Mother, Can You Not? (4 page)

M
ost kids get their first fake ID from a sketchy friend with a connection at the DMV. My first fake ID was handed to me directly by my mom when I was twelve years old. Mind you, it wasn’t so I could start guzzling 40s and chain-smoking Camel Lights. It was all part of her master plan to help me get into an Ivy League college.

When she is passionate about something, my mother is terrifyingly convincing. Under the right circumstances, she could persuade a vegan to dive headfirst into a platter of ribs. And when I was in sixth grade, she had both me and my father convinced that:

How could anything you did as a twelve-year-old impact college admissions, you ask? It probably can’t, but this is my mom’s brain, the same place where a study about trace amounts of carcinogenic material in tap water translated to fifteen years of drinking exclusively bottled water. There was a near divorce whenever my father poured me a glass from the sink.

After a few calls to the top universities (using fake names, so as not to hurt my chances when I would apply
six years later
), my mom identified three extracurriculars that were “hot commodities” for college admissions: tuba, water polo, and crew. Trying to appeal to my artistic nature, she suggested tuba first. What could be cooler than wrapping my body in a giant brass instrument and sentencing myself to ten years of sweating in parades and getting stuck in doorways?

I agreed to try crew, so my mom found a summer
rowing camp at Stanford University for me to attend, but you needed to be fourteen years old in order to enroll. Again, I was twelve, but she signed me up anyway. Screw the rules! This camp was run by actual Stanford coaches! Who knew? Maybe I would even get scouted and recruited for admission! As a lying twelve-year-old.

One morning in the late spring, she woke up the family and herded us into the car for what she described as a “surprise road trip.” The last time she said this, we ended up stranded with a flat tire in Compton. Why? My mother wanted to try her luck at a liquor store that was famous for selling winning lottery tickets.

When she took the Maple Avenue exit from the I-10 freeway, I was relieved and excited. I instantly knew we were on our way to the Santee Alley, a literal alley in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. It is a bustling three-block thoroughfare lined with stores and pop-up stands, hawking everything from bootlegged DVDs to replica handbags to live animals.

“Oh my God, YESSS! Please, please, please, please, please, PLEASE, Mom, can we get a turtle today?!!”

“We’ll see. But first we’re going to get you a fake ID!”

“What?!” My father turned to her in the passenger seat.

“Relax, Michael. Don’t go get a shotgun yet! Your daughter’s not going out clubbing. It’s for the rowing camp she’s going to this summer. They said we need to bring proof of age.”

My mother parked the car in a garage a few blocks away from the alley’s main entrance, and we fought our way through the crowded streets. I’d like to point out here that my mother is a terrible criminal. The alley was a place people went to eat street meat (that usually resulted in diarrhea) and buy knockoff handbags, not a place where terrorists went to buy forged government documents. And what was her master plan? To walk up to random people on the street and ask them if they could sell her a counterfeit birth certificate? That was precisely her plan.

My mother went from vendor to vendor, slowly examining the merchandise at each table until a salesman approached her and tried to sell her the fake Chanel or Prada bag in her hands.

“You like that? That’s best-quality leather. Top quality.”
My mother—again, the world’s least-smooth criminal—made this transition: “Actually, I’m looking for something a little
hotter
?” Each time she said this, the salesman in question gave her a quizzical look. One of them asked, “What you mean? Like, sexy dresses? I do bags, no dresses.” My mother’s criminal shorthand, ripped from movies like
Rush Hour 2
and
Blue Streak,
was not translating to the real world. We were halfway through the seventh iteration of my mom’s illicit routine when it landed.

“…Actually, I’m looking for something a little
hotter
?”

“Okay, mamma, what you need?” A towering West African man nodded at her knowingly.

“I need a fake ID.”

The guy looked her up and down. “You a cop? What you need a fake ID for? You look forty!” My mother pulled the man into a hug.

