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	body & soul inspiring stories

My Mother Myself
By Leah Bassoff
Web Exclusive, July 31, 2006

We were heading into the mountains, and my mother was driving sitting, as she usually did, about an inch from the steering wheel. Instead of looking at the road, she spent most of her time gazing out the window, making poetic observations about the scenery or turning her head to make full eye-contact with her friend Mindy who was sitting in the passenger seat.

"Oh, Mindy - look at those beautiful wild flowers,' she said in a whispery voice, "and the sky, the way it's glinting.'

"Oh, yes, Evi, the colors are spectacular,' Mindy agreed lustily, sounding as if she were exhaling extra air out with each word.

Then we suddenly hit a bump in the road, and Mindy noted calmly, "Oh damnation, Evi, do you think we hit something? An elk? A person?'

"Oh Mindy - damn, damn, damnation. I do think we actually ran over our neighbor, and she was such was a lovely woman, too' my mother noted.

"Indeed,' Mindy confirmed. "The salt of the earth. Evi, shall we find a place to pull over and have a cup of tea?'

"That's a lovely idea. Let's find a place where we can sit surrounded by dew and elk droppings.'

Okay, so this wasn't actually my mother and her friend Mindy talking. It was me and my best friend Cyndi, Mindy's daughter, and we were back in junior high school imitating our mothers driving and making up dialogue for them. It should be admitted that, in reality, our mothers never hit anyone or any living creature in the car.

That said, my mother really did sit an inch from the steering wheel; she really did stop to make whimsical observations all the time, and she really did turn her head to make full eye-contact with me every time we were stopped at a red light causing her to, invariably, not realize the light had turned green until either I barked at her or someone tapped his horn at her from behind, at which point she would act surprised: "Well, that's a very un-Boulder thing to do,' she would say of the driver, referring to Boulder, the New Age town where I grew up where people were, according to my mother, supposed to be perpetually kind to one another. Because she was a psychologist, my mother would usually attribute rude behavior such as beeping your horn at someone as an indication of that person's inner discontent remarking, "That person must be very unhappy inside.'

Cyndi and my imitating our mothers' driving was part of an official game we used to play that we named "The Car Game.' In junior high school, every day after school, I would go over to Cyndi's house, and each time we got together we would meticulously make up a list of possible activities we could do, then vote on them systematically via a process of elimination; nominees usually included making chocolate chip cookies, bouncing a big red rubber ball back and forth to one another, sitting on Cyndi's windowsill and singing overly emotional songs, watching a soap opera, or playing "The Car Game,' which involved, as mentioned, sitting in Mindy's parked car (we ourselves were not old enough to drive) and pretending to be our mothers. We used to do this game for an hour at a stretch and played it for about a full year straight.

I don't know why this game held our interest or amused us so much except to say that it allowed us to make fun of our mothers' too-slow driving, make fun of our mothers' fanciful mannerisms, and imagine our mothers cursing, something which seemed completely ludicrous and would send us into fits of giggles. (With my father I never had to imagine him cursing, since he did it quite frequently, but my mother and Mindy always seemed far too proper to engage in that type of behavior.)

Now as an adult, if I were to analyze "The Car Game' on a deeper level, I think the game stemmed from Cyndi and my attempt to deal with every teenage girl's deepest fear, that of someday turning into our mothers. Even though we both got along with our parents, we were, during our teenage years, utterly embarrassed by nearly everything they did. We would roll our eyes at our fathers or, as Cyndi commanded me to do, "Pretend that we don't know him,' when her dad used to drop us off near school and then follow us for a half a block in the car yelling, "Cyndi, come back and give me a kiss,' just to tease her. However, though we got exasperated by our fathers, we never mimicked them like we did our mothers.

One weekend, when we were still in junior high school, Cyndi's family, my family, and one other family went to the YMCA camp in The Rockies. The parents decided to have some fun with all of us sulky eye-rolling teenagers, and they set up a chart they called "The Mortification Chart.' Each parent's name was written on the chart, and if any of the parents embarrassed his or her daughter, that daughter would put her initials by the parent's name. The winner was the person who could embarrass his or her daughter the most.

