The Jewish Daughter Diaries (9 page)

Rebecca Drysdale

I remember my mother telling me as a child that you become who you are “because of” and “in spite of” your parents. But even then, I knew that the “in spite ofs” were going to come out on top. I was
not
going to be a list-making, frantic-house-cleaning, appearance-oriented, tiny step-taker with an unmoving, microphone foam dome of hair perched on top of my head. There was nothing about that woman that I would be anything like, and I knew it from birth.

In seventh grade, I made an appointment with the counselor at my elementary school because I was concerned that I had an unhealthy amount of anger toward my parents. At the tender age of twelve, I was concerned enough about my feelings of rage that I sought professional help. I filled out a form, received a form back, set a date, got permission to leave class, and talked to a professional about my growing hatred toward my mother. Again, I was twelve. This did not bode well.

I began a campaign to actively be everything Non-Cynthia. The battle had begun. Her first huge strike came a year later, when we moved from Vancouver to Montreal.

For the previous few years, I had been spending my summers at Camp Tel Noar in Hampstead, New Hampshire. (No, I don't know Rachel Shapiro, and if I did, I don't think we were friends.) Camp Tel Noar (in English: Hill Of Youth…or in Rebecca-ese: Fields of Sadness) was the Jewish summer camp where my parents had met and fallen in love, the camp where my brother and sister spent a million glorious summers, the camp my entire extended family had attended since the dawn of man, and where I finally got to go and be bullied by mean girls from Framingham.

Meanwhile, all of my friends attended Camp Hatikvah in bully-free bliss. I spent three summers at Camp Tel Noar, deciding that if I was miserable in this utopian wonderland of teenage growth and spiritual discovery that I had been hearing about since birth, it was my fault. So I kept my mouth shut and wondered why all of these girls were being so mean to me. Weren't they impressed by my Zack Morris haircut and my ability to get from the flagpole to the dining hall on my unicycle? Marni? Liz? Yael? Guys?

When we moved to Montreal when I was thirteen, I demanded that I be allowed to go to Camp Hatikvah, the camp where all of my school friends from Vancouver spent their summers. If I had to go to a new school, I should get to see my friends from home, for God's sake. But the answer was no. Apparently, according to my mother, kids came back from summers at Hatikvah with unusual injuries and antiquated diseases.

I didn't care that kids were rolling out of there with rickets and peg limbs and lice-infested yarmulkes—I just wanted to be with my friends. But there was no convincing my mother. And that's when she did it. She made the most Cynthia Drysdale, I-read-about-it-in-Jewish-Mother-Bullshit-Weekly move ever. She took me to see a “summer camp consultant.”

A summer camp consultant! I remember my soul shriveling up and turning to dust like I had chosen the wrong Grail cup. A camp consultant. Kill me. Well, I knew of one camp consultant who was about to get a full hour of my now-perfected bitch face.

I remember a tiny office filled with brochures and promotional videos. There were posters on the wall of smiling tweens in matching shirts shooting arrows and painting crappy pictures and floating in yellow tubes. Blech. The consultant, if I remember correctly, was a hundred and fifty years old. He was a skinny, graying man who looked like the only camp he had ever seen was the concentration kind. My mother began describing me to him like I wasn't there as he scratched down notes and nodded his skeletal, old man head. He then handed me a bunch of books and brochures and a handful of VHS tapes to watch, and we left.

“Did you see anything interesting to you?” my mother asked.

“No.”

“What about that art camp in Connecticut?”

“I hate it.”

“You seemed to…”

“Shut up and leave me alone!”

I stomped to the car and rode silently home with my arms crossed and my lips pursed tighter than a cat's ass. I was mad. I was mad at the whole camp consultant thing...but what really pissed me off was that that camp in Connecticut looked pretty fucking cool. Damn it!

And so, when I was thirteen years old, I went to that art camp in Connecticut, which turned out to be Buck's Rock Fine and Performing Arts Camp. (Yes, I do know Joelle Yudin, and we are still in touch!) The camp was set up as a series of art studios ranging from glass blowing to dance to ceramics to jewelry to theater, and everything in between. My interest in street performing drew me to something called the Clown Shop. I walked into the Clown Shop to learn how to juggle clubs, and I never left.