“Forty! Honey, thank you! Michael, did you hear that? This guy thinks I look forty!” My dad rolled his eyes, and my mom pointed at me. “It’s not for me, it’s for my daughter.”

“All right, cool mamma!” The guy grinned. “Okay, okay. Follow me.”

He led us through throngs of people in the crowded alley to a desolate, boarded-up warehouse fifteen blocks away. I grabbed my mother’s arm.

“Mom, this feels sketchy. Maybe we should go back.”

“Oh my God, what do you think is gonna happen? You’re gonna get murdered?”
I mean, maybe. Yeah.
“You need to stop watching
Law & Order: SVU.
Mamma’s here. I’ll kill anyone who looks at you the wrong way.”

My dad, who was no longer surprised by any of my mother’s schemes, just shrugged and told me not to worry. The salesman banged three times on the entrance to the warehouse and shouted something in a language I couldn’t understand. After a few moments, the door swung open and an old wrinkled woman was glaring at us from her perch on a rickety stool. She took us in and nodded, opening the door just wide enough for us to pass.

We followed the man into an enormous warehouse, an open space at least five stories high. Every surface was covered in counterfeit designer handbags. It
looked like a Technicolor shrine to the Almighty Purse. My mother stopped short, having arrived in her version of heaven, and my dad groaned.

“Oh my God! Look at these bags!” She was purse-gasming.

After some intense haggling, my mother followed the salesman into an office in the back of the warehouse, clutching two replica Chanel bags. She motioned for us to hurry. As we entered, an Asian man with a bright blond mohawk looked up at us from his desk. My mother smiled.

“Hi, we need identification for my daughter here.”

The man looked over at my gawky twelve-year-old frame and my oily face with an angry whitehead begging to be popped on my chin.

“Nobody’s gonna believe that girl’s twenty-one!”

“No, no…we need a birth certificate or a passport or something. It should say she’s fourteen.”

“Uh, we don’t do that shit here. We make fakes for like clubs and shit.” The guy looked at her like she was smoking the crystal meth that they also didn’t sell. Because again, these people were replica-handbag
salesmen,
not
terrorist document forgers on an NSA watch list. My mother paused.

“You know what? Just give her a driver’s license. We’ll make her look sixteen.”

“Okay, I’ll take your money!” He laughed and rose from the desk, grabbing his camera. He motioned for me to stand up against the smudged white backdrop. “Okay, smile!” I did, revealing a metallic smorgasbord, and the man physically recoiled. “Okay, don’t smile.”

When we showed up at Stanford for crew camp a few weeks later, my braces were off, my mother had painted my face in dramatic makeup, and she dressed me in platform shoes. At the registration desk she offered, “Kate just turned sixteen! Always looked young for her age. She hates it now, but let me tell you, she’ll be happy about it when she’s pushing forty!”

The college student manning the check-in table never even asked us to provide ID and just trusted that I was a very tiny sixteen-year-old girl with no breasts and poor makeup-application skills. She handed me my registration packet and said with a smile, “Welcome to Stanford.”

M
y mother takes special occasions as seriously as Paula Deen takes butter. Every Thanksgiving, she hosts a fleet of forty relatives at our house, serving dinner on her favorite (NOT dishwasher-safe) cranberry Spode china. My mom barely allows people to eat off these dishes, so after dinner she chases helpful guests out of the kitchen and hand-washes over two hundred individual pieces of china. Usually until 4 a.m.

Birthdays are no different. When I turned three, she hired a children’s party entertainer to come to our beach bash as Ariel from
The Little Mermaid.
She convinced this poor actress to dunk herself in the ocean (in January) before walking up to the party from the sand. You know, to make it authentic for the three-year-olds. For Hanukkah, she lights all ten of our menorahs and invites her guests to bring their own. By the eighth night every year, we have burned through a
minimum of five hundred candles and have set off at least one fire alarm. It’s a miracle we haven’t burned down the house.

