Mother, Can You Not? (13 page)

She has never mastered the art of switching off her phone’s ringer. If I decide to see a movie with my mother, put her phone on vibrate, and forget to switch it back later, I am guaranteed at least three months of complaining: “You broke my phone! Don’t talk to me about buttons; it just doesn’t ring anymore!!! Come home and fix it!!!”

After about twenty minutes of waiting with no updates from Seal Team Mom, I cracked. “Okay, I have to call. It’s safe, right? There’s no way they were at the checkpoint for this long, right?”

My dad nodded, and I dialed my mother, who answered cheerfully after the third ring. “Hello, Spawn!”

“Oh my God, you made it?”

“My God, you’re such a nervous Nina! Of course we made it! I’m just pulling up to the house with Lenny; I’m going to show him more photos of you! Come in, Lenny!” For those of you who don’t know, after trafficking yourself past a sea of law-enforcement officials, it is customary to invite a hot fireman to spend an evening looking at photos of your daughter.

“Anyway, we have to go, but I’m going to send Lenny out to pick up you and your father later on tonight! Here, Lenny, look at this picture of Kate. Doesn’t she have a great figure?” I had resigned myself to a night of paperwork at the bail bondsman’s office, so listening to her pimp me out was actually an improvement.

“No, Mother, don’t. We’ll just come back after the evacuation order is lifted.”

“Oh really, you’re going to make Dad drive all the way back to New York and climb up fourteen flights of stairs? That’s crazy.” Yes,
that
would be the craziest thing to happen that day.

“Mom, stop.”

“Well, make sure you stop at a bathroom! Or are you exclusively pooping in trash bags now?”

Two days later, we were back home with my mother, using working toilets and playing with our menagerie of pets (that would have been absolutely fine without my mother’s valiant rescue mission).
*

I’ve always hoped that the kindhearted fireman wasn’t scarred by his evening of crime with my mom. If you were and you’re reading this, Lenny, let me know if you’re interested in joining our little support group! A lot of people have found solace in Kim’s Klub, and my mother tells me that you make a mean casserole (it’s usually a potluck thing). Anyway, email me at crazy
[email protected]
.

B
eing single sucks. Being single with Kim Friedman as your mother is a disaster. There is no one she won’t give your number to. No lawyer she won’t ask if he’s single. No Starbucks she won’t cruise for eligible men. My biological clock appears to have a direct line to her ears. It registers as a deafening alarm that won’t quit blaring until she spends a few hours giving out my phone number to strangers or scheduling plastic surgery appointments with doctors who might be single. You know how dogs can register super-high-pitched sounds that humans can’t hear? It’s like that, except my mom hears the screams of my dying eggs as they get flushed down the toilet every month.

When I was twenty-four and single, she was convinced that my next relationship would either turn into marriage or lead down a path to barren spinsterdom. She was like a drug-sniffing police dog, trained
to detect eligible “Sperminators” from a mile out. She showed my Facebook profile to strangers on the street. She loitered at the Columbia Medical School library and handed out my business cards. She catfished men by posing as me on every dating site, including the now defunct website called JMom. What’s JMom, you ask? Why, it was a dating service for Jewish mothers to connect with other neurotic Jewish mothers looking to find a mate for their child.

One weekend, I invited a few friends from college to my parents’ home in New Jersey, and my friend Jacob stabbed me right in the back. He broke the cardinal rule of the fellowship of children born to neurotic Jewish mothers: Never mention a wedding in the presence of a Crazy Jewish Mom, especially if her child is still single. In fairness to Jacob, my mother was interrogating him about his personal life at the time, but I still think he could have choked back some of the heartfelt delight over his sister’s impending nuptials.
Thanks, Jacob.

“Your sister’s getting married! Ah, your mother must be so thrilled! How did they meet?” My mom glanced
at me, the epic failure she had shot out of her own baby cannon, green with envy over this family’s joy.

“Well, that’s a funny story.” Jacob looked over at me apologetically. His mother and mine are cut from the same cloth, so he knew exactly what was about to happen.

“The Princeton Rabbi introduced them.”

I could see all the gears in my mother’s brain locking into place as he said this. Ivy League. Men. Jewish. Wedding. Babies. Grandspawn. Stealing grandspawn. Grandspawn outfits. Grandspawn elementary school applications.

“THERE’S A PRINCETON RABBI?!” I worried her brain might explode from the sudden flood of dopamine. “And he does matchmaking? Kate, why didn’t you tell me this?” She pounced back on Jacob before I could answer. “How did it happen? Where? When?”

