Biopsychology

Biopsychologists believe the circuitry of a child’s brain is profoundly influenced by the child’s experiences as an infant who senses the primary caregiver’s emotional state at every turn. This could explains a great deal. I think Mama was at least mildly depressed throughout her life, and know for sure that she very timid, very ill at ease in the world. I remember being around four years old and walking from our apartment down to the communal garage. Mama was very disturbed by my singing, and not for the reason those few I am able to strongarm into listening to my music these days are disturbed, but because of her all-purpose dread. When I asked what was wrong,  she hissed, “Someone’s going to hear us!” as though that were a terrifying prospect. I suspect this was a carryover from her own childhood, when her very poor family had to abandon rented premises under cover of darkness to avoid being hassled for overdue rent. Whatever it was, it made a real impression on me, and I went into the world pretty sure that someone or something was intent on doing me harm. 

My being weak and vulnerable worked well for her, as it made me more dependent on, and thus closer to her. Not for a millisecond do I doubt that she adored me, nor do I imagine that it even occurred to her that she was grooming me to be a weakling. I didn’t realise myself until I was two decades and more into adulthood. Pop had a stroke, and Mama. had exiled him (with the tacit complicity that was his iconic trait in their marriage) to a convalescent hospital from which she and I picked him up for a day out one Sunday when I was visiting from northern California. Reaching our destination, I went to get his wheelchair out of the trunk. Mama was aghast. “Get someone to help you with that!” she implored me. I wasn’t a healthy 45-year-old man who worked out on Nautlius machines six days a week, but a helpless little boy, perpetually dependent on the kindness of strangers. 

That long-delayed realisation felt like a hard punch in the face. The floodgates opened as I realised what she’d (unwittingly!) done to me, as it occurred to me that a million humiliations I’d suffered as a reflexively submissive schoolboy were traceable back to her parenting. I began treating her as disdainfully as she’d always treated my dad. To my eternal shame, I did so in front of my little girl. And by reflexively refusing to exercise not only due caution, but also the hypercaution I’d grown up being told were necessary for my survival, I put her, myself, and my little girl in jeopardy on one horrible occasion.

Mama had invited me and my daughter to accompany her Back East to visit my sister, then living in Rhode Island and working in Boston. I did all the driving. One afternoon, determined not to stop and ask for directions, as Mama kept imploring me to do, I had to drive us across tracks in the middle of Boston down which a train was coming. If our rental car had stalled, we and who knows how many train passengers would have been killed or injured horribly. Twenty-five years after the fact, I continue to have nightmares about that. You’re the first person I’ve ever told about it.

Some months later, Mama came up to San Francisco to see me and her granddaughter, and I was late to SFO to pick her up. I can picture Mama, who was intimidated by everyone and everything, being absolutely terrified, imagining we wouldn’t turn up for her. And then what would she do, 400 miles from home, surrounded by complete strangers? (There were no mere strangers in Mama’s world, just as there was no darkness. There were complete strangers and pitch darkness.) I’ve been late around three times in my life. Most psychologists believe that such mistakes are instances of the subconscious grabbing the steering wheel for a minute.

What a perfect little bastard I was.

Of course, I was just warming up at that point. I persuaded Mama to get a computer, thinking she might enjoy looking up old classmates and relatives. She had no aptitude for it, and I made no secret of my exasperation, this in front of my daughter, until Mama insisted on my daughter having it. Shame on me. She would take us to dinner on Friday evenings when I drove up to Santa Rosa to pick my daughter up after school. I was snide at my best and contemptuous at my worst, as far from gracious as Mercury is from Neptune. Shame on me.

After my first marriage disssolved, and I left my wonderful job as a word processor at San Francisco’s biggest ultraconsrvative law firm for fear that either I or one of the self-delighted young dickhead attorneys whose words it was my onus to process would go out a 21st story window some afternoon. Dr. Steven B. Jacobson, who’d treated me at Kaiser when I had medical insurance, kindly consented to keep seeing me in spite of my having ceased to have insurance, and living hand to mouth. He was an adult child of alcoholics, and specialised in the treatment of others like himself. He believed that my childhood would have been distinguishable from his other patients’ only by virtue of Mama and Pop being teetotal. He told me that I wouldn’t begin to truly heal until I had confronted both my parents  and told them how I’d come to realise they’d damaged me.

Years before, when I signed up for free psychotherapy at the university I attended, my dad had been horrified. Men of his generation scorned psychotherapy. And yet when I bared my soul to and raged at him, he apologised immediately, from the heart, not glibly, astonishing me. Mama, who believed psychotherapy to be a great thing, was the one who couldn’t bear to hear what I had to say, and then tried to refute it. How could I have had the tortured childhood I was claiming when I’d always received such good grades at school? I was speechless.