And these are just regular old holidays that happen every year! Can you imagine how she might handle a once-in-a-lifetime celebration like, I don’t know, a wedding? I can! Because she has already floated the following ideas about my hypothetical nuptials:

Yeah. I’m pretty terrified about getting married.

Thankfully, she hasn’t had too many once-in-a-lifetime celebrations to plan thus far, though there have been a few. And this brings me to my mother’s handling of my first menstrual cycle.

In fifth grade, my best friend, Molly, told me she had gotten her period, and I was incredibly jealous. Sixth grade passed with Aunt Flo visiting every single girl in my class but me, and I was riddled with tampon envy.
As seventh grade started to zoom by, and my underwear remained spotless, I got angry.
Come on, uterus, get your shit together!
I wanted so badly to reach that milestone, to join in on the fun, complaining with the rest of the girls about feminine products and cramps. And who knew? Maybe my boobs would come in too.

I was almost fourteen when I dropped my pants in the bathroom and found a little red stain in my underwear. In all of my hot-pink fantasies about girl talk and Midol, I had glossed over the blood and hadn’t even considered that I might be alone, in a public restroom, when I got my period for the first time. I was frightened and embarrassed.

The bathroom was at Renaissance Kids, where I was getting extra algebra help after school. I shoved some toilet paper between my legs and waddled back over to the classroom, where the instructor, Anna, was scribbling an equation on the whiteboard. I cracked open the door. “Excuse me, Anna? Can I talk to you for a second? Um, in private?” My cheeks must have been quite pink, because she looked concerned as she walked with me to the back of the office. I mumbled that I had
gotten my period and asked her to call my mom, while my classmates undoubtedly strained to hear what exciting drama was afoot.

They didn’t have to strain terribly hard though, because my mother was still in the parking lot and came running back into the office when Anna called. She swung open the door and bounded toward me with her arms open wide. “Ah! She’s a woman!” I was expecting a hug, but she slapped me across the face (more of a tap), and shouted, “MAZEL TOV!”

For those of you who are not Jewish, my mother was not having a psychotic break or rehearsing for a role in a dramatic telenovela. She was practicing a Jewish tradition called “The Menstrual Slap.” It’s not exactly clear where this tradition comes from or why it’s done, but I’ve heard explanations that range from it being “a woman’s warning to guard her gates against premarital entry” to a reminder that “a woman’s life is filled with pain.” Exactly what a hormonal teenage girl needs to hear.
You think Jill McCarthy making fun of your zits is bad? Well, wait until childbirth.

“I’m so excited! My little girl is a woman! But don’t
think that means it’s time to start letting boys stick their tongues down your throat!”

“Shh! Mother!” Some of the kids from my classroom down the hall were giggling. I grabbed my backpack. “Okay, can we go now?”

“Who do you think we are, the Rockefellers? I’m paying seventy-five dollars for this class!” She rustled around in her bag for a moment and thrust a tampon in my face. “Here, shove this up your hooha, and get back in there!”

“Mom, I don’t know how!”

“Relax, I’ll show you.” She shooed me back into the bathroom.

After a few minutes, including a live demonstration, I figured out the tampon and was back in class, trying to concentrate on algebraic functions but stressing about whether or not I was leaking onto my chair. As soon as the hour expired, I rushed out to the car where my mother was waiting.

“So, how do you feel?”

“I don’t know. The same.” I squirmed. I was actually feeling terrible. I’m not sure if it was the blood (the
sight always makes me pass out), the concern about humiliating myself with a period stain at school one day, or the larger realization that I was now capable of growing another human, but I was anxious.
*

“You’re fine for another hour or so; we’ll practice putting another one in when we get to the house. SEAT-BELT!”

“Okay, okay. Hurry. I want to go home.”

“Hold your horses! I’m going to stop at CVS and pick up some more tampons. I don’t know if I have enough at the house for both of us
big fertile women
!”

