A few months ago the blogosphere was all abuzz with the personal article about a woman who hated her daughter. Concerned commenters pointed out that she sounded like she had real psychological problems (obviously) and it was more than just the Terrible Twos. The problem was and is not with mothers who sometimes get frustrated because Little Snowflake keeps painting the walls with his poop – having a very human “OMG you are so annoying!” moment is not what this woman was talking about. The issue with this woman was that she was putting the onus of responsibility to have a connection with her child on the child – not on herself. Women who have Borderline Personalities cannot form appropriate and healthy attachments to people – including their own children, and especially their own daughters.
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family
16 posts
On March 28th, my world changed forever. Four weeks after a car accident that left her in a coma, my Grandmother took her last breath (with the help of a ventilator) and went into the most peaceful sleep anyone could imagine. Or that’s how I think of it, anyway.
The events that led up to that moment are unchangeable. A woman drove through a stop sign going 40 mph and slammed into the side of a car that was driven by my Aunt. Her sister was in the passenger seat, while their mother and youngest sister sat in the back seat. They were driving my Grandmother to a doctor’s appointment. After the initial hit, the car driven by my Aunt flipped several times before landing on the roof. The police were called, ambulances came, the jaws of life were used and everyone was brought to the hospital alive. Continue reading
Not having a mom on Mother’s Day is like being newly single on Valentine’s Day.
You don’t want to be that bitter person… but you are.
You don’t want to resent other women for having a mom to love… but you do.
You wish you could stop feeling sorry for yourself … but you can’t.
By DahlELama and The_Obvious
The two of us have lots in common: we both continue to love The Office long after everyone else has given up on it, we both revere our KitchenAid mixers, and we both think we’re better than everyone else at Scrabble. But for all our similarities, there will always be one huge difference between us: our backgrounds.
However, good friends and natural-born educators that we are, we’ve always made sure to try to teach each other a little bit more about where we come from. For instance, I, Dahl, taught T_O about the Sabbath, and he now he tries to get me to bail on it every Friday. And I, T_O Ochocinco taught Dahl about Easter and egg hunts, and she promptly invited herself to my family’s annual holiday celebration. Eventually, we discovered that our cultures do have one major thing in common: a reverence of balls.
The_Obvious
Like any good little Catholic kid, I was dragged to church every Sunday. Through all the mumbling of prayers, mouthing of words to hymns when the priest saw me not singing, and making paper footballs out of dollars destined for the collection plate, there was one motivating factor that made it all worth it: meatballs. Going to my grandparents’ house was a post-church tradition, and one that I enjoyed very much. The smell of the impending feast hit you as soon as you got to the front door and the star of the show were the meatballs. My grandma would keep a watchful eye over the pot as family members filed in. There were always a few sauceless ones set aside just for me. (I eventually grew out of my disdain for sauce and graduated from white to regular pizza, much to the relief of my mom.) Food and family were synonymous growing up and Sunday meatballs were very much an important part of that. Not long ago, I went to a restaurant that only served meatballs, and felt a pang of guilt and betrayal for eating anybody else’s but grandma’s.
I gave Grandma Obvious a call asking if I could have her recipe, which like most family favorites is not written down anywhere. I’m afraid the answer I received won’t be very useful to anyone though as the measurements she rattled off included: “2-3 pounds”, “some”, “a few”, and “a generous amount.” What I can tell you is that there is mixed chopped meat (veal, beef, and pork), egg, milk, bread crumbs, and parmigiano cheese. She fries the meatballs so they get a nice brown crust and finishes them in the oven. Noticeably absent is garlic and onion, so yes, this is not a spicy meatball. I suppose that’s relatively controversial as far as meatball recipes go, but with any comfort food, your first food memory tends to be what you prefer.
DahlELama
Unfortunately, because I’m an observant Jew who keeps kosher, both the pork and the combination of meat and dairy products make those lovely balls off limits to me. (But I would not turn my nose up at an all-beef kosher version; just throwing that out there.) Fortunately, we Jews have our own special balls which are 100% kosher. I speak, of course, of matzoh malls!
