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mallorys_cameraAs the only child of a Jewish mother, Christmas had no particular importance for me when I was growing up other than its significance as a retail swag opportunity. I wanted things; we were poor: I very seldom got things. Christmas was the generic winter holiday. Stores put up elaborate Christmas trees, strands of multi-colored lights, tinsel angels. No one I actually knew had those things in their homes.
Personally, I like pageantry and ornamentation so as soon as I escaped from my mother's home, I began investing in Christmas. Started a collection of Christmas ornaments. (Those may still be in a box in my California storage unit for all I know.) Put up Christmas trees the day after Thanksgiving that often stood in my living room till the day before Valentine's Day (mostly because I'd missed the deadline for tree trash takeaway and had no other idea how to get rid of the damn thing.) Learned the words to Christmas carols. (My favorite had nothing to do with heralding angels or proud young virgins, but is the Mexican folksong about the Jimmy Choo's in the mall in front of the Pearly Gates:
A la puerta del cielo
Venden zapatos
Para los angelitos
Que andan descalzos
)
###
I celebrated Christmas even harder after I had my own children. I married goyim -- odd in retrospect given my identification with Judaism, my great delight in the tribe's lingua franca of sarcasm, and my inability to communicate from the heart with anyone who wasn't fluent in that language.
I think my selection of haploid gene donors may have had something to do with a dream that until five or so years ago, I used to have at reoccurring intervals, every six months or so. In that dream, I was always an adolescent -- sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. I was sitting down to eat dinner with my family in a lavishly appointed dining room. I remember light from chandeliers refracting from cut glass crystal and the thin gold edging of the fine china on the table .
Then there came... No, not a knock on the door. The sound of the door forcibly opened. Men in uniforms pushing into the room. "You have five minutes to get your things and you're coming with us," the uniforms announced waving long rifles.
And the other members of my family would always obediently begin gathering things together. And I would always refuse. "Just shoot me," I'd tell the uniforms. Seemed pretty obvious to me that we were all going to die one way or another, and this way, I figured, I'd die fast.
In some of the dreams, I woke up as soon as one uniform raised a rifle and pointed in my direction. In others, I'd hear the gunshot and then wake up.
In a couple of the dreams, though, I'd actually die. Being dead didn't feel all that different than being alive, at least not in the dream. The peel that held the dream reality together maybe felt... springier after I was dead.
Anyway, I've had the dream as far back as I can remember. Though, as I say, I don't have it anymore -- it stopped around the time the Little Store went down in flames. And I don't remember when I learned about Nazis and concentration camps -- probably after I read The Diary of Anne Frank -- but once I did, the dream morphed into a narrative about Nazis coming to take me -- us -- away to a concentration camp. And I suspect one of the reasons I didn't choose Jewish reproductive partners had to do with a really deeply seated and completely irrational feeling that if I diluted the DNA with goyim farmboy stock, the Nazis would leave it alone.
###
I celebrated Christmas, but that didn't mean I had Christmas traditions the way other people I knew had Christmas traditions. I had a tree; I had decorations. I had a pile of gifts for each child under the tree, and my rule of thumb when the boys were little was that each pile of gifts had to stack roughly to the height of the child being presented with them.
I didn't bake cookies. I didn't string lights or other decorations around my home or yard. I tried to make a gingerbread house one year just because I LUV little miniature houses, but I failed miserably. I didn't go to midnight mass or any other type of religious service. I didn't sign up to work in a soup kitchen. I didn't perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus, and I thought Christmas stockings were a ridiculous waste of time unless you had a fireplace to hang them from.
I suppose one might say that my attempts to celebrate Christmas were all a form of protective mimicry designed to keep the Nazis from hauling the kids off to the Camp. Possibly, too, an opportunity to shower them with gifts, which, essentially, was a means of re-parenting myself, giving them the things I would have liked to have had when I was their age. My kids will never see me as a human being, of course -- though Max at least tries -- but I honestly did go out of my way to give them good experiences and opportunities that I never had. For selfish reasons, of course: I was the type of mother that I would have liked to have had. Quite probably, they would have preferred an entirely different type of mother.