My father and Cyndi's father figured (and hoped) they were shoe-ins for the prize. Both of them were raucous and loud, and they loved to sing and make raunchy jokes. Not surprisingly, my father scored many points on the Mortification Chart. He embarrassed me terribly by dropping a piece of food in Cyndi's shoe, shrugging and then picking it up and eating it. He scored points for doing his Tai Chi routine in the living room in front of everyone. Meanwhile, Mort (my friend Judy's father) embarrassed us immensely by singing to himself when we were in the swimming pool, and Paul (Cyndi's dad) scored huge points by asking Cyndi if she had wet her pants after she had spilled the Sprite she was drinking on her lap. Yet, overall, it was the mothers, not the fathers, who were the surprise winners in the Mortification Contest. While our mothers were softer than the fathers, we felt their methods of embarrassing us were subtler, yet somehow more insidious.

It was something about how our mothers' eyes glazed after they had drunk merely a half a glass of wine, how they would start giggling and dabbing at the corners of their eyes with damp, crumpled napkins, all the while putting their arms around one another and proclaiming, "Yes, I think I am a little tipsy just from those few sips.' It was something about the way their voices would get all quivery and sentimental when they would tell stories about someone (anyone) who had experienced a misfortune somewhere in the world, something about the way our mothers would ask us too many questions, ask us about our feelings, or kiss one another on the lips (and try to do the same to us).

Though I am now appreciative of my upbringing, of having been exposed to different cultures, raised on health food and progressive ideas, back when I was a teenager, all I wanted to do was blend into the blandest common denominator of society. Growing up, I felt my name, Leah, sounded too "Hebrew,' not to mention my middle name, Yael, which you couldn't even get me started on. One time I told my mom, "I like the name Christa. If I have a daughter, I might name her that.'

"Honey, we're Jewish, you can't give your child a name with the word Christ in it' was my mother's reply.

"Well, I still might,' I said, just to be petulant.

Growing up, I just wanted to eat white bread instead of the sprouted wheat forest my parents liked to spread their almond butter on top of and listen to top 40 music instead of the opera or Greek folk music my parents liked to play.

That my parents liked African art and had paintings of bare-breasted women around the house was all cause for discomfiture on my part, part of what I termed collectively as my parents' "weird cultural stuff".

We were at a 50th wedding celebration for my grandparents, and some of the guests at the party hadn't seen my mother since she was my age. Though logically they knew that this fifteen-year-old girl couldn't be my mother, my mother was that old when they last saw her, and so it was as if they had been transported back in time. "Evi?' they would ask tentatively, as I replied curtly that, no, I was her daughter. After one of these relatives began to expound on the fact that I looked "exactly like my mother—a carbon copy,' I ran out of the room in tears.

When my mother went after me to ask what was wrong, I told her that I had no desire to look like her.

My mother tried to take this in stride, "Okay, honey, well that's not the nicest thing to say, but I understand that you want to be you, and all of thata^?|'

It has taken me all these years#&151;years during which I became an adult and became a mother myself#&151;to realize that it is a compliment when people tell me I look like my mother, who is, I'm now able to see, a beautiful woman. More shameful than that, is the realization that it has also taken me all of this time to realize how truly smart and accomplished my mother is.

I never thought about my mother being intellectual when I was growing up. Instead, she was someone who cooked for me, who nagged me about my posture, causing us to have huge fights. I was always very melodramatic as a teenager, especially since I was a young thespian, and when I tested positive for scoliosis, a condition which was a separate issue from the slump that I had previously developed, I needed someone to lash out at. Naturally, I chose my mother, as if she was somehow responsible for the curvature of my spine. I stuffed a big wad of clothing in the back of my shirt so as to fashion a hump for myself like Quasimodo and went around the house like that saying, "Here I am, Mom, your hunchbacked daughter. Are you satisfied?'

"Honeya^?|' my mom just stopped herself and sighed.

Because my father was a professor, I always thought of him as being the academic. Meanwhile, I never thought it was a big deal that my mom got her PhD when I was in elementary school, that she started her own private practice as a psychologist. I never thought it was a big accomplishment that my mother wrote a book in her spare time and got it published, though I was excited about the fact that I would get to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show with her since her book just happened to be about mothers and daughters. Even after we found out we were going to appear on Oprah, however, I refused to find the time to actually read my mother's book.

I remember my mother sitting next to me on the airplane as we were heading out to Chicago where Oprah was filmed and saying, "I brought my book with me. Do you think you maybe want to just glance through it?'

"No thanks,' was my less-than-gracious reply. "I'll wing it.'