Like T_O, my grandmother was quite skilled in the kitchen, and although the 7,000-mile distance between us meant I only had her cooking a handful of times in my life, one of my favorite things that my father brought back to our American kitchen from her Czech-turned-Israeli one was her matzoh ball recipe. One of the great debates of the kosher kitchen is whether matzoh balls should be dense or fluffy, and my grandmother’s were as dense as can be. For a recipe for fluffier matzoh balls (and chicken soup to go with them), see TackyTick’s Passover post. For my grandmother’s matzoh balls, see below:
Savta’s Matzoh Balls
4 eggs
1 c. matzoh meal
1/2 c. oil
1/2 tsp. salt
boiling chicken soup/stock/broth/whatever (basically, whatever liquid you’ll be serving them in should be prepared first)
Mix all ingredients until smooth. Place in refrigerator for one hour (or freeze for 20 minutes). Roll into balls about an inch in diameter and drop into pot of boiling chicken liquid-of-choice. Cook partially covered for 40 minutes.
If you’re feeling ambitious and artsy, you can also try giving your matzoh balls some color using spinach, turmeric, or tomato.
So those are our favorite balls; tell us about yours in the comments!
DahlELama and The_Obvious are parents to two adorable chicks named Nuggets and General Tso, who are currently living with a foster mother in Connecticut. The chicks were taken away following a traumatic incident involving The_Obvious and some brutally decapitated Peeps.
Living with Mom and Dad in the Ancestral Family Split-Level was quite an experience, and law school was boggling. When I moved back home after college, I was unprepared for the efforts of my Old People to stay young.
I don’t know if it’s a Scot thing or a Milanese thing, but we all tend to sing when we think we’re alone and are doing a domestic task. Mine tend to come from VH-1’s Top 20, and Mom and Dad tend to Motown, since in 1961 that was the thing.
The central staircase of a split-level separates the living areas by function, which is cool. It also enables one to spy on what’s going on on other levels without being seen.
So, when I came home from work and discovered that my Jamiroquai CD was missing from my car, I was a tad startled to hear it blasting from the stereo in the dining room.
Mom.
She had her friend Pam in the living room and was dusting. There was wine – a huge bottle of Pinot Grigio. She sang “You know this spooky is for real!” and Pam folded up on the sofa in a pile of giggles. I stood there on the stairs to the den with my jaw unhinged as Mom pranced around with a can of Pledge. Canned Heat with lemon freshness. “I threw my caution to the wi-hi-hind! Oh. Hi. I borrowed your CD. Do you want some wine?”
“Mom, I think you’ve had enough for both of us.” The crazy bitch was actually speaking LOLcat.
Finally, I tottered out to the terrace and called my friend Bill. After telling him what was up, I asked if I could move in with him. “My Mom sings ‘Stairway To Heaven’ when she dusts.” he informed me. “You’re better off.”
Then, the next day, I was watching HGTV in the den with the kitty, and Dad was working in the garage with the door open just a bit. It was just enough to hear him yell along with Boston “I closed mah eyes and she slipped away-ayyy-hay! She slipped away-AY-HAY! It’s moar than a feeeeeling (moar than a feeling) when I hear that old song play woo-ooh-ooh-hoo!” The cat cocked an ear in that general direction, then shook his head, like “Christ, make it stop.” My sentiments exactly.
I peeked in, and there he was at his workbench – making a goddam birdhouse, so that the goddam blue jays have a haven from which to dive-bomb our outdoor meals.
“Are both of you batshit?” I asked him.
“Maybe, a little.”
“Great. That looks terrific for me and my future.”
“Heh-heh-heh.”
Don’t get me wrong. If I had boring Old People I’d be bored and more than slightly irritated. I just wish they were a little less musical about it.
And I’m so glad I live 20 minutes away now, with my Cap’n. Though he thinks I’m a bit kooky when he catches me singing Colbie Callait to the cats.
I used to have this theory about adulthood, that you aren’t actually a for-keeps, responsibility-driven, “adult” until one or two things happened.
- You have a child.
- Your parents die.
It was a convenient theory because the day after my eighteenth birthday I moved to New York, three thousand miles away from anyone I knew. Normally, this would have the event that triggered entrance to the world of “adults,” but I wasn’t ready to claim that title and its attendant responsibilities (Who is at eighteen?). So, I crafted a sort of bill-paying, binge-drinking, working full-time and going to school full-time pseudo-adolescence for myself. It carried me through conservatory, college and almost a full year out in “the real world.” I could fuck-up (within reason) all I wanted because this was not yet my Official Adult Life. Nothing counted, yet. Given the fact that I was committed to never having children and my mom was still young, I thought this maturing theory would give me a couple decades of freedom.