###
I expressly refused to take child support when my first marriage ended. Bill and I split physical and legal custody until he got his job in Tustin. After that, it seemed to me, it was more important that Bill continue to have a strong relationship with Max. I asked Bill to take the money he would otherwise be paying to me for Max's support and either come up to visit Max one weekend a month (he could always bunk at my place) or fly Max down to SoCal. This ended up not happening for a variety of reasons, but what did end up happening was that Max ended up spending every major holiday -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, President's Day, even Memorial Day -- with Bill and MaryAnn.
So Christmas turned into an after-the-fact celebration with Max and a targeted celebration only with Robin. Ben was a big believer in Christmas stockings crammed with candy, which Robin would devour within two hours becoming hyper and irritable. Presents would be opened as soon as Robin woke up and then the rest of the day would barrel into irrelevance and anti-climax. At some point in the afternoon, I'd take one of the dogs for a long walk, peer in the front windows of the various houses I passed where through the ugly branches of a fake Christmas tree, I'd see families sitting stupified from too much rich food and drink in front of a TV. Broadcast entertainment -- the modern technological communion.
When Ben abandoned me, I gave up on the Christmas tree. How was I gonna get one home in my little Veedub or carry it into the house? Jayne LeGro, of course, always had a Christmas tree 'cause she was such a perfect homemaker in all ways. Every year, Jayne LeGro would go to the enchanted forest to help cut Christmas trees down for the poor! She did this selflessly, of course, because she was a truly wonderful human being whose greatest joy -- besides sewing missing buttons on Ben's shirts and rereading the wonderful poems that Ben had written when he was 18 years old and somehow left in her custody when he checked out for his Lost Years, some 40 or so revolutions of the calendar -- I repeat, whose greatest joy was Helping Other Human Beings in Need.
(For the record, I will note here that in the 17 years we were together, I never once sewed a single button on any of Ben's clothes. Since I had to teach myself to sew buttons -- I'm not sure my mother ever learned how herself -- I never quite got how to make tidy, tied-off knots, and I was too embarrassed to inflict my great wads of twisted thread on other people. Besides. I was the one out in the salt mines, earning the cash that kept our little menage afloat. Surely under those circumstances, Ben could sew his own fucking buttons.)
Did I even get Robin gifts throughout this juncture? Honestly, I don't remember. I was pretty fucking broke, having major problems scraping up the bucks to pay rent, utilities and automobile insurance. Sans doubte, those three years in Ithaca were absolutely the worst fucking years of my life and I wouldn't have pulled through them at all were it not for the kindness and generosity of a handful of strangers -- if you're reading this, you know who you are -- and my thought that suicide is not only the coward's way out but is also a self-defeating tactic in the karmic sense since it guarantees you're gonna have to take the class over again in your next reincarnation.
###
All of which, I suppose, is an overly long, rambling prelude to saying that I wasn't particularly dissatisfied with the way I spent Christmas this year -- not until I got off the phone with Max toward the very end of it. (That phone conversation was the point of this whole LJ entry, but naturally I don't have time to write it now.)
I'm under no delusion that my perceptions are any more real than other people's perceptions. In fact, I know I suffer from a very peculiar astigmatism wrought by the conditions of my very peculiar upbringing. Although the vast majority of the people I'm acquainted with seem to be in psychic pain -- either wallowing in that pain or in fierce denial of it -- I'm also blessed to know people like Marybeth and Susan who live happy lives in full possession of their faculties, and those happy lives include celebrating happy holidays. It's my karma for whatever reason to be the little orphan with her nose pressed up against the bakery window, spying on all the treats she'll never get to eat. I can't indulge in feeling sorry for myself, and I can't be spiteful about other people's happiness. It's just the narrative I'm caught in. Maybe next time round, the story the universe tells about me-e-e-ee will be a happier one.
