Jew World Order

On my first night of college, I called my mom an hour after she left. She’d spent the entire day helping me tape up photo collages and putting light blue bed sheets on the dorm room twin XL. “It’s weird here,” I whispered, standing next to a cereal dispenser in the giant dining hall. I was hiding from an overly peppy girl with pink hair who’d tried to make conversation in the teriyaki bowl line.

“I’m still on the 101. Do you want me to come back?” This was the perk of living 20 miles from college. Also, of having an overprotective Jewish mother. I didn’t say anything. She knew my silence meant “yes please.” Forty-five minutes later, we were eating orange chicken at the Panda Express on Figeroa together, the infamous “Felix” sign lit up large in the background.

“Do I have to go to college?” I half-joked. “No. We can just hang out,” she half joked back. But in her voice I could hear a twinge of truth. I knew she felt she was losing a piece of herself when I packed up to leave home that morning. And when she died last winter, I suddenly understood that loss in a new light.

My mother and I had been intertwined for as long as I can remember. I was an emergency C-section. They had to unzip me out of her. My birth had almost killed us both. I was just three pounds and lived the first eight weeks of life in an incubator, my mother sleeping in uncomfortable hospital chairs next to me. We survived that first trauma together — clinging onto one another as we re-entered the world.

When I started preschool, I’d sob when she tried to leave me with the other kids, wrapping myself around her leg. I think she was uncomfortable with it at first. She was one of the only mothers in our community who worked — a big-time sports producer for over a decade. But when I was born so prematurely, she quit her job. She grew into the role of mother. I think she liked feeling needed. Soon, it became her entire identity.

“Cindy is everyone’s honorary mom,” I once heard my second grade teacher say in the lunch line. Everyone knew my mom. She served hot lunch on Fridays — cold pizza and hard shell tacos. Sometimes she’d sit with us afterwards, making herself at home on the long red benches, talking elementary school gossip like she was one of us. It helped that she’d always been childlike. She had a certain whimsy and lightness to her being.

In middle and high school, I’d often come home to find my friends sitting in the kitchen drinking hot tea and chatting with my mom. On our prom night, she agreed to host the after party. I’ll never forget walking into her bedroom to a group of girls in long sequined dresses sipping tequila with her on her bed, complaining about their dates. “You’re so lucky. Your mom is so cool. You can tell her anything,” my friends would always say. And I was. And I could.

She had a particular weakness for my friends who had strained relationships with their mothers. She often said she never felt safe with her own mom. Her mothering strategy became to embody the opposite of what she’d experienced. She created an environment of complete openness, acceptance and warmth. There were so many nights we had on her bathroom floor, sharing our deepest thoughts and fears about sex, love, drugs, death. No topic was off-limits with her.

I once overheard a relative talking about us at a Thanksgiving dinner. “Becca and Cindy … It’s so odd. It’s like they’re sisters or friends or something … the poor girl doesn’t have an authority figure in sight.” I think she meant it as an insult, but I didn’t care. I knew it was true. My relationship with my mother went far beyond the typical “mother-daughter” bond. She was my everything — my best friend, my spiritual home, my other half, a piece of my own beating heart.

My parents split up when I was 14, and my older sister was going off to college, so naturally it became my mother and me. “Cindy and Becca against the world.” At family gatherings, it would be my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins and their significant others, and my mother and me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it wasn’t until she passed away that I had my first serious relationship. Until then, we were each other’s life partners.

Since she died last December, I find myself frantically searching for that feeling of completeness everywhere. When I can’t find it again, I distract myself — make another plan with a friend, go on another run, watch another mindless episode of TV. Let the empty hours without her pass.

I love my dad and my sister and my boyfriend, but they are not my mom. They are not the person who would help give me enemas when I became constipated, who reassured me for days after I had a panic attack from smoking too much weed freshman year of high school, who drove to my dorm room in college and slept in my bed with me after a boy broke my heart. The person who birthed me and held me and saved me over and over again during my most formative years.

I notice mothers everywhere now — mothers pushing strollers up hills on my runs, mothers with toddlers in the frozen foods aisle of the market, mothers fighting with their teenage daughters in line to buy makeup at the mall.

In my grief, I’ll feel a flood of rage ripple through me when I notice grandmothers with their daughters and their granddaughters. What would my mom have looked like in her seventies and eighties? Would she have continued to get her long, blonde extensions to cover up the grey? How would she have been as a grandmother? Would she use her coupon clippings at TJ Maxx and Marshalls to buy tiny, frilly baby clothing?

Mother’s Day is especially hard.

I wish I could be mad at the two teenage girls I see eating avocado toast at mother’s day brunch with their mom and grandma. One of the girls is looking at her cell phone in her lap, the other rolling her eyes as her mom dusts lint off of her long yellow sundress. I wish I could tell her how much I miss my mom picking lint off of my clothing, how much I miss her annoying texts making sure I arrived safely at a friend’s house, what I’d give for one more reminder from her to remember to make a gynecologist appointment.

Without her, I float … alone … anchorless.

As I continue down the street this Mother’s Day, I imagine us — baking some odd concoction in the kitchen. The sunlight streams in from the glass windows. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon waft through the space. Taylor Swift is playing in the background. I am seventeen again. Everything is awful, but everything is OK because she is with me, we have each other. I squeeze her bony frame, our high-pitched laughter lingers … Cindy and Becca against the world.

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