One Friday evening when my daughter and I arrived to pick Mama up at her assisted living residence, at which I never dined with her, even though it would have made her proud (go figure!), she greeted. us in slacks that were, as ever, meticulously pressed, but also noticeably stained. In 49 years, I’d never seen Mama with a hair out of place, let alone stained clothing. That her dementia was accelerating was unmistakable.

Did I turn over a new leaf and replace the snideness and contempt with kindness and patience? Of course, I didn’t. I became more monstrous. “What do you mean?” I would roar at her, “you didn’t take your fucking [oh, yes, that] medication?” Brave Johnny terrorising a cowering 80-year-old woman to get back at her from crimes she didn’t realise she’d committed 55 years before. No statute of limitations for brave Johnny!

My sister acknowledged it was her turn to deal with Mama, who prepared to relocate to the Midwest, where Sis had moved. I drove them to the airport. Mama looked at me with bruised incredulity. Was I going to play the heartless, sneering bastard until her and my sister’s flight was called? You bet I was, being pretty sure if I didn’t, I’d disintegrate. If I started to cry at the prospect of never seeing her again, and in acknowledgment of the monster I’d been, how would I ever manage to stop?

Celia

In the first months of my life, my parents and I lived in DC with Pop’s parents. Mama quickly came to loathe her mother-in-law, a native of Riga, Latvia, who made spaghetti by emptying a bottle of ketchup into a big bowl of what at the time were called noodles, stirring, and serving. At the dinner table of my dad’s early years, anyone who wanted a second helping of something just reached in with the fork he or she had been putting food into his own mouth with. Mama found this disgusting, and during her and Pop’s marriage, she would shrike loudly enough to be heard back in her native Minneapolis when Pop reverted to the ways of his own childhood home and helped himself to more of something with his own fork. I would be forbidden to have any more of whatever it was.

Where Mama’s hypergentility came from was anyone’s guess, in her own childhood, her family had been so poor that they’d had to sneak out of rented premises they couldn’t afford to pay for under cover of darkness, and Mama couldn’t bathe as biology might have preferred. One of the defining moments of her childhood was of being sent home from school for smelling. In adulthood, she would become fascistically fastidious.

Her mother, whom I knew as Gram and the world knew as Celia Kaufman, had grown up in Odessa, Ukraine, which her family had fled for fear of being raped or incinerated in a pogrom. For reasons that I’d love to know, and will never find out, she and her young husband, a fellow refugee from Ukraine, relocated to Minneapolis, where Hubby took to being carried home drunk and bloodied. They had four children — my mother, her sister Doris, her brother Marty, and a little boy whose death at a few months old was another defining moment of Mama’s early years. Gramps — John Ned Kaufman — was apparently an inattentive or even abusive dad, and the three siblings grew up as damaged emotionally as they were gorgeous. My grandparents came out to Los Angeles briefly when the air still smelled of oranges, and opened a cafe in Boyle Heights. It went bust, and they returned to the upper Midwest, where John Ned resumed being carried home half-dead until a year or two after the repeal of Prohibition, when he got rich as a liquor wholesaler. A year or two later, he died at 42 a year or two before my own arrival. Gram returned to Los Angeles, and Mama, having had enough of Riga-born Grandma Rose’s coarseness and ketchup spaghetti, informed Pop they’d be following her.

Her three surviving children remained very, unhealthily, close to Gram all their lives, Doris because she was incapacitated by a disease whose name I never knew, a disease that killed her before she was 35, and Marty because the world terrified him. I saw a great deal of Gram. I would go over to her home either with Mama alone or with both my parents. While Gram listened in silence and I, precocious little sod that I was, read the latest issue of Readers Digest, to which Gram subscribed, Mama would rail at the world and everyone in it, especially those to whom we were related, by blood or marriage, without taking a breath.

Under the influence of powerful, primitive antidepressants, Marty had an automobile accident which left him slightly less gorgeous, and too self-conscious ever to venture into public in daylight again. He persuaded Gram to relocate to Quartz Hill, in the Antelope Valley, where no one was likely to be horrified by his (imagined) ugliness.

For around 36 hours after my almost-unattended bar mitzvah, I aspired to become a rabbi. Everyone was delighted, none more than Gram, who I don’t think was ever glimpsed in a synagogue, but who remembered the pogroms well enough not to be very comfortable around gentiles. Then I resumed planning to play second bass for the Los Angeles Dodgers even though I was an awful baseball (and everything else) player.

Marty and I got close as I entered adolescence. He murdