15. “My mother is dead, again.”

I gave up on writing about my mother after MY MOTHER IS CRAZY was rejected in 2010. I wrote two other books instead — a novel for adults, and a novel for tweens.

Now it was May of 2015. My mother had been dead for 2.5 years. The adult novel had just been published, and the tween novel was with an editor who wanted to buy it; she just had to sell it upstairs. I was on my way to my workspace, where I was writing a follow-up kids’ book, and I thought, My mother is dead, again.

Again and again, and still. I’d talked about her for hours and days and weeks in therapy with my new shrink, Robin, whose name in my head was still Ju..Robin, though I’d been seeing Robin for three years by then. After seventeen years together, Judith had become synonymous with therapy.

For two and a half years, in and out of therapy, I had faced my mother’s death, confronted it, interrogated it, engaged with it, processed it, reconciled with it, integrated it, and accepted it. At the end of it all, she was still dead. Again.

So I started with that first line, My mother is dead, again. And I told a story from three years before she died, about a friend’s wedding, a blissful event, which I spent in an agony of calculation over the likelihood of my mother being dead vs. her just not calling me back for two weeks. I did this frequently, hence her being “dead, again.”

There were going to be two interwoven tracks in this 2015 version of the book — the “recent” events of 2009-2012, and the events of the distant past. I present them here in their untangled form.

Past:
* Determined this time to make sure that my mother is a sympathetic and likeable character, I start with her own history as a newborn adoptee to an unfit couple in the Bronx.
* Her adoptive mother was what they used to call a “hysteric,” or, in Yiddish, “a nervous chalariah.” Grandma was 50 years old at the time of adoption, way too old for a newborn, my mother emphasized. A terminally pessimistic, Depression-era, guilt-tripping bundle of neuroses and tics: that was my grandmother, and I say that with love, having known her until I was twelve and she was dead, and boy was my mother happy.
* Her father was a traveling salesman with his family’s garment business, a gentle man with one crossed eye and a vacant smile. He was absent and ineffectual, and he died when I was four, but I remember him as kind. My father, who knew him, describes him as “not all there.” Like, not there at all.
* My mother felt intense psychic and emotional pain, like most people born in the 1940s I guess, and when she was 16, she asked her mother if she could see the doctor about her feelings, but her mother didn’t want to pay for a doctor’s visit when there was “nothing wrong.”
* There’s a picture of my mother at age 12 where she’s smiling and twirling in a dress. There are so few childhood pictures of her. She’s glorious, her wide smile, her dimples, her joy.
* A few years ago, I found Husband One, the guy she eloped with to Delaware when she was sixteen. I have this photo album from the wedding their parents forced them to have in the Bronx when they turned seventeen.
* I have loved this wedding album since I first found it in a box when I was in high school, and I immediately took possession of it. My mother never mentioned it; I assume she forgot she had it. It’s my favorite artifact of her.
* Anyway, I knew his name, he was Husband One, he was famous to me, and it finally occurred to me to look for him on Facebook about seven years ago.
* I wrote him a note telling him I was Joan’s daughter and I had this photo album and I could send him some scans if he wanted, and she was dead but it was fine and if he ever wanted to tell me something about her back then, something that would make me feel better or more complete, I’d be happy to hear it.
* He didn’t respond. I didn’t take it personally. She was destructive to so many people, I assumed he was one of them.
* Back to the sympathy: she hated her mother. She dealt with her mother out of guilt and with resentment.
* “I never want you to feel about me the way I feel about my mother,” she said constantly, back when I was young, and I couldn’t imagine such a thing ever happening.
Recent:
* I find out after 10 years of low contact that my mother and her schizotypal fifth husband are living in filth and bankruptcy with 25 cats; also, she is off the direly necessary medications that control her Multiple Sclerosis.
* Try to do things about it, seeking the help of doctors, the ASPCA, Adult Protective Services, the Department of Health, the Department of Buildings, specialty cleaners, and the police.
* Be disappointed at every turn, every single goddamn fucking turn, by everyone.
* Meanwhile, she and Husband Five keep trying to bleed me for money — if I’ll pay for doctors and cat litter, why won’t I give them money?
* Go low contact again.
* Meanwhile my beloved and life-saving shrink, Judith, is succumbing to dementia and won’t admit it.
* I finally understand that I have to meet and accept my mother on her own terms if I’m ever going to have a chance of getting through to her.
* Invite her and Husband Five to Olive Garden with me and my (one and only) husband, who she never met, even though they were invited to the wedding, and even though I’m grateful they didn’t come, I’m still sad she wasn’t there.
* She hangs up on me mid-invitation. I’m writing about it a few days later: I spoke to my mother, for what may well have been the last time.
* Aaaaand she’s dead.