Since my mother was appearing as the guest expert on the show, and since the other people on the panel were mothers and daughters who fought each other tooth and nail, I ended up, by comparison, looking like quite the goody two shoes as I sat there talking about the fact that I had a "wonderful relationship with my mother.' After the show was over, and I was loitering around the set, Oprah took the most outspokenly rebellious teenage girl who had been on the show aside. There were tears in Oprah's eyes as she told this angry girl that when she was young, she was just as rotten to her own mother as this girl was being to hers. "You will live to regret it,' Oprah told the girl. "Now shape up.'

Though Oprah was talking to this other girl and not me, as I grew older, I did come to regret all those times I told my mother that I didn't feel like walking next to her in the shopping mall or begged her to let me do her make-up, as if I was some kind of junior high school cosmetologist. Giving my mother a makeover usually involved me slathering lots of blush, garish lipstick and blue eye shadow on her. "There,' I would proclaim, as if relieved; "Now you're finally starting to look better.' Meanwhile, my mother would gaze back at me and smile tentatively with her now whorish-red lipstick.

"Boy,' she would say. "I'm just not sure this look is me.'

There is a Jewish mother's curse that basically says, Let your children do to you what you did to me. Though I have two boys and no girls, I still live in fear of karmic retribution, and, in my mind, I make all sorts of amends for taking so long to see my mother as the successful person she is. My mother is one of those women who "had it all', to the extent that one truly can. She was a stay-at-home mom for many years dedicating herself to my brother and me, followed by odd jobs and part-time work that allowed her to be home for us after school—stints as a yoga instructor, a lunch lady, an art teacher. However, as my brother and I got a bit older, my mother went on to recreate herself and still continues to do so. Now in her sixties, she has suddenly—Grandma Moses style—started selling her paintings. She still continues to work full-time, is in terrific physical shape, boasts a social life far more hopping than my own, and is involved in community service—having adopted a whole host of Sudanese young men who came to Boulder as refugees and now refer to my mother as "Mama Evi.'

Yet, the biggest gift from my mother came to me recently in the form of a letter she sent to me from Greece where she and my father were vacationing. Enclosed in the letter was a photograph of my mother in a field of flowers looking, for all intents and purposes, like a happy teenager. My mother wrote to me:

"Leah, I recently turned sixty-one, and I feel more alive, more vital than ever. Never fear growing older.

You will, in these early years with your children, give yourself to them completely, but you must also reclaim a creative life for yourself outside of your children. I continue to do that.'

As I hold my two sons on my lap, both of them fighting for lap zoning rights, I realize that right now they are in that unconditional love stage, that they love me "fifty hundred years' as my younger son likes to tell me. I also realize that it will be a long time before they see me as a real person. At this point in time, I am more like a member of a one-woman hand-washing police squad, as in, "Did you wash your hands after you peed? Let me smell them. I want to smell soap on those hands."

I am holding my breath, waiting for my sons to turn into teenagers someday, to tell me they hate me, convince themselves they were adopted, shuffle their feet and walk five feet behind me, pretending that they don't know me. The hope is that, if they do go through this phase, they will then come back to me, just as I returned to my parents.

Later in life, I began to embrace all those aspects of my parents' lifestyle that I had, as a teenager desperately questing for autonomy, tried so hard to eschew. Now, I am a mother myself. I take African dance; I eat tofu, and as I drive my five-year-old son and his friends to Tae Kwon Do, I make the kind of chit-chat my mother used to make, the kind that used to drive me crazy: "So - how's everyone doing back there? What was your favorite thing about your day? How did that make you feel when that boy did that?'

As an adult, I now look to my mother for guidance and friendship. I have grown to appreciate and value her, both as a woman and a mother. However, if she gives me too much advice, my inner fifteen-year-old might still reemerge to respond with some classic eye rolling, and the urge to imitate my mother still creeps up on me. Though I now spend more time trying to emulate my mother than distance myself from her, sometimes I still can't resist mimicking my mother's voice. When I reach her answering machine, I'm often tempted to respond after the beep by copying the silky, cheery way in which she says, "Hi, this is Evi. Leave a message, and have a happy day.' I guess I'll always be capable of being just a tiny bit wicked to my mother.

Leah Bassoff is a former editor for Penguin Publishing, a former high school English teacher and is currently a full-time mother and writer. She writes a weekly journal for www.thebabycenter.com and a monthly column for www.sanity central.com. Her book, Hoochy Mama, a collection of essays on motherhood, is currently being represented by The Elaine Koster Literary Agency.