empathy was reasonable, while other times served highlight the limitless depths of dysfunctional relationships and neuroses as part of a new social framework being written live by the socially inept.
Grief was usually the underlying sensitivity, which has no timeframe for closure—if any. This is a fair reminder for sensitivity. Then, the grievances: “My mother was a narcissist” or “My mother gave me an eating disorder and told me to get a nose job.” These mothers were also dead, but still alive. Still a reasonable reminder: not every mother is worthy of admiration. Soon, a Pandora’s Box of overshares popped open, collectively exposing everyone to countless lived experiences of mothers who absolutely do not deserve to be celebrated.
But of course, there are always those ready to demand respect without earning it, like a defiant child lacking emotional regulation concern trolling strangers with the conviction of an audience member on Jerry Springer and the passive aggressive cheeriness of a Midwestern yokel empowered by a keyboard. “Why do you have to ruin this day for everyone else? This is a day for MOTHERS! Show some respect!” Some of these people are parents, and some of them are even mothers, too. Do they really need to be celebrated?
Here's the kicker: I’m kind of an asshole too. So while I might internally scream, “Who gives a fuck if this day is hard? Get offline then and let other people celebrate their day!” I stay silent, because #decorum, while promptly texting about a dozen people to talk shit who all whole-heartedly agree with me that they should just fucking get over it.
Now a decade later, I’m different. Older, maybe wiser? My grandma's gone, my mom's deteriorated mentally to levels that are to be expected for someone with untreated schizoaffective disorder. And while I could have gone another Mother’s Day doing my best to be emotionally indifferent about another Hallmark holiday, this past weekend, I caught Avital Ash’s show “Avital Ash Workshops Her Suicide Note,” and it hit different. It was a brutal yet somehow comforting look at losing a mother who was never really there and the specific lifelong struggle with that type of grief—personally touching for this adult orphan estranged from her own mother, who is not dead but might as well be.
In front of a sold-out show at Union Hall, she shared intimate details of her mother’s suicide, the mishandling from family members and friends, the entanglement of lifelong depression, sexuality, sexual assault, substance abuse, and the underlying cultural lens of being raised within Orthodox Judaism in a sort of coming of age/coming to death/coming to the uncertainty of life interactive storytelling. I think I was supposed to issue a trigger warning about half of those topics, so uh, consider that the warning, I guess.
The show was uniquely relatable, even though our stories are quite different. One of the things I appreciated the most was her ability to keep it real, even when audience members putting audience members on the spot with deeply uncomfortable and personal questions such as, “What porn do you watch?” and “Do you think you’d feel lucky if one of your parents died and you just got a new one?” It’s not easy to maintain levity and humor while earnestly addressing really vulnerable and dark topics—but that’s exactly the type of attitude required to persevere through darkness. Kind of like “Morbid Chicken Soup For The Soul.*”
*Confession: I used to love the “Chicken Soup For The Soul” book series when they first came out because who doesn’t love feel-good stories? But checked out when they got greedy and decided to become a media house that wouldn’t stop milking every sob story for what it was worth, manufacturing the literary equivalent of Campbell’s Soup: disgusting and barely edible.
For years, Mother’s Day never troubled me much. In fact, I liked it. It felt like a normal thing to do with your family, and a way to be generous to women. My mom was still a mom, after all, a single mother at that. Who else would celebrate her if not me? Eventually as I worked in restaurant trade, my opinion would change and I’d come to see the day differently as a hospitality cash grab. Soon, my personal relationship with Mother’s Day became so removed that I rarely thought about it at all. In many ways, this was freeing because I think I was carrying so much pain that being emotionally numb was preferable to feeling everything.
Typically, I’d head home for Passover (which nobody used to talk about unless you were Jewish and that I recently learned that nobody still wants to talk about it unless they’re Jewish) and while I was there, we’d also do Mother’s Day, keeping it simple with a home buffet. I'd occasionally bring the good stuff—fine wine, gourmet treats—but it was often seen as a slight against my grandma’s cooking (besides, I was giving tremendous emotional labor being there at all) so I was mostly there to be fed as gracious witness. Ironically, these holidays became deeply symbolic for me, a blended ritual of Jewish maternal resilience across three generations. Not the typical takeaway from that story, but as a fourth-generation single Jewish-American woman, these were the rituals that informed me: unconventional, private, uplifting, lots of food, and survivalism.
On both sides of my family, the women were often alone—widowed, divorced, or perennially single (as my aunt quipped about avoiding marriage to keep from cleaning someone else's toilet). But I assumed, for better or worse: my womanhood, my struggle (eat your heart out, Knausgård). Plus, I have to think about PASSOVER now?! HOW SAD IS THAT? To feel predestined for loneliness. No wonder I was drawn to Dostoevsky and morose Slavic literature at a young age and wanted to go art school. Even my therapist was depressed!