We walked to the tampon aisle, and I grabbed a box of the Tampax Pearls that I had seen in all my friends’ bathrooms. My mother swatted at my hand. “Not so fast, Miss Kate!” She glanced around and flagged a middle-aged pharmacy employee wearing a CVS white coat. “Oh, excuse me, sir?”

“Can I help you?” The man paused, and walked over to us.

“Yes, thank you! My daughter just got her period,
and I’m wondering if there is a specific brand of tampons that’s better suited for young girls? Maybe something organic?” She smiled at him, and I cringed.

“Standard tampons should be just fine. You could start out with slim ones, but there’s no reason to unless she experiences discomfort with the regular size.”

“You tell us, Kate, did the one you put in earlier hurt?” My mouth fell open, and I headed back out to the car without responding. As I sped down the feminine products aisle, my mom turned back to the man. “I guess that’s a no!”

I waited, fuming in the car, but as milestones with my mother go, it could have been far worse. In fact, it had been worse. During the summer before seventh grade, after months of pleading, she finally agreed to buy me my first bra (that I in no way needed). I imagined we’d go somewhere fun and sexy like Victoria’s Secret. Instead, she took me to a little hole-in-the-wall bra shop at a suburban strip mall. The centerpiece of the store was an aging, borderline-obese man. His voice was hoarse from years of cigarettes, and he would shout out his (always accurate) estimation of your bra size when
you walked in the door. As I entered, he barked, “Get those mosquito bites outta here!” I didn’t have long to feel embarrassed though, because a transgender woman came in right after me, and the man screamed, “Thirty-eight double D! Chanel, you finally got the titties put in! It’s about time…one more Wonderbra, and I woulda shoved those implants in myself!”

So this was better.

By the time we arrived home, the sun had set. I noticed that my dad’s car was missing from the driveway, and the lights were off in our house.

“Where’s Dad?”

“The market? Who knows! Shoot, I’ve gotta pee!” She closed the car door and rushed ahead toward the house. “Come to my bathroom. We can change your tampon after I pee!” I glanced around the neighborhood, thankful that no one was out walking a dog or getting their mail.

As the front door swung open, the lights flipped on, and Shania Twain’s voice was singing, “Man! I feel like a woman!” My mother was dancing in front of the door, wearing a bright red party hat and swinging tampons
by their strings. My dad was standing between a bouquet of crimson balloons and the dining room table, smiling uncomfortably. I looked around, and the entire house was decorated for a “period party.” There were tampons taped to walls, boxes of panty liners, and Midol in a cute little basket on the coffee table. Red dots of glitter were sprinkled over every surface, and cherry-colored streamers were hung all over the room.

My mother danced over to me, strapped a party hat on my head, and hung a silky red sash across my body.

“Oh my GOD! Mom, you told Dad!?” I shouted over the music.

“Oh relax, it’s just your father!” She shrugged, uninterested in my humiliation.

“How did you even do this?”

“I’ve had these decorations since you were in the third grade. Took you long enough!” She blew a glittering party horn in my face. Apparently, my mother had been planning my period party for years, with different contingency plans for different “period getting” scenarios. We walked over to my dad, who had thrown together this mortifying little event in her absence.

“So, Michael! Tell her what’s for dinner!” He blushed and, after a quick smack on the shoulder, recited the period-themed menu. It included clams in red sauce. She couldn’t resist, adding, “And we got
red
velvet cake for dessert! But easy on the cake, honey. Sticks directly on the hips. Welcome to womanhood.”

As always, my mother’s enthusiasm was as contagious as the flu. By the time we wrapped up the dance party to her “girl power” CD and sat down for dinner, I was fully infected. All my anxiety about tampons and birthing babies was gone; even my father was singing along with us to
Gypsy’
s “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” by the end of the night. And this is one of the things I love most about my mother: she knows just how to make me smile, and exactly when I need to the most. That said, while it’s wonderful to know my mom will be there for me when I have my inevitable wedding-day anxiety attack, I really hope she doesn’t try to sneak “cherry popping” sundaes onto the menu. Let’s be real: that ship has sailed.