Every Day is Marne Gras

I am going on vacation; I will be back in Seattle on June 30th.

Recently I started to tick off the months it has been since I last saw my parents, much the same the way I used to count each month anniversary with my high school boyfriend.

It has been not quite eight months; I went home for a few days during Chanuka. As each month passes by without a comment from my mother about my weight or one of my siblings offering to get me high, I’ve become a little more defiant, a little more too into playing the role of the kid who has a don’t-even-mention-it-in-front-of-her fucked up relationship with her family.

This is slightly misinformed as my family doesn’t hate me more than they hate anyone else (we’re pretty curmudgeonly and we enjoy complaining), and even though we don’t have a lot in common and can’t stand to be around each other fifteen minutes after I step off the plane (here is a typical conversation that takes place on the car ride home from the airport):

“Are you going to smoke while you talk on your cell phone while you drive?” “Are you ever going to shave your armpits?” etc.

we still have one of those I’m-going-to-hate-my-family-members-as-much-as-I-want but-if-you-say-anything-bad-about-them-I-will-put-a-dead-horse-in-your-bed dealios.

Having a poor relationship with one’s parents inevitably surrounds one with a sexy, sexy cloud of mystery, and I could ponder why that is or discuss why I think this is fucked up, but I am feeling mushy and not very critical at the moment. Plus, I don’t care; I miss my mom. Poor relationship or not, I think about my mom all the time, and most of those thoughts are about the random things that make me think of her rather than how my perceived independence makes me more sexually desirable.

Even though my mother and I are not close, being older and living far away from her sometimes makes me feel like I have broken up with a great love, in the way that I am sometimes overwhelmed with sadness knowing that things will never be the same, or something. It’s a weird analogy. If I run with it anymore, I’m bound to run into incest territory, which was not where I was attempting to go, so you can think about how your great love breakups made you feel and then apply that to my mom.

Sometimes I think about her in past tense, as if she has died. She is healthy and alive, though; we talk on the phone once a week, but it feels like I am constantly grieving. Someone my age with dead parents probably needs to smack me around a little bit.

I have developed mom triggers– things or places or actions that hit me in the stomach by surprise, and I get caught in these sudden onslaughts of loneliness and nostalgia and weakness and confusion.

Every now and then something will remind me of her in a positive way; I will find a new memory or be reminded of something good that makes me feel grounded and whole and safe. This does not happen especially often, though, and these moments do not lend themselves nearly as well to compelling blogs as the existential crisis type moments do.

1. This just started happening to me: my mother’s voice comes out in mine when I sing in my car. I was winding around the freeway on-ramp headed to my office a couple weeks ago when I first heard it. It was during this two week stretch of cold rain (I swear I am moving away from this miserable coast and never coming back) and I only heard it for a second, but it was unmistakably her intonation, her voicing.

I have a terrible singing voice (I had a lead role in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in eighth grade and everyone in my family agreed that while my acting was cute and funny, my solo numbers sounded like a lo-fi version of Yoko Ono imitating a school bus); my mother was a voice major during her one semester stint in college who sang in fancy, elite choirs. We have never sounded anything alike. This is one of many reasons why I am not especially concerned about the prospect that I am possibly becoming my mother, even though we are both middle children and we have the same face and both love to overstuff our friends and say things like “I love to see you eat”.

Recently I learned how to drive and acquired a car and now that car is an extension of myself where I feel safe and happy (champagne honda civic, i wonder what that means?), so now I sing (loudly) all the time, but the mom voice thing is a new development.

It was a folk song that I like a lot, because I can sing a majority of the notes close to on-key. I was belting out some line about the fucked-upedness of the american political system and then there it was, hanging in the air, like casper the friendly ghost or a butterfly. I put my hand over my mouth, and then I got a little weepy, and then I went back to singing. I sang the same song again on the way home from work and felt it again, the same note. After experimenting with almost all of my cds, I’ve found three albums where my singing versions conjure my ma, but it feels a lot like listening to the voicemail greeting of someone who has died. You think it’ll make you feel closer to them, but it doesn’t, and instead the hollow space in you gets a little bit bigger.

2. I don’t eat meat and I don’t make vegan nut loaves, but last week I watched some kids mix ground beef with vegetables with their bare hands the way my mom does when she makes meatloaf, and that made me feel a little lost. I participated in a cooking class with the youth I teach at my job; they made egg rolls.

When I saw the youth in my program working their hands through the meat, I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother, and how when she made meatloaf when I was younger she wouldn’t be able to answer the phone while she stirred, and how I could never get up the guts to ask her to mix the beef with a fork. I think I was worried that she would get E Coli and die by mixing it by hand. When I became a vegetarian, I never thought about how it would affect my mother, but she went through a long period of feeling resentful about me not eating her cooking, especially the foods that she used to show her love through, like meatloaf.

I used to love eating meatloaf as a kid (I think I loved it more because my sister hated it AND it was covered in ketchup), but I hated watching the prep for it. My mother would take her rings off and stick her hands in up to her wrists in the ground beef, eggs, bread crumbs, and god knows what else. I hated the noises it made and I could not figure out how something so disgusting turned into any meal, let alone something as wonderful as meatloaf.