Jacob explained that he became very close to Princeton’s Rabbi Eitan and his wife, Gitty, while we were still in college. When his sister Joanna broke up with her boyfriend, Jacob asked the Rabbi to introduce her to someone.

I’m pretty sure my mom tuned out the rest of his words, because she was already mentally scanning the Vera Wang bridal catalogue. She had a dopey smile glued to her face, and her eyes were glazed over like she was rolling on molly. She snapped back into focus when he stopped talking.

“Can you call the Rabbi for Kate?!”

From then on, my mother’s obsession with JDate and OKCupid shifted to a fixation on the Princeton Rabbi. Jacob had also mentioned that Eitan hosted alumni events in the city all the time, and she made me swear that I would go to each and every one. I attended a few of these happy hours, which were realistically just glorified singles mixers, and braced myself for the subsequent debrief with my mother every time.

When I did not immediately get married and impregnated, she decided to take control of the situation. One day after a conference call at work, I looked down at my phone to find seventeen missed calls and thirty-two text messages from my mother. This, by the way, is an entirely average number of messages to receive from her. Usually, though, this quantity comes in over
the course of an afternoon, not during a quick twenty-minute meeting. I stepped outside to call her, and she answered after half a ring.

“Are you going to the alumni drinks meet-up the Rabbi is hosting tonight?”

“What? How do you know about that?”

“I found the Princeton Rabbi’s Facebook page. We’re friends now. Eitan. He’s fabulous!” Oh no.
This is bad.

“Mother!”

“Oh relax! He loves me, we’ve been chatting all day, and he wants you to come tonight!”
This is very, very bad.
“Hello!? Answer the question!”

Didn’t seem like this was really a question, so much as a command. I was not planning on going. In fact, I had a glass of cabernet, some leftover Thai food, and my current boyfriend, Detective Elliot Stabler, waiting for me at home. I sighed.

“Yes, okay? Yes! I’m going.”

“Good. I told him to introduce you to only the best guys. And you need to go to
all
of the parties he organizes. He told me you only go to
some
of them. He’s
going to tell me when you don’t go, Miss ‘Netflix Is My Husband’ Friedman-Siegel.” Oh good. The Rabbi was informing on me to my own mother.

Now that they were friends, all her Facebook stalking shifted from me to the Princeton Rabbi. I can’t count the number of times she confused the search box with her status update bar and made her Facebook status: “Kim Friedman is Eitan Webb.”

With unfettered access to the Rabbi’s movements, my mother took full advantage. Sometimes I might have thought I was going to spend an evening tweezing ingrown pubic hairs and drinking boxed wine in bed, but I could be wrong. All depended on whether the Rabbi had posted about an event on Facebook that day. One mention of a rooftop mixer, and I’d be sipping overpriced cocktails I couldn’t afford and making forced small talk with strangers for several hours.
Oh, you have four brothers? Wild! We have nothing in common, and I don’t want to talk to you anymore! CAN I GO HOME AND SHAVE MY TOE HAIR NOW?!

After a few months of these Rabbi-sponsored happy hours, my uterus remained empty, and my mom grew
impatient. One evening in late November, she called me after a long day at work.

“You’re still coming home for Hanukkah, right? And you’re bringing your friends?”

“Yes.”

“Perfect. Oooooh! I’m so excited. I have a surprise! You’re not going to believe who’s coming to our Hanukkah party!”

All my hair stood on end; I hadn’t heard her this giddy for some time, and I tried to imagine who our mystery guest could be. Was Broadway diva Ethel Merman back from the dead and coincidentally in southern New Jersey for the holidays? Was Mick Jagger playing Hanukkah parties in an attempt to finally find his “Satisfaction”? Was Hillary Clinton getting a head start on securing the Jewish vote for her 2016 campaign? With my mom, nothing is ever really impossible.

“Who?”

“It’s the Princeton Rabbi and his wife! And they’re staying overnight at our house!!”

Of course they were. Keep your friends close, but keep deeply religious Jewish people who might
introduce your daughter to a nice Jewish boy closer.
Clichés are clichés for a reason.
I’m very fond of Eitan and Gitty and consider them good friends, but having them sleep at our house was complicated in a way my mother failed to consider.

At this point, I think it’s important to note that Rabbi Eitan Webb and his wife, Gitty—again both lovely people—are Hasidic Jews. And as Hasidic Jews, they adhere to very strict Jewish rituals—everything from dietary laws involving separate dishes for milk and meat to rigorous prayer obligations. Not to mention the fact that they cannot touch people of the opposite sex! This was especially challenging for my mother, a woman who once hugged a policeman while he was giving her a ticket.