Then, one spring night, my forty-four year old mother had a massive brain hemorrhage.
Looking back it’s insane that we all didn’t see it coming. Well, no, correction, I DID see something coming. She was having at least one nosebleed a day paired with crippling headaches and she kept going to the same doctor and urgent care provider who told her one ridiculous tale after another. My mom is a head-in-the-sand kind of lady, so she never sought out a second opinion. We had a huge fight about it, about two weeks before the stroke. But, like most fights between mothers and daughters, nothing was resolved.
I was in D.C. when it happened. I traveled for work and instead of going all the way home to Seattle, I decided to stay and spend the weekend catching up with some college friends. We got stunningly drunk. I made it back to my hotel room around three or four in the morning. Just as my beginning-to-pound head touched the pillow, my phone, that was on the desk, on other side of the room, began to ring. Before I could even make the decision to ignore it, I was asleep.
Two hours later it rang again.
Through the thick, pain-soaked, ears ringing haze I sensed the doom that goes along with all late night phone calls. I drug myself across the room to answer. It was my uncle’s voice, telling me to get home as soon as possible, the ER doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding and that my mom was probably going to die. Soon. My family is nothing if not blunt.
I could write several separate pieces about everything that happened in the next ninety minutes. How to arrange grieving flight travel. How to deal when the guy you’re dating, who is in the place you’re going, refuses to just pick you up at the airport and drop you off at the hospital so your family can stay put, because he has Laker’s tickets. How to not curl into a ball on the dirty hotel carpet and cry until you pass out. How to manage all of this when you have The Worst Hangover You Have Ever Had In Your Life.
I made it in time. D.C to L.A. in about eight hours door-to-door and my mom was still alive. My grandma and I lived in the ICU for the next few days. There are so many things about strokes you don’t know about until they hit you in the face. One of the big ICU recovery benchmarks after a stroke is a “swallow test.” My grandma and uncle abandoned ship. They couldn’t deal with seeing mom possibly choke on some water. It was just me, her, the nurse and about a gallon of my terror-induced sweat.
She drifted in an out of consciousness for the next few days. The only person she recognized in midst of her delirium was my grandma. That was fine with me. I don’t think I could have dealt with my mom calling out to me for help. It was bad enough being the unspoken point person.
Things improved steadily within the next ten days, except that her entire right side was paralyzed. Two different rehab centers, thousands of hours of therapy and time have not significantly improved the situation. She can walk short distances with a cane and take care of almost everything herself inside the house, but she is disabled, confined mostly to a wheelchair, and probably will be for the rest of her life.
There is only about a twenty year age difference between my mom and I. This seems astronomical when you are five, not so much when you are twenty-four. I love and like her dearly. This is a very good thing because she (and my grandma) will be living with me, within three or four years of my graduation from law school, for the rest of their lives.
I can count on one hand the years left of my life where I can just float around, sleep late, bring men home, study whenever I want, come home late, hell, just BE alone whenever and for however long I want. It’s like knowing almost the exact date you will one day wake up instantly married with kids.
I don’t mean to sound bitter; it’s just overwhelming to see it in writing. Mostly because, while I am a Type-A, obsessive compulsive, I am also a free spirit. I never planned to “settle down.” I loved being able to pick up and run back and forth across the country. I had hopes of being able to run across the world a few times. Sure, it still could happen, but it will require a lot more planning than just popping over to the North Face store for a large backpack.
However, the worst moment of my life was thinking I was going to be on some stupid fucking airplane when my mom died. I consider everything that isn’t that, the last three years of adjusting, the next decade of planning (and more adjusting), my accelerated membership into adulthood, all a fair trade for the continued presence in my life of the woman who regularly emails me pictures of baby koalas.
Seriously? Look at that! That is totally worth all the yelling at real-estate agents I’m going to have to do in Seattle, land of hills and stairs. ” What part of “HANDI-CAP ACCESSIBLE” do you not understand?! I’m not paying you a commission to show me fucking stairs!”