In addition to occasional clowning, the Clown Shop taught very basic sketch comedy and improv. By the time I was fifteen, I was writing and directing original sketch shows and teaching improv. I remember sitting with my friend David Iserson on a bench and deciding that comedy was what we were going to do for the rest of our lives. And then we both did. When I was seventeen, instead of going back to camp, I went to New York and started doing stand-up comedy in the city.

Buck's Rock was the first great example of my mother winning—and it saved my life. Buck's Rock was where I learned to be and love myself, to love learning, and what a real friend was. I am still in touch with the people I went there with as a teenager, and the people I worked with when I went back eight years later. It wasn't my mom or the consultant that made Buck's Rock what it was…but it is what got me there, and nothing else mattered. The most important thing that ever happened to me, more than anything I can point to in my life, had my mom's list-making fingerprints all over it.

That was her big win. There were many others.

I pierced my nose in the bathroom when I was sixteen.
Ha! Take that! This is my body!
My mother was pissed, not at the nose piercing, but that the earring I had used wasn't fourteen-carat gold. She took me to see her friend who “designs beautiful jewelry” so we could find something nice. Cynthia 1, Rebellion 0.

When I was nineteen I got my first tattoo. It was going to be of a jester's hat. At the tattoo parlor I looked at a binder full of designs that all looked like skateboard logos or graffiti tags…so instead I got a tattoo of the silver jester pendant I wore around my neck.
Blam! Take that!
Except that the jester around my neck was given to me by my mother. Another point for Cynthia. Even my tattoo, the ultimate Jewish mother destroyer, could be traced back to my mom.

When I bought used corduroy pants with holes in them, she got them hemmed. Point Cynthia. When I wanted to wear a suit instead of a dress, she took me to a seamstress to get it custom tailored. Damn it! There was nothing I could “Becky” that she didn't “Cynthia” in some way.

Finally I went off to school and was free. Free from the daily Cynthia-ing of my life. I went to Sarah Lawrence where my main focus was sketch comedy and girl fucking. I met my best friend, Jordan Peele, with whom I dropped out and moved to Chicago when we were nineteen. Finally I could be the person I was meant to be in spite of my mother. And then the scariest thing in the world happened. The “because ofs” reared their ugly heads.

Jordan was not the tidiest person in the world, and we were sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Chicago with that shitty gray carpet that is in your first apartment because you only looked at one. This small space forced me to be the tidiest person on earth. I was in a constant state of picking up, rearranging, and putting away. The cover on our couch was always getting crumpled and required refitting every few hours. Our rogue weed stems would end up smushed between the couch and coffee table. It was gross.

With so much to do just to keep our apartment from turning to shit, it was necessary to create a system of to-do lists. With all the writing and producing of our own shows that was going on, I thought it would be easier if there was a filing system in place to establish a sense of order—and a calendar to keep our rehearsals and tech meetings and work schedules in. Wait—
What
was
happening
?

Somehow—even though I was a tattooed, dyke comedian dropout, dating a shiksa, and living in my weed-soaked shitty apartment with my black writing partner—I had
still
turned into my mother! Sure, my lists had different items on them, and the crap I was tidying and stacking was different, and the designer jewelry was everywhere but in my ears…but those were just the details. I had become everything I hated about her, and the worst thing about it was that it was working. Life was easier. So annoying.

Now, at thirty-four years old, I realize that all of what I thought was trying to stop me from being the person that I was, had allowed me to be the person that I am.

When I marry the corn-fed Nebraskan Catholic girl I am engaged to, I am going to know what colors match and what shoes are too casual to go with my custom-tailored pants and vest, because of my mom. When I trip my balls off on mushrooms in the woods, I know to pack an extra layer of clothing and make all the calls I need to first so that I don't have to worry about it later, because of my mom. When I opened my own theater and had to schedule it, budget it, administrate it, and decorate it, I knew how, because of my mom. I have a sense of humor and am a professional comedy writer because of my…Nope! No way…you can't have that one!

So whether I am who I am “in spite of” or “because of” my mom doesn't really matter. I'll take 'em both…and then I'll probably alphabetize them, file them, and check that off a to-do list.

I should have known that this was going to happen when I was twelve years old and I filled out a form and scheduled an appointment with an expert to talk about how much I hated my mom…

Classic Cynthia Drysdale.

Emmy Blotnick

I love my mom, but she's dangerous to be with in public. It's been happening for as long as I can remember, and it goes like this: a stranger in our vicinity does something mildly impolite, and rather than letting it go, my mom will turn to me and loudly trash the person.

