So Sorry, What Was That?
Okay so let’s paint the scene….1980 something - suburban faux Frank Lloyd Wright wanting to be a bungalow wanting to be contemporary was spruced up and ready for a wedding!! Dad, 60, married woman, 30, and 12 year old slowly inched her way down steps holding a delicate bouquet of peach roses. Between steps tween looked around the room at shocked, numb, bored, relieved and maybe some happy guests all the while thinking, ‘Okay, cool,cool,cool,cool,cool, this will be fine.’
Kind of like, and VERY unlike a Jewish wedding, instead of swirling around the bride and groom asking when the baby will be coming people started whispering at me, around me, literally over me, ”Soooooo do YOU think she should call (insert bride’s name here) mom?” “Maybe it would be best if you called her mom.” “I bet she’d like it if you called her mom.” “You will feel better and miss your mom less if you call her mom.” “When will you decide if you will call her mom?”
You get the picture.
It lasted a while.
The thought and idea went in and out of my head and heart like a tornado. Sometimes I wanted to run in the house after school and yell from the rooftops, ‘MOMMMMMM I’m home! Please make me strawberry covered cupcakes and then we can laugh about love and boys and have a pillow fight.’ Sometimes I came home and ran to my room and hid in my closet wondering if when I opened my closet door the idea would disappear, and I’d be in Narnia eating Turkish Delights riding atop Aslan in a cape - FAR away from Wisconsin. My relationship with this woman and this nuptial was complicated; sometimes I thought she wanted to eat me or lose me in a grocery store and sometimes I thought she wanted to hairspray my bangs and gently put her fingers through the Finesse and say, “Jess, let’s go shopping.”
I did want my pain to go away; I did want to start over; I did want a mom.
So I did it.
I came home from school one day, turned a two minute walk up my driveway into a thirty minute unnecessary nature hike, opened the door and proclaimed, “I am home, MOM.”
Crickets. Not the bugs.
I turned on my heels, ran back down the driveway and decided to try again. But you can’t go backwards. On so many levels in life we simply can not go backwards.
I recently rewatched an episode from Everybody Loves Raymond called Call Me Mom. Anybody who knows me knows I am, for whatever reason and many, obsessed with this show. I have probably seen this episode a hundred times; alas, this particular episode resonated with me as if I saw it for the first time.
For review, Deborah wants Ray to call her mom, Lois, ‘mom’ so he “throws her a bone” and gives it a shot. Marie, Ray’s mom, overhears Ray calling Lois ‘mom’ so of course, in her passive aggressive Magnum Opus lets Ray know this is unsatisfactory. Ray stops calling Lois ‘mom’ and Deborah gets upset. Then Ray takes reverse psychology to a higher level and suggests that if Deborah calls Marie ‘mom’ everyone will live in peace and harmony and bond in family bliss. Deborah gathers her courage and walks across the street to make her move and Marie responds to Deborah’s plight with a shocked and confused, “So sorry, what was that?” Followed by a chilling, “Oh, you don’t have to do that dear.”
YIKES
I empathize.
What was complicated for me was surely complicated for (insert name of new step-mom here). I understand that now; I did not understand that back then. What I also could not understand was how I let so many people influence my words and actions when our moment and our life was no one else’s business. My gut had said no, not the right time; my tongue was on a mission to help others feel better about me being in a complicated situation.
The New Year is upon us. This time of year makes many of us want to do better, make changes, erase wrongs and rewrite the rights. New Year’s Eve sidles up right next to a day that shares my mother’s yahrzeit and our wedding anniversary. Almost 22 years ago my cowboy and I decided to marry on a day that held a lot. We can never go backwards, though we can add on, move ahead and build new dreams while at the same time remembering and moving on from despair.
Drown out the whispering and make your own win! It’s nobody’s business!
Happy New Year xo
Thank you to my editor, Leila Loeb.
(Insert editor’s name) can definitely call me MOM!