Personally, I like pageantry and ornamentation so as soon as I escaped from my mother's home, I began investing in Christmas. Started a collection of Christmas ornaments. (Those may still be in a box in my California storage unit for all I know.) Put up Christmas trees the day after Thanksgiving that often stood in my living room till the day before Valentine's Day (mostly because I'd missed the deadline for tree trash takeaway and had no other idea how to get rid of the damn thing.) Learned the words to Christmas carols. (My favorite had nothing to do with heralding angels or proud young virgins, but is the Mexican folksong about the Jimmy Choo's in the mall in front of the Pearly Gates:
A la puerta del cielo
Venden zapatos
Para los angelitos
Que andan descalzos
)
I celebrated Christmas even harder after I had my own children. I married goyim -- odd in retrospect given my identification with Judaism, my great delight in the tribe's lingua franca of sarcasm, and my inability to communicate from the heart with anyone who wasn't fluent in that language.
I think my selection of haploid gene donors may have had something to do with a dream that until five or so years ago, I used to have at reoccurring intervals, every six months or so. In that dream, I was always an adolescent -- sometimes a boy, sometimes a girl. I was sitting down to eat dinner with my family in a lavishly appointed dining room. I remember light from chandeliers refracting from cut glass crystal and the thin gold edging of the fine china on the table .
Then there came... No, not a knock on the door. The sound of the door forcibly opened. Men in uniforms pushing into the room. "You have five minutes to get your things and you're coming with us," the uniforms announced waving long rifles.
And the other members of my family would always obediently begin gathering things together. And I would always refuse. "Just shoot me," I'd tell the uniforms. Seemed pretty obvious to me that we were all going to die one way or another, and this way, I figured, I'd die fast.
In some of the dreams, I woke up as soon as one uniform raised a rifle and pointed in my direction. In others, I'd hear the gunshot and then wake up.
In a couple of the dreams, though, I'd actually die. Being dead didn't feel all that different than being alive, at least not in the dream. The peel that held the dream reality together maybe felt... springier after I was dead.
Anyway, I've had the dream as far back as I can remember. Though, as I say, I don't have it anymore -- it stopped around the time the Little Store went down in flames. And I don't remember when I learned about Nazis and concentration camps -- probably after I read The Diary of Anne Frank -- but once I did, the dream morphed into a narrative about Nazis coming to take me -- us -- away to a concentration camp. And I suspect one of the reasons I didn't choose Jewish reproductive partners had to do with a really deeply seated and completely irrational feeling that if I diluted the DNA with goyim farmboy stock, the Nazis would leave it alone.
I celebrated Christmas, but that didn't mean I had Christmas traditions the way other people I knew had Christmas traditions. I had a tree; I had decorations. I had a pile of gifts for each child under the tree, and my rule of thumb when the boys were little was that each pile of gifts had to stack roughly to the height of the child being presented with them.
I didn't bake cookies. I didn't string lights or other decorations around my home or yard. I tried to make a gingerbread house one year just because I LUV little miniature houses, but I failed miserably. I didn't go to midnight mass or any other type of religious service. I didn't sign up to work in a soup kitchen. I didn't perpetuate the myth of Santa Claus, and I thought Christmas stockings were a ridiculous waste of time unless you had a fireplace to hang them from.
I suppose one might say that my attempts to celebrate Christmas were all a form of protective mimicry designed to keep the Nazis from hauling the kids off to the Camp. Possibly, too, an opportunity to shower them with gifts, which, essentially, was a means of re-parenting myself, giving them the things I would have liked to have had when I was their age. My kids will never see me as a human being, of course -- though Max at least tries -- but I honestly did go out of my way to give them good experiences and opportunities that I never had. For selfish reasons, of course: I was the type of mother that I would have liked to have had. Quite probably, they would have preferred an entirely different type of mother.