“If only this dumpy old broad would hurry up counting her nickels…” she bickers in the checkout line at CVS.

“I'm sorry I can't hear you,” she says to me, next to a businessman on his cell phone. “This fat asshole is yelling my eardrums out.”

“Get a bra!” she shouts after a nipply woman who has not yet exited the dollar store.

You see, I'm not just her daughter; I'm her insult springboard, her mud-slinging enabler. Because of course, if that stranger shows any sign they heard her—so much as a glare or an “Excuse me?”—she acts like the conversation was only between us, and I'm left scrambling for the right gesture to approximate an apology. In the ballet of passive aggressiveness, this is the pirouette.

And it is terrifying. There are a lot of drugs I don't need to try because I've already experienced the highs of adrenaline watching my mom insult ladies bigger than both of us. It's a miracle she hasn't been punched in the face in a TJ Maxx yet.

“But I never aim it at you or anyone I love,” she tells me. “I just have certain expectations of the world.”

Throughout my teenage years, when my mom's habit of lashing out at strangers mortified me the most, I never understood that it was rooted in a concern for decorum and a kind of modern decency. Only recently did she explain to me that she keeps a mental list of things she considers to be in bad taste and only springs to action when she senses a violation, as though it's her duty to fix it or at least drop a big hint.

Those violations include but are not limited to:

1. loud neighbors

2. loud eaters

3. long lines

4. long fake nails

5. bad perfume

6. bad hair

7. slow walkers

8. slow orderers

9. whistlers

10. people who mouth words as they read

11. Ugg boots with miniskirts

Sometimes she frames it as though there's a monster living within her, always ready to make appearances. It's a cute and convenient scapegoat, the inner monster. It's certainly easier to think of it that way than face the fact that calling people out on their bad behavior is itself bad behavior. It also makes it easier to realize that I've inherited her habit. I do have an inner monster of my own; it just hasn't yet developed the will or the balls to show up as often as my mom's does. I'm grateful mine is still silence-able but it's definitely in training, gradually building up the self-righteousness to risk having a bag of groceries swung at my head.

When I moved out of the house, as the last child to leave, I wondered how she'd keep it up. Would she just walk around muttering to herself, rattling off insults to no one in particular? Even after years of being embarrassed, the thought of her not having a trash-talking associate bummed me out a little. I thought there was a chance she'd accept the futility of her form of vigilantism and halt the running commentary altogether.

But no. Hell no. The habit—the monster, whatever you want to call it—remains in full effect. She's just found a replacement sidekick: our dog. It seems to be working out well for them. He doesn't look mortified at all on walks when she announces, “Okay, we'll let this idiot with the ugly raincoat go ahead first.”

It's hard to imagine how it would feel to overhear a lady giving you an impromptu Friars' Club Roast, only to discover that the other half of the conversation is being held down by a twenty-pound schnauzer named Harrison. Luckily, you don't have to imagine it because, eventually, the Mom and Dog Insult Team will find you.

Arianna Stern

“I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother,” Angela Chase says in the MTV teen drama
My
So-Called Life
. “It just means too much to her.” In a poll for the most Jewish-sounding quote from
My
So-Called Life
, my vote would go to that one. Then again, maybe I'm biased.

As a teenager, I did well in school, observed the High Holidays, and successfully alienated any boy who might've gotten me pregnant, but my dinner plate was still a major point of contention. My mom emphasized the “style” portion of her kosher-style kitchen, choosing Hebraic brands that she cooked with as liberally as she pleased. Still, in one respect, she was decidedly old-school. Meat was not murder; it was the wellspring from which proper nutrition flowed, the world's sole source of physical strength, and a prerequisite for robustness of the spirit. I disagreed. (In retrospect, our quibbles might have been avoided had we Googled the word “Hindu.”)

When my mom hears the word “vegetarian,” I imagine she thinks of a wan subsistence farmer, an emaciated hippie too weak to move her pathetic little plow, much less conceive a baby. If no animal had died to fill my famished belly, how could my Jewish mother live?

I first decided to become a vegetarian at age fourteen, struck by an epiphany in the kitchen. At the time, I was all hormonal and ready to sympathize with any sentient being with eyes I could gaze into, from cows to teenage boys that just blatantly stared at my boobs. Cows could make noise or wave their tails like excited puppies, and they had hearts and veins like I did. They were beautiful. I did not want to eat them. But when I told my mom, she seemed less than ecstatic.

