Dispatches from the Chubette Department
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My mother bragged about me to anyone who would listen. But in reality, she didn’t see me at all.
It’s impossible to say where in my maternal line, exactly, things went wrong. In a family obsessed with genealogy, though, the stories go way back. My grandmother — a petite woman who knitted bright scarves for me and bought Froot Loops as a treat when I visited — once flushed my grandfather’s ashes down the toilet in a fit of rage a few years after his death. Her own father, a prominent pediatric vision researcher, was chilly and distant, but perhaps it was no wonder. His mother, my great-great-grandmother, allegedly used to lock him in a closet when her gentleman callers visited.
With a family history like mine, I’m lucky to live in a time when therapists and psychiatric drugs are reasonably accessible. Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir of atypical depression, came out the year I graduated from high school. But the stigma against mental health treatment lingered far longer, even for self-styled intellectuals like my parents, immersed in a world in which going to therapy for one’s neuroses was the source of endless comedy. “It’s amazing you’re not a serial killer,” a friend has said to me, more than once, when I’ve recounted some childhood memory of my mother.
My stories about her go way back, too. Most center around her violent temper, but many are just inexplicable or confounding, actions driven by reasoning I could not begin to understand. Delusions of reference: it means “the phenomenon of an individual experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance.” Learning this term felt revelatory, as if I had finally discovered a unified field theory of my mother.
But I have long felt uneasy about reducing her to the qualities that estranged me from her. Especially after my relationship with my father broke down, maintaining a connection with my mother felt like a measure of my own humanity: I can be forgiving, I can be magnanimous, I can demonstrate my belief that difficult people are still worthy of love. People are more than one thing, and few relationships are more complex than the one between a mother and daughter.
In White Lotus, Jennifer Coolidge gives an incredible performance as Tanya McQuoid, a wealthy woman determined to scatter her late mother’s ashes on the ocean during a sunset boat ride. “My mother, she had a beautiful house in Carmel,” she begins. “And she tried very, very hard to be a really good mother.” But soon it takes a turn: “She had borderline personality disorder … and she was cruel. She was very, very cruel.… My mother told me I would never be a ballerina, and that was when I was skinny. She just couldn’t handle her jealousy. She had to take me down. And what’s weird is that I miss my mother, even though she was a big jerk!”
Sure, my own mother had been cruel. Her physical violence could be explosive, and she would hiss terrible things at me when she was angry, which was often. But she could also be fiercely protective, and effusively proud of me, and she was diligent in taking me to every enrichment class I ever wanted to go to. She read to me and took me to the library. Those things were evidence of love, weren’t they?
The year I was eight, in the summer of 1984, my family moved from suburban Maryland to rural Bavaria, in what was then West Germany. It was only for the academic year; my father, a lecturer at the local university, had landed a position teaching on an army base. But he wanted an authentic experience, which meant that we would shun life on base and live among the locals. This was an adventure I had eagerly anticipated, but of course, I had no idea what we were getting into.
Plucked out of an American condo development adjacent to a strip mall and dropped into the German countryside, I was completely disoriented. The fields were vast and open, the late-summer air smelled like manure, and sonic booms from fighter jets taking off from the air base frequently shook the silence. Back at home, I was an excellent reader and a good writer, with a vocabulary that impressed adults. In my new school in the village, I struggled to express the most basic ideas, was baffled by German cursive, and, when called upon to read aloud by the teacher, found myself suddenly illiterate.
But that wasn’t even the half of it. I couldn’t read music, or understand the metric system, or stop my new fountain pen from covering my hand with blobs of royal blue ink. I couldn’t understand the games in PE. And then there was religion class — an ordinary part of the school day for every German student, but for a Jewish kid who didn’t know the Holy Family from a hole in the ground, there were few experiences more foreign than drawing the Virgin Mary on a donkey, guided by a cross-like star.
Gradually, though, I fell in love. The songs we sang in school made me feel one with my classmates and gave me a touchstone for the grammar of the new language. The countryside worked its magic on me, and though I would soon leave that strange and bucolic little corner of the world, it would still live vividly in my heart decades later. In 2009, I wrote a novel, The Kingdom of Childhood, rich with flashback scenes to the protagonist’s childhood in that very same Bavarian village:
When they first moved into the home, the garden was in full bloom: bright red poppies, purple globes of thistle, delicate and poisonous cups of foxglove, bleeding heart blossoms hanging on a stalk like a string of predictions. Blueberries burst ripe on the bushes, and Judy liked to eat them as she played, imagining herself to be a caveman’s child traveling through a wild land never before seen by human beings. Her own Eden, a child’s Eden with no lurking specter of defilement, no serpent watching her; she slipped the slender cups of foxglove over her fingers, licked the backs of poppy and nasturtium petals to make designs on her bare legs. Her sandals slouched in the dirt beside the hens-and-chicks that lined the rock garden, the plants swollen with rain and primeval as her fantasies.