I expressly refused to take child support when my first marriage ended. Bill and I split physical and legal custody until he got his job in Tustin. After that, it seemed to me, it was more important that Bill continue to have a strong relationship with Max. I asked Bill to take the money he would otherwise be paying to me for Max's support and either come up to visit Max one weekend a month (he could always bunk at my place) or fly Max down to SoCal. This ended up not happening for a variety of reasons, but what did end up happening was that Max ended up spending every major holiday -- Thanksgiving, Christmas, President's Day, even Memorial Day -- with Bill and MaryAnn.
So Christmas turned into an after-the-fact celebration with Max and a targeted celebration only with Robin. Ben was a big believer in Christmas stockings crammed with candy, which Robin would devour within two hours becoming hyper and irritable. Presents would be opened as soon as Robin woke up and then the rest of the day would barrel into irrelevance and anti-climax. At some point in the afternoon, I'd take one of the dogs for a long walk, peer in the front windows of the various houses I passed where through the ugly branches of a fake Christmas tree, I'd see families sitting stupified from too much rich food and drink in front of a TV. Broadcast entertainment -- the modern technological communion.
When Ben abandoned me, I gave up on the Christmas tree. How was I gonna get one home in my little Veedub or carry it into the house? Jayne LeGro, of course, always had a Christmas tree 'cause she was such a perfect homemaker in all ways. Every year, Jayne LeGro would go to the enchanted forest to help cut Christmas trees down for the poor! She did this selflessly, of course, because she was a truly wonderful human being whose greatest joy -- besides sewing missing buttons on Ben's shirts and rereading the wonderful poems that Ben had written when he was 18 years old and somehow left in her custody when he checked out for his Lost Years, some 40 or so revolutions of the calendar -- I repeat, whose greatest joy was Helping Other Human Beings in Need.
(For the record, I will note here that in the 17 years we were together, I never once sewed a single button on any of Ben's clothes. Since I had to teach myself to sew buttons -- I'm not sure my mother ever learned how herself -- I never quite got how to make tidy, tied-off knots, and I was too embarrassed to inflict my great wads of twisted thread on other people. Besides. I was the one out in the salt mines, earning the cash that kept our little menage afloat. Surely under those circumstances, Ben could sew his own fucking buttons.)
Did I even get Robin gifts throughout this juncture? Honestly, I don't remember. I was pretty fucking broke, having major problems scraping up the bucks to pay rent, utilities and automobile insurance. Sans doubte, those three years in Ithaca were absolutely the worst fucking years of my life and I wouldn't have pulled through them at all were it not for the kindness and generosity of a handful of strangers -- if you're reading this, you know who you are -- and my thought that suicide is not only the coward's way out but is also a self-defeating tactic in the karmic sense since it guarantees you're gonna have to take the class over again in your next reincarnation.
All of which, I suppose, is an overly long, rambling prelude to saying that I wasn't particularly dissatisfied with the way I spent Christmas this year -- not until I got off the phone with Max toward the very end of it. (That phone conversation was the point of this whole LJ entry, but naturally I don't have time to write it now.)
I'm under no delusion that my perceptions are any more real than other people's perceptions. In fact, I know I suffer from a very peculiar astigmatism wrought by the conditions of my very peculiar upbringing. Although the vast majority of the people I'm acquainted with seem to be in psychic pain -- either wallowing in that pain or in fierce denial of it -- I'm also blessed to know people like Marybeth and Susan who live happy lives in full possession of their faculties, and those happy lives include celebrating happy holidays. It's my karma for whatever reason to be the little orphan with her nose pressed up against the bakery window, spying on all the treats she'll never get to eat. I can't indulge in feeling sorry for myself, and I can't be spiteful about other people's happiness. It's just the narrative I'm caught in. Maybe next time round, the story the universe tells about me-e-e-ee will be a happier one.
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-26 07:00 pm (UTC)I think this is the ultimate fact of motherhood!!!
no subject
Date: 2014-01-01 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-29 07:14 pm (UTC)Whoa. Maybe I just have spent too much of my life (as it runs now) as a student, but that is the single most persuasive thought against committing suicide I have ever heard. I'd never thought of exactly that.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-01 05:30 pm (UTC)