To illustrate
my
family’s level of religious observation: the last time we went to synagogue was for a Bar Mitzvah in 2002, and our bagel brunches involve serving a giant pile of bacon next to the lox and cream cheese. For those who are unfamiliar with Jewish dietary laws, pork is
the
most forbidden of all the forbidden foods.

My mother made her first Jewish mistake long before the day of the Hanukkah party: she invited them to travel to our home on a
Saturday
afternoon. Another quick Jewy primer for all you gentiles reading this: Some observant Jewish people do not use electricity or drive from Friday night at sundown until the sun sets the following day in observance of the Sabbath.

After that embarrassing faux pas, my mother decided she was going to transform herself into the Shebrew Martha Stewart and our house into a home worthy of the Jewish issue of
Architectural Digest.
On the day of the party, my mom rehearsed conversations with the Princeton Rabbi in her head and sometimes out loud a little bit too.
Oh, you have kids? How great! My daughter wants kids! But she’s alone.

She ordered a laughably enormous spread of food from Bubbie’s, the only kosher restaurant in our neighborhood, hid all the bacon, and even bought six extra menorahs to hammer home what respectable Jewish people we were. And of course, she searched for the perfect, non-pork-contaminated paper dinnerware on which to serve them. All her frantic preparations
that day had the kind of intensity that makes me think her internal monologue was:
If I don’t choose the right paper plate design, my only daughter will die childless and be eaten by a herd of her own cats.

We had a big boisterous group of guests at our house for the party, and she was her usual insane self for our pre-Rabbi dinner at 7 p.m., jabbering about vibrators and the transgender surgeon documentary she was working on at the time. This, of course, included an in-depth description of how plastic surgeons can invert penises and build, and I quote, “lifelike vaginas that are nicer than mine!” The Rabbi and his wife weren’t scheduled to arrive until 9 p.m., because again, they are Hasidic Jewish people who observe the Sabbath and cannot drive until after sundown on Saturdays.

By 8:45, man-made vaginas were a distant memory, and my mother was visibly nervous. I even felt the need to reassure her when they were ten minutes away from our house.

“It’s going to be fine. They’re going to have a great time here!”

“Shoot, maybe we should have waited to eat with
them. Should I have bought new plates and silverware for them? Is paper rude?” Let me translate that:
If you die alone, it’s going to be because I let the Rabbi and his wife eat off paper plates.

“Mom, it’s going to be fine. Breathe. Just remember not to get excited and hug the Rabbi.”

“I FORGOT ABOUT THE HUGGING! Oh my god! This is a disaster! I was going to hug him! Why don’t I just roast a pig in the middle of our living room?!”

When they arrived, my mother was uncharacteristically timid at first. She took Gitty’s coat and elbowed my father until he offered to take the Rabbi’s. I could see my mom silently reminding herself:
Don’t hug the Rabbi. Don’t hug the Rabbi. Don’t hug the Rabbi.

“It’s so great to meet you in person!” She led them over to the dining room table, carefully avoiding the Rabbi’s path. “I hope this is okay. We ordered you food from Bubbie’s, and they promised me they have a strict kosher kitchen, and we only have paper plat—”

Gitty cut my mother off in the middle of her rambling apology. “Oh, Kim! This is perfect, thank you! This is just right.”

Unfortunately, Gitty and Eitan are lovely people, and almost instantly put my mother’s nerves at ease. After that and a few charming jokes from Eitan, my mother’s Shebrew apron was on the floor. She instantly felt like they were family. Hell, inverted schlongs might be back on the table for discussion!

And speaking of penises, at one point she actually said, “I know you’ve cornered the East Coast market on Jewish manmeat, so come on??? Where’s my daughter’s hunky kosher strip steak?!”

All nervous pretense and niceties were gone, and she interrogated them with the sort of frankness usually reserved for the privacy of her own brain.

“Let’s talk turkey here! Kate’s not getting any younger; her eggs are rotting as we speak!”

If you’ve met my mother, you’ll know that the majority of what she says out loud is pretty objectionable. Given how comfortable she felt with the Rabbi and his wife, I’m surprised she didn’t scream, “BRING ME THE CIRCUMCISED SPERMINATORS, RABBI!”

Thankfully, she didn’t, so Gitty and Eitan are still speaking to us. And I’m not really allowed to complain about
any of it, because exactly four days after the Princeton Rabbi and his wife slept over at our house, I met my current boyfriend, Jon, at a Hanukkah party at the Princeton Club of New York. Hosted by who? Rabbi Eitan and Gitty Webb.

So, and I really can’t emphasize this enough: If you force Hasidic Jewish people to sleep in your home, they might find you a hunky kosher strip steak.