In the novel, young Judy’s father is an American professor who has taken a job teaching at an army base. Her mother, distant and disinterested, is experiencing a slow mental breakdown. But Christmas is approaching, and Judy is experiencing epiphanies of beauty and hints of a spiritual awakening in her new environment, at least for the moment:
She sang the rough German hymns that sounded to her ears like the original language of humanity, like cavechildren gathered on a solstice dawn waiting for a razor of light to appear between two tall stones. Because who could say there wasn’t a Sun God? Who could call it primitive to believe, long ago, one man might have brought light into a dark world?
Her mother’s breakdown, a relatively vague blend of OCD and catatonia, is one of the weaker elements of the story — in retrospect, probably because I was choosing her symptoms carefully to avoid my own mother recognizing herself in the character. Still, it serves its function: the downward spiral fills Judy with unease and loneliness, leaves her without support or guidance, and sets in motion a chain of events that will scar her psyche for a lifetime — making her, ultimately, the antagonist of her own story.
When the novel first came out, in 2011, to some fanfare, my mother was the person I was most excited to give it to. I had long since cut off all contact with my father, and my younger sister, Heidi, had died years earlier, making my mother the only person in the world who would read those Germany scenes and recognize what I was describing. Perhaps especially since my relationship with her had always been fraught, I felt that sharing those scenes with her would strengthen our bond; we would, together, be looking at a world only we had inhabited, and one that was now lost to time. They were an acknowledgment, as well, of how much I remembered and appreciated from a year that must have been hard for her, too.
Once I knew she had read it, I eagerly sought her feedback. She praised my writing and said she had enjoyed the story — “except for the Germany parts,” she added. “I didn’t really connect with those. But I thought the rest of it was very good.”
Seriously? I thought. Even after I pointed out to her that those scenes were set in our very house, in our very garden, she shrugged it off. But, setting my disappointment aside, I knew it wasn’t my place to dictate what memories should matter to her or how she had processed them. She had been an adult, after all; different things would have made an impression on her than the ones that stuck with an eight-year-old kid.
My mother was a writer, too. All my life she had written novels, though she never found any success with them, a fact which frustrated her endlessly. She was talented, but her volatile temperament and very thin skin made the inevitable rejections impossible to endure. When something didn’t go well for her, she would explode, sending shrapnel of blame everywhere. Conspiracies were aligning against her. She was owed recognition that was being denied to her. Once, when I vented to my partner about my most recent grueling interaction with her, he asked why I kept her in my life.
“Because she’s my mother,” I told him. “And I know she loves me.”
With an apologetic wince, he said, “I’m not sure there’s much room in her head for anyone but herself.”
But he didn’t know her. Even after nearly four years together, I had never introduced them. Her casual racism, mixed with insistence about her credentials as a progressive, made me feel protective of him and embarrassed at what she might say or even think. She looped me into her emails with her siblings, where she once went on a long rant, clearly attempting to be witty, about her withering disdain for overweight people. That didn’t help.
“How did you come from such an awful person?” asked the same friend who had congratulated me on not becoming a serial killer.
She could be awful, but she loved me. She was proud of me. She had always bragged about me, all my life, to anyone who would listen: how smart I was, how advanced in reading, how successful at writing. She couldn’t always help the way she was, and besides, to shun someone who loved me felt cruel.
With her, though, it had always been difficult to figure out where the mental illness ended and her genuine personality began. One day, in an effort to get adulation for her writing, she exploited her connection to me in a way that could have cost me a job contract. I told her that wasn’t okay, but she was angry and unrepentant. “I don’t need to apologize again,” she told me, though I had never asked her to apologize in the first place. “God heard me the first time.” Then, when I stopped responding to her texts, she sent the police to my house in the middle of the night, claiming she was concerned about me.
I decided it was time for a break.
I switched to sending her cards for birthdays and holidays, but otherwise stopped calling her. I asked her siblings to alert me to any emergencies, but otherwise, to consider me off duty for a while. They understood.
Months into that break, I spontaneously came across an unexpected treasure: a small stack of letters she had sent to my paternal grandmother during that year we lived overseas. These letters must have come into my possession after my grandmother’s death, and I had never taken notice of them before. I took them from their envelopes with great anticipation. After the disappointment of her reaction to my novel, I could finally get a glimpse of that year through my mother’s eyes.
In the first one, written that December, she writes that we live in “the most beautiful storybook town.” Then she briefly mentions her children: “Heidi hates the cold. She’s such a skinny kid. I don’t think she has any fat to protect her. Rebecca is chubby, and I guess the fat keeps her nice and warm.”
Gee, thanks, Mom, I thought. It was a weird comment; I was an average-sized kid, and even my cruelest peers had never commented on my weight. But my grandmother was overweight, so maybe, in my mother’s socially awkward way, she thought she was paying her mother-in-law an indirect compliment.
The next letter, a description of her own hobbies, says nothing about my sister and I or our travels. Then, in the third, she returns to the subject of her children. “I think Becky has your genes,” she begins. “She’s a whole lot like you. She’s sturdy, intelligent, and a healthy eater.” From there, it doesn’t get any better:
Sometimes she thinks she should go on a diet, but I say no child should ever diet. We do find it hard to fit her in clothes. She’s as large around as a young teenager, but her legs are too short for teen clothes. When I was a girl, every store had a “chubette” department, but you can’t find them anymore. People in America must be pretending we don’t have chubby children.