At the same time, the holidays were always so stressful. Eating at home was a consolation for my mom’s unpredictable antics that would include: rudely and awkwardly interjecting and interrupting everyone mid-conversation to add nothing of value, speaking to herself in full conversation to an invisible person while sitting directly across from others engaged in an active conversation, removing herself to go into the hallway to screen accusations at her neighbors in the hallway, insisting the apartment was being gassed, lacking basic boundaries and considerations, make inappropriate comments about my body, give me unsolicited advice she has no business offering (the latter of the aforementioned list apparently being common nits about moms, in general). Fifteen minutes with her was often 15 minutes too many on any given day, but this was a day I was supposed to celebrate this person who frequently made my life a living hell because “love.”
To her credit, she might be completely inept on every level, but I would bet serious money that she’s sadly still probably more functional than many other people. The difference being that many of those people end up on the street, and her saving grace from my grandmother was two decades of enablement she decided to save up just to place on my shoulders even though I never asked for the responsibility of being born a caretaker. I’d be asked to do this frequently and would oblige because it was my mother and grandmother and I was trying to be a dutiful daughter, and I had no one else in my corner and was clearly causing me great distress.
This is what I think about on Mother’s Day. Why can’t I just like brunch?
Like Avital, my mom has battled mental illness for as long as I can remember, though their circumstances differ. My mom is alive; hers isn’t. Her mom didn’t leave a note, which she symbolically pens in her one-woman show; mine is still sending me incoherent paranoid emails I can’t bear to answer. We share this absence of a Hallmark holiday, a lack of simple answers. (And yes, we’re both Jewish, both from Florida, though I bet Avital has a better handle on the Torah than I do).
My earliest memories are tainted by my mom’s accusations against neighbors she imagined were thieves, leading to a childhood rife with paranoia, upheaval, and constant moving. This would be a pattern that would continue, worsening in paranoia, verbal and emotional abuse, and impulsive actions that would lead to nonstop tension wherever we lived, arrests, evictions, the exile of living in motels and sleeping on friends’ couches, and the dominant topic of my next 25 years of therapy.
Trying to inject humor and levity into my narrative, I refuse to be defined by my trauma, though it undeniably shaped who I am. I never wanted to be one of those people whose therapy a-ha moment is “Oh, I guess I do hate my mother after all!” It’s more complex than that. How do you summarize a complex love-hate relationship with someone so deeply detached from reality who was supposed to be your guiding light? How much is her illness and how much is her? Trying to separate these thing is a nearly impossible task.
Living with my mom meant vacillating between fierce independence and being her protector against a world she feared. This has left me with a legacy of anxiety about legal systems, a reminder of too many days in court before being ejected by the sheriff’s department or visiting her in jail. I don’t know if it was a conscious thing shifting to lifestyle and food photography, but it’s easy to see why I’d seek an aspirational life rather than the chaotic one I was dealt. But when COVID struck, I lost it all, the façade of being an indispensable part of a community crumbled, revealing just how isolated I truly was.
I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I had become so accustomed to happily diminishing myself for what I saw as a noble contribution to uplifting foodways, connecting communities and cultures, that I almost forgot that I am actually not that valuable! I couldn’t change the perspectives or habits of anyone in my life, I was not the first person anyone called to make sure I didn’t die, and as I volunteered my time to be present with my pulse anywhere, I somehow found myself more alone than ever in whatever this “community” as it exists now is. Retreating into solitude, I was suddenly faced with the full impact of a lifetime of repressed trauma I finally needed to deal with. It sucked. It tested friendships, and many of them failed. It broke my spirit, my motivation, and the ability to speak freely.
Believe it or not, getting my Pilates teaching certification actually helped me regain my voice through the introduction of a new language and way of thinking. When clients come in who are like, “I want to lose weight and be skinny,” I think, uh that’s mostly nutrition, but why not? I actually feel a little sorry for them that they don’t fully recognize what a mind-body connection really means, because if they did they probably wouldn’t be so concerned about “being skinny” and in general, I don’t really think the Pilates community addresses that every time they put some stunning dancer with long legs on a reformer. And why would they? A spa isn’t an inpatient clinic, so you kind of have to find the motivation to engage in your own practice as part of true holistic healing, which is mostly about regaining focus by intentionally interacting with your body rather than trauma dumping.
In many ways, my grandmother was my rock as my mother's mental state worsened. But in her final years, I realized she had unwittingly enabled my mother’s decline. Our family’s attempts at intervention were exhausted and ignored, leaving me disillusioned and resentful. Towards her final years, I started dreading her calls confiding in me how horrible it was living with someone so verbally abusive—as though this was all some newfound revelation and not something she allowed to happen for years that our entire family had tried to hold repeat interventions about, as I once again struggled with employment and housing.
The hardest part is knowing I can’t really discuss these traumas openly. New York might normalize therapy and meds, but it doesn’t prepare you for the awkwardness of social interactions, where you can’t explain why you’ve moved so often without exposing the dark reality of living with a mother lost to mental illness. Basic questions such as, “Where are you from?” or “Where are your parents?” become challenging trying to skip through without actually going into depth about the reason you’ve lived in so many places is actually because you were a familial prisoner of an unhinged single parent with schizoaffective disorder. But don’t worry about it—I’m in therapy! The Jewish element adds another impossibly complex identity issue as the incessant reminder of ancestral (single!) matrilineal descent serves as a reminder that everyone—Jews and non-Jews alike—are quietly judging you for being “an apple falling not so far from the tree.”
My mom wasn’t inherently bad; her illness drove her. Before my time, she was an artist, an adventurous Sagittarius, a hippie in San Francisco who worked for the CDC during the AIDS crisis, later becoming a tough insurance adjuster. Her relationship with my dad, like much of her life, was complicated and fleeting. While dating five other guys, she met my father in the most ‘70s Bay Area way: a hot tub. After getting knocked up, they decided to lock it down in marriage. The day I was born, my dad finished a game of jai alai and load of laundry before coming to the hospital; they divorced a couple years later. While my mother’s memory is questionable, her claims about my dad’s various transgressions of assholism are also quite believable.
She did her best, despite her failings. And though we know little about what truly causes conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, I advocate for integrated holistic and pharmaceutical treatments, knowing too well the dangers of untreated illness and that not all plant-based remedies can heal a person suffering from clinical issues. And when someone in your life who is clearly very ill refuses to go on medication even at the expense of everyone else around them that they allegedly care about, it requires creating your own boundaries and sticking to them. If anything, the mental illness has the same defiance and damage as an alcoholic—except people are less forgiving about it, even after you get treatment.
So, two years ago, shortly after my grandmother’s death, I gave my mom an ultimatum: seek help or lose me. It was a last-ditch effort to salvage any connection. When she chose denial and conspiracy over recovery, I chose silence.
Debating her condition with others is pointless—they don’t bear the brunt of her instability. They don’t understand that you can’t reason with someone who’s lost to their delusions. It’s so much easier to just feel sorry for someone and brainstorm ways we can make life easier for people rather than accept that some people just don’t want to change and can’t be reasoned with. It’s also fruitless and painful to resurface all the ways you feel helpless to help this person, as if you hadn’t tried with generous amounts of time and money you were never afforded in the first place.
Mental illness can be intensely selfish, and often, survival means looking inward. It requires holding a certain amount of space for yourself that you’ve never been given as a forced primary caretaker simply by the act of being born to caretakers you never asked for. If anything, the connectivity I felt with Avital speaking of her own mother was mostly the reminder that human beings are inherently flawed, mental illness is often a very selfish disease, and we’re often tasked with looking within to save ourselves and figure things out on our own.
Even as I’ve struggled, rarely did family check on me without segueing to my mom’s latest crisis. I’ve missed life events, choosing isolation over empty interactions, as my own life’s queries too often lead back to her. When I am having a bad day, I can’t run to my parents, a sibling, a partner, or even many of my friends, who have all expressed that their emotional bandwidth is stretched even on good days. I go to therapy and practice gratitude consistently, as I have a lot to be grateful for and reasons that make me want to continue living, even though I carry a lot of sadness in my heart. And while I can see how some people think Pilates is a fad, it also has been a lifeline, too, connecting my mind and body in a positive, healthy, and inspiring way.
Now, without a home to return to for Passover or a mother to honor this Mother’s Day, I find myself at a bit of a crossroads trying to figure out exactly where I fit, what I’m doing, and why I’m here. I wish my mom would get help and we could have brunch, and maybe she could envision a better life for herself without constant fear, anxiety, sadness, and hate. One where I could take her to the Catskills, she could play her guitar on a hike or do paint ‘n’ sip goat yoga or whatever. Where we’d make my grandmother’s recipes for Passover and have a laugh thinking about her.
Passover came to actually be one of my favorite holidays, particularly for the food and the symbolism on the plate—a lost tradition I was already coping with and unable to replicate for the past four years without a communal table to read from the Haggadah—with the campus disruptions adding yet another layer of pain at the worst possible time ever from people who could possibly give a fuck, and in turn, I could also give a fuck.
The campus protests were actually triggering for a number of reasons, but among them, what tremendous privilege you have to have to feel like you can blow off your college graduation to scream at people with the full support of your parents and no regard for whom your hurt in the process, experiencing next to no consequences for it. It triggered a certain vulnerability I didn’t anticipate that sparked a fight with one of my closest friends, who is still not talking to me and someone I don’t owe an apology or to make it better. How many people are alive but dead to me now?
I’m reminded to be sensitive about Mother’s Day on the internet by complete strangers, but have to suffocate myself with the triggered anxiety of listening to endless screaming that reminds me of hers, which I had to listen to nightly for years as she’d wake me up with piercing screams of being electrocuted or gassed, shoving me into a car, and driving me around for hours on end or to a motel, before I’d have to go to school the next day and act normal, doing my best to fit in and get good grades, only to show up a college campus where I’d get checked for devil’s horns or whatever antisemitic bullshit they teach kids and be expected to defend my existence then as I do now. I’m tired.
Mother’s Day shouldn’t just be about the Hallmark moments. It should acknowledge the messy, the painful, the real. So, this weekend, whether you’re celebrating or just getting through the day, let’s be real about it and considerate of everyone’s battles, seen and unseen. If you’re coping, whatever the reason, cut yourself a break. If you have the bandwidth, be there for someone else.
Catch you at the buffet or maybe just online.
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