Mother Daughter Me (10 page)

Now that my mother no longer owns a dog, I feel more charitable toward her canine-loving ways, and an early birthday gift of the topiary terrier seems perfect. When I present it to her, a white ribbon around its stiff little neck, she loves it and decides she wants to name it. Her first suggestion is Cherubino, the Mozart-inspired name of one of my grandmother’s poodles in the 1960s.

“Don’t you think we’re done with those Mozart opera names?” I ask. She agrees and runs through a few more possibilities before settling on “Porter.” She keeps Porter outside her front door at the lower level and buys him a special watering can. I’m pleased.

For weeks she has been admiring my wristwatch—a simple Swiss-made
timepiece that Matt gave me many years ago. She wants one like it. We decide to go off to Bloomingdale’s for a birthday shopping trip for her. It’s understood that a watch will be another birthday gift to her.

Zoë, in the meantime, has been lobbying for a fall shopping expedition. So I strike a deal with the two of them: It’s established that this is to be her grandmother’s birthday trip, but Zoë can accompany us and try on clothes by herself. I instruct Zoë to call me from her dressing room when she’s ready for me to inspect her items.

We arrive at Bloomingdale’s and, according to plan, Zoë sets off for the third floor. As I watch her hurry away, it occurs to me that I’ve forgotten to give her a dollar limit. My mother and I stay down at accessories and head straight for the watch department. She sees nothing she likes and certainly nothing resembling my watch. Just as we’re about to abandon the watch counter, a Gucci dress watch catches my eye. I point it out to my mother, who urges me to try it on—and I do. I’ve never owned a fancy watch or even had one on my wrist. I rotate my forearm a few times, admire the watch, fantasize about owning it, then take it off and hand it back to the salesman.

At the earring counter, we’re helped by a young woman who possesses an infinite store of patience. My mother examines a dozen different earrings before finally deciding on a pair. Just as we’re moving on to scarves, my phone rings. It’s Zoë, who’s ready for me to come up to her dressing room to check out her selections. By this time, not one but two nice saleswomen in the scarf department are assisting my mother.

“I have to run up to see what Zoë’s picked out,” I say.

My mother looks at me matter-of-factly and says, “I’ll take a taxi home.”

“No, you will not take a taxi home. This will take only a few minutes.” I turn to the saleswomen. “She is not to take a taxi home.”

The young saleswomen look amused. “You are not to take a taxi home,” one of them says to my mother, with mock sternness.

I rush up the escalator to Zoë’s dressing room. The kid is surrounded by clothing, and she’s got my number. She knows I feel bad for spending the entire time with my mother, not her, and she knows I’m distracted and can’t take the time to veto any of her choices—which means I lack not only the time but the guts to say no.

“Whatever,” I say, and rush back down to find my mother, who is ready to look at coats.

It’s another testament to my willful optimism that I failed to see how sideways this little field trip could go, how forcefully I would be pulled from both sides. In fact, before we set out, I was sure we would have a lovely afternoon, during which we’d accomplish our separate goals and move closer to one another, because that’s what families do. But once again I’ve failed to understand how much these deceptively simple rituals rest on a foundation of love, respect, and a willingness to give and take. My efforts at righting the tilt of this canted trio keep backfiring. It’s at times like this when the intervention of reality is most painful, when my urge to create a family feels tragic in its hopelessness.

———

W
E’RE SEATED IN LIA’S OFFICE, AND MY MOTHER SAYS THERE’S
something she’d like to talk about right away.

“Katie sits on her wallet,” she announces.

I feel my face go hot. She’s accusing me of stinginess, but I have no idea what’s coming next. She continues, “She sits on her wallet when it comes to others, but she’s happy to spend money on herself.” And she tells Lia the story of my fascination with the expensive watch.

I’m stupefied. “But I didn’t buy it,” I say.