“If you're going to do it, you should do a little research first,” she said, as though I'd asked to hang out at R. Kelly's house. “I think there are some vitamins you have to take.” Dutifully, I searched for nutritional advice for vegetarians, and my mom and I shopped accordingly, stockpiling marinated tofu, garbanzo beans, and sunflower seed butter. But she wasn't satisfied, still envisioning me as the brittle-boned hippie farmer.

“Your fingernails are blue,” she would say repeatedly, scooping up my hands and frowning at my shitty circulation. “You're anemic.” She made an example of her one vegetarian friend, who always ate fish. Couldn't I at least eat fish? That her vegetarian friend never came to visit was beside the point. My mom's vegetarian friend is probably eating dinner right now with Bill O'Reilly's black friend.

“I just have bad circulation,” I'd say, but the damage had already been done. My digits were insufficiently pink, and as far as my mom was concerned, malnourishment was the only possible culprit.

As the weeks passed and I didn't budge, my mom grew more flustered. While I spent fifteen-minute intervals foraging in the open fridge, her voice would call out from behind me with helpful suggestions. On multiple occasions, she guided me through the animal kingdom, enumerating why each species did not deserve to live.

“Shrimp are just big bugs,” she would say. “Chickens are dumb and mean—just ask your uncle Phil. Don't you think a cow would eat you?”

In the park one day with my mom and her long-term boyfriend, I complained that I was cold. It had been about six months since I'd stopped eating meat. Across from me, my mother knitted her eyebrows while I pinched clumps of grass with icy fingers. Mom's stew of worry finally boiled over, and she dragged me to a nearby fast-food restaurant where I could restore my blood to a healthier, meatier thickness. Under the halogen lighting, I dunked something that once resembled chicken in something that never resembled honey or mustard.

“You look much better,” my mom said, and I gave up, but not for long.

Though my mom's instincts suggested that vegetarianism would accelerate the pace of my untimely demise, the medical community—one by one—denied her hunch. During a blood drive at my high school, a lady technician signed a slip of paper confirming my adequate iron levels. Time and again, my pediatrician spelled out my physical normalcy, in between encouraging me not to try coke and comparing my pubic hair to that of the other girls she saw.

At sixteen, I decided to give vegetarianism another shot. My mom still did not support my diet, but she'd mellowed out slightly, opting for the slow-burning tactic of annoyance over the full-scale assault.

“Are you getting enough protein?” she would ask on a near-daily basis. Before we went to a restaurant, my family would pause for ten minutes as my mom scanned the menu in detail, lovingly ensuring my inclusion as she highlighted the inconvenience I posed.

In a stubbornness contest within my family—within any Jewish family—there can be no clear victor. I managed to avoid eating meat until I left home for college and never thought twice about it until my brother gave me a book on sports nutrition. I knew plant-based protein was less efficient, but I'd never seen it spelled out quite so clearly. What ultimately changed my mind about true vegetarianism wasn't a philosophical evaluation of animal consciousness; it was more like, “Fuck, I don't even like beans that much.”

I felt the most comfortable working fish back into my diet. They seemed to lack the psychological complexity of other animals, and they couldn't bewitch me with curly, humanoid eyelashes. Besides, if my mom's logic is to be trusted, fish totally deserve to die because they're racist.

Still, I couldn't break the news to my mother right away. I was only eating fish on a trial basis, and again, it just meant too much to her. If she got her hopes up, and I then decided to revert back to true-blue vegetarianism, she would be devastated. So I snuck around town to eat my first lox-and-bagel sandwich in four years.

I felt so full that I didn't eat another meal for eleven hours. The sandwich was good—not dazzling, but good enough that I wanted to have another one sometime. I officially became a pescetarian, which I remain to this day, at age twenty-five. After a couple weeks of secrecy, I informed my mom that I'd begun to eat fish.

She met the decision with little fanfare, instead betraying calm and relief.

“Oh, good,” she said, naming a few dishes we could now eat together, like tuna with melon or lox and bagels. And then that ended the nagging forever, right?

If only it were that easy. Apparently my mom magnetically attracts articles about nutrition. These days, she wants me to eat fish multiple times weekly, so I can maximally absorb their beneficial fats. She won't quit until I've digested an entire zoo.