3. I have a watch my mother wore every day for as long as I can remember. A couple of years ago my father bought my mother a fancy pink Burberry watch to replace her old one. She put the old one at the bottom of her jewelry box to make way for her new wrist candy almost immediately.

I was heartbroken. I remember looking at the new pink plaid band around my mother’s wrist with pure sadness and hate for my mother’s love of new, pretty pink things and how it felt like everything sacred in my life was disappearing. I had no words. It was like meeting your new baby sibling; you can’t say you hate it, even if it makes you feel like life as you know it is gone forever (though I guess the changing of the watches was a wee more symbolic).

Last summer we went to an antiques roadshow-type jewelry buying event and my mother attempted to sell the old watch along with a bunch of other random pieces of costume jewelry she had acquired from well-meaning relatives. I spotted the watch in her plastic bag of twinkly crap and threw a small fit about how she could not get rid of the watch (literal translation– me: “you aren’t going to get rid of that, are you?”).

I said “I need a new watch; I’ll take it”, and I put it on. My mother was happy to give it to me; I think she was happy that it meant I would stop hinting at how much I hoped she would buy me a watch before I left for Seattle.

What I meant to say was “This watch reminds me of everything that was good about being a child; I cannot think about this watch without remembering how your skin felt when you hugged me when I was small and feeling sad; this watch is your entire essence rolled up in gold plated tin; when you stopped wearing it my whole world shifted; I am going to wear it every day even though I hate women’s watches and gold colored jewelry because I need to take a part of you with me when I move away”.

4. I will never drink vodka martinis because they are my mother’s drink of choice and even the words ‘vodka’ and ‘martini’ conjure up an image of Mama Marnegras stumbling around the back patio during our annual memorial day barbeque with the music up way too loud, screaming at some neighbor to lighten up and have another shot.

Whereas the fact that my grandmother only drank bourbon makes me feel like I am carrying on a family tradition, even when my friends order martinis (even the slutty chocolate kind that look more like yoohoo than their transparent brethren), I shudder.

I will never get over how much my mother cried when she broke her favorite martini glass. She was washing dishes, and then she couldn’t stop screaming “FUCK!” pause. “FUCK!” She cried even harder when a few weeks later she broke the other glass in the set.

5. I do almost nothing to spite my parents (on purpose, that is; I am in my 20’s; I am not fooling anyone.)

I do indulge when I can 1. afford my favorite ice cream and 2. restrain myself long enough to put said ice cream in a bowl. I douse my ice cream in chocolate syrup, I eat every drop, I don’t share it with anyone, and when I am done, I think of my mother, smile, and lick the entire bowl (with my whole face, in a way that only someone who enjoys cunnilingus can: who else could haphazardly close their eyes, stick their whole face into something wet and sticky, and come out licking their lips, happily satiated?).

When I tried to lick my ice cream bowl as a kid/teenager/college student home for Thanksgiving, my mother would squawk, swoop down, and pry the bowl away from me. She would, with disgust, throw my bowl with perfectly good ice cream residue in a dishwasher full of crusty dinner dishes and dessert would suddenly be over.

The first time I ate ice cream out of a bowl as an adult away from home, I was in a college dining hall. It took about six minutes (the time it took to eat the ice cream in the bowl) to realize that no one cared what I did with my dishware or my tongue (we were too busy exploring our sexual identities and wearing sweatpants in public). I licked the whole bowl. I got ice cream on my nose. My new friends laughed. I have never not licked a bowl with ice cream in it since.

6. My mother has a big personality that goes along with her big voice, and though she passed neither along to me, i did inherit her rabid love for musical theatre. My mother sang snippets of old broadway shows as bedtime lullabies, cheer up songs, rallying cries. I, in turn, sing them to my friends now in the same kinds of moments my mother would sing them to me (this is how my friends usually come to understand the depths of my love for musicals; when I attempt to communicate my feelings through sondheim).

For several years on my birthday I was permitted to skip school and we would go into the city and see a show. I never thought about it then, but I think I was in love with the fact that a big, shaking broadway voice could sing any number of trite, melodramatic lyrics and still convey complex, conflicting emotions; the kind that transcended whatever the actual words were. Broadway voices made me believe that is possible to communicate emotion without surrendering to the confines of our vocabularies, that there are certain voices that could make anyone understand love or pain or whatever. When people make fun of Barbara Streisand around me, I remember watching Funny Girl for the first time on the couch with my mom at age 14, I remember hearing her hit the notes in ‘People’ for the first time, and it feels like they are directly making fun of me and my mother. Our entire relationship is based upon the fact that we are clearly the only people in the world who understand the breadth and depth of what Fanny Brice is experiencing as she is in the alleyway with Nicky.

The Tony awards, which were on last week, featured this incredible performance by Patty LuPone as Mama Rose in the new revival of Gypsy, singing ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’, and I watched alone on my couch here in Seattle, hugging an overstuffed pillow as my housemates milled about, freaking out a little that their housemate they thought they knew was crying over a televised awards show. I wanted so badly to be watching the Tonys with my mom. I don’t even remember if we watched them every year when I was growing up. I don’t think we did. It still felt right, though; missing my mom, conjuring up these memories that may have never happened, wishing I knew for sure she used to be the person I thought she was.