“No, you didn’t,” she says. So what is this about? As I will discover, this is but the first of many indications that my mother has fastened on money as an issue—perhaps
the
issue—that is dividing us. Come to think of it, as issues go, it isn’t new. It’s a festering sore of a topic. For my part, I think my mother’s priorities are all wrong. I’m angry that she spent tens of thousands of dollars on her dogs while paying precious little for my education and that she’s continuing the pattern by contributing
nothing to Zoë’s education either. And now I see that she views
me
as self-indulgent, perfectly willing to think about dropping $700 on a trinket for myself but—but what? I’m stumped.

We’re hardly the first family to be haunted by money issues. High-profile fights over the family coffers are in the news all the time. And they aren’t reserved for the Helmsleys and Astors and assorted landed gentry duking it out over inheritances the size of a small African country’s economy. Money plagues families rich and not so rich, famous and obscure. Just because there’s less money to fight about doesn’t mean it’s less of a flash point. While for many families money is a way to manipulate others and exercise power, in my family’s bloodstream it’s even more toxic than that: It’s the virus that always lies dormant, erupting occasionally into full-blown painful lesions.

I caught drift of this problem in our family early in life. Perhaps unintentionally—perhaps not—my mother made certain of that. When I was twelve, I sent a birthday gift to my grandfather. My mother wasted no time in reporting to me that her parents decided I had done this not out of love or thoughtfulness but in order to get a shot at their money someday. Their reaction was obnoxious and paranoid, but for my mother to have told me about it was still further off the mark.

Kate Levinson, a psychotherapist in Northern California, specializes in the topic of women and their relationship to money. In her book, aptly titled
Emotional Currency
, Levinson wrote that if we have enough money to cover our basic living expenses, much of the angst we experience around money stems from what she calls “our inner money life.” For women, it also represents a tangled skein of emotions. We use money to act out feelings we’re unable to acknowledge or express in other ways. Nowhere does this play itself out more poignantly than in family dynamics.

The topic of money has clouded my sister’s entire view of life. When Sarah was truly impoverished, she complained that she never had enough money, and although she is now settled in a lovely large house, with a stable marriage and a husband who has a good job, she hasn’t stopped worrying. Year after year, I’ve been poised to buy gifts for her, only to have her change her mind and tell me that what she really
needs
—instead of the tub of Patricia Wexler skin-regenerating
serum or the boots from Zappos.com that she’s already picked out—is the cash equivalent and could I please send a check instead. She doesn’t really need the cash, of course, but money handed to her by family members symbolizes something deep.

For most of her adult life, Sarah has fretted that my mother will strike her from her will—with good reason. Over the years, in reaction to Sarah-inspired upsets, my mother has spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, instructing them to excise Sarah from her will, then put her back in once the storm blows over. At the same time, she once told me she was planning to leave $100,000 to her dog trainer, in case her dogs outlived her.

The source of my mother’s troubled way with money isn’t hard to trace. My grandparents used money as a bludgeon. Money certainly didn’t bring them happiness, but, as Helen Gurley Brown once put it, at least it helped make them miserable in comfort. They could have been generous toward their daughters, but they weren’t. When my mother’s sister once asked them for a loan, they agreed but informed her they would require interest at a rate comparable to what a bank would charge.

My grandfather died in 1986, and my grandmother died three years later. It was up to my grandmother to make the final decision on bequests. She once said she didn’t “believe in inheritance.” Accordingly, in the end, she sold her house, as well as all the rare books, the artwork, and nearly all of her property on Cape Cod, and donated most of the proceeds to Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she had conducted her research. Her longtime live-in maid, a lovely Irish woman who had devoted most of her adult life to my grandmother, received a pittance of a few thousand dollars. My grandmother left her beautiful Steinway piano to one of my grandfather’s colleagues at MIT.