Anyway, I think she’ll get her growth spurt in a couple of years and then she will probably get slim. Everyone tells me this, anyway. I tell her now that chubby is cute. She’s unconvinced.
Heidi, though, is five years old and still wears a size 2. She’s the tiniest little thing in her school. So I have to really search for clothes that will fit a chubby little girl and a little midget.
The dismay I felt wasn’t about my mother body-shaming me — at least, not exactly. Lots of mothers in the 1980s were weight-obsessed. It was about the fact that, where I was concerned, she could think of nothing else to say.
Looking down at her familiar handwriting, I could only think of all the other things that were going on in my life over the months in which those letters were written. Our magical visit to the Christkindlmarkt, where I bought a tiny wooden hedgehog that still sits on a shelf in my living room. My first sledding excursion with my third-grade class, so exhilarating that it would remain etched in my memory forever. The new village we had moved to, bounded by tall stone gates, full of fascinating cobbled streets to explore. The library on base where I once got so many books that I couldn’t carry them all down the stairs, and I cried.
I wouldn’t have expected my mother to mention these specific things. But surely there were other things. Something other than my weight.
The fourth envelope to my grandmother contained a thank-you letter I had written to her myself.
Dear Gramma, Thanks for the Pegasus and baby doll. I had no idea that you knew I was interested in myths and legands. Now I have a Unicorn and a Pegasus. Every night (when he’s home) Dad reads me storys from a library book: Walt Disney: Myths and Legands. Thanks a lot for everything!
I had forgotten about how fascinated I was with Greek mythology. See, I thought snarkily, I did have an interest besides eating.
That evening, I showed the letters to my partner. “I don’t get it,” I said. “We were traveling all over Europe! I was memorizing poetry, and making crafts, and learning German! I have so many memories from that winter. And in three different letters, this is the only thing she can think of to say about me?”
He scrunched up his face. “It’s not about you,” he explained. “You were an accessory for her to show off so other people could admire her. And that accessory — it was getting a little bit fat.”
I thought about her glowing pride in me — and how, even when she was at her meanest to me growing up, she never hesitated to tell others how great I was. I had always drawn a clear demarcation between these things: the verbal and physical violence were manifestations of her disordered impulse control, while the pride was the side of her that was my real mom, the one who thought the world of her daughter. But suddenly, for the first time, all that bragging didn’t seem like clear evidence of love.
I felt pride in my own kids, and so I thought I understood her. But maybe that had been a mistake. I was immensely proud of my kids for achieving the things they had set out to accomplish, doing hard work to magnify their talents, making the most of their intrinsic potential. To some degree it might reflect on me, but overwhelmingly, it reflected on them.
But to my mother, maybe my achievements were less my own than they were hers by proxy. It was why she had reacted so indignantly when I told her it was wrong to endanger my job in a bid to get attention for her writing. What was the point of my job, anyway, if it couldn’t elevate her?
On that sliding scale between the violence and the pride, there really was no me at all. Within that scale, the kid who loved myths and legends did not exist — only the shell of me, annoying her or reflecting well on her. Needing to be silenced or amplified, depending on her own needs.
It’s not my place to define what love is to different people, what makes it sufficient or insufficient, genuine or false. I can’t speak for my mother about what she actually feels toward me or anybody else. But I can say this: the mother each of us yearns for and deserves is one who wants her child to be happy in the world, to be at peace, to use their time on earth to its fullest. It’s fair for us to want that. I would go so far as to say it’s our birthright.
Nature didn’t give me that kind of mother. But, by backing away from the relationship, I could take it for myself. Sending her cards on holidays and birthdays, rather than engaging with her in ways that demoralize and depress and exhaust me, is what brings me greater happiness and peace and better use of my time on earth. And I have to believe that’s what she actually wants for me — the part of her that cares about me as an individual person, not as a way for her to gain others’ admiration. It’s in there somewhere.
And if it isn’t? Well. Like every child of a parent with an unmanaged mental illness, I’ve had to accept the limits of what I can do, legally and emotionally, to deal with the situation. And like every child of a parent who can be just plain mean, I’ve had to learn to set boundaries to protect my heart. This is something people with nicer or healthier parents don’t understand. She’s your mother, they’ll say. You owe your life to her. As if the goal of parenting is not to build children into healthy, kind, independent adults, but to create people who are indebted to you.
Everything I have given to my children, I have given freely. My goal is not to demand payment from my kids on a loan they never asked for, but to be the kind of person they want to come back to. I spent a lot of time and effort teaching them how they deserve to be treated by others: with respect, with kindness, with fairness. If I want them to spend time with me, I need to meet that standard myself.
Because I’m not my mother or my grandmother or my great-great-grandmother. Every generation of family is an opportunity to set new patterns in motion. In my family, this is how we do things now. And I like this way a lot better.