As for my mother and aunt, my grandmother left a trust in their names. But she didn’t actually leave it for them. Her two daughters were given not the full amount of the trust but the
interest
on the principal. My grandmother’s final instructions—giving a sizable sum to two institutions, then putting the rest of the principal out of reach of her children while tantalizing them with interest payments that reminded them how much they weren’t getting—seemed designed to inflict pain, to humiliate. Over the years, if my mother needed, say, a new car, she had to appeal
to the Boston lawyer my grandmother had named as executor, who would release funds for the purchase. No doubt this exercise in parental sadism had a profound effect on my mother’s feelings about money, about inheritance, about what parents owe their children—and on what is happening between us right now.

I, too, have a troubled relationship with money. I hoard it one week, then splurge on, for example, an expensive vacation for Zoë and me the next. I’ve always made certain I’m working and solvent. Still, I constantly worry and fret about money and can see myself as one of those old ladies with bills stuffed in a drawer, living on Arrowroot biscuits. Zoë inherited her expensive taste from her father, Matt. (His family and I used to joke that he was descended from an aristocratic branch of the family no one had ever heard of.) No supermarket shampoo for my daughter; only “product” sold at the salon. At restaurants, if she intimates that she’d like to order an expensive main course, I shoot daggers at her until she retreats to a cheaper dish. If she pushes me a little too far about a purchase I consider unreasonable, I blow up and lecture her about how hard I have to work so she can buy her designer jeans. None of this is terribly rational, I know.

In Lia’s office, my mother isn’t finished. She tells Lia that she paid for Cheryl to come up and help unpack, and she resents the fact that I haven’t offered to contribute. My mother has been stewing about this for some time but never mentioned anything until now. She didn’t ask me to chip in, and if she had, I probably would have—or I might have decided to unpack myself. It was my understanding that this was a gift, an acknowledgment that I was upending my own life to accommodate hers. I’m speechless.

Perhaps Lia considers it too soon to focus on the meaning of money in our relationship, for she seizes the opportunity to point out that money is only one of the many issues we’re coping with. She asks us what we’re doing with our assignment to create distinct boundaries and guidelines around the issues of time and space as well as money. We tell her we’ve been trying to come up with ways to give me the time and space I need to get my work done and to live my life. As for money, we split every household expenditure; Cheryl’s bill is the notable exception.

Lia nods approvingly when she hears of our progress, but the Cheryl
topic is left to smolder, because my mother has another subject she’d like to bring up: Zoë. “I find Zoë uncivil and incredibly rude,” she says. “And horrid,” she adds, just in case “uncivil and incredibly rude” didn’t get the point across.

Lia tries to zoom out to the big picture, to get my mother to see things more objectively. “There’s something really fascinating about teenagers,” Lia says, “if you can get beyond being hurt by them to trying to understand what makes these kids tick. It’s not about loving or hating you. She’s testing you, for sure, because you’re a rival for her mom’s love, and the question is, Are you able to love her, in spite of all that?”

My mother ignores the suggestion that she try to see beyond the narrow horizon of her own hurt feelings. “It’s uncomfortable for me just to go up to the kitchen or to be down in my little cellar listening to them.” By “them,” I assume she is referring to Zoë and me.

It’s too late in the hour to start in on this train wreck of a topic, so I deliberately change the subject.

“It’s Mom’s birthday today!” I say.

Lia’s face brightens. God bless her. None of this can be easy to listen to. “Happy birthday!” she says to my mother. “What are you doing to celebrate?”

A loaded question, although Lia doesn’t know it. I’ve been preparing for Thad’s book party, and after our session, because I still have to buy food, we’ll be going shopping on the way home. Clearly miffed that she doesn’t have my full and undivided attention on her birthday, my mother goes into martyr mode for Lia.

“I’ll be helping Katie shop for the party she’s giving her friend,” she says, “and that’s fine with me.” Sometimes, she plays the part of the stereotypical Jewish grandmother—the one who, when the lightbulb burns out, says, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just sit in the dark”—with the skill of a seasoned Borscht Belt actress.

At the end of the session, all Lia can say is this: “I’m going to tell you again how difficult this is. It’s so difficult that I’m touched just by the fact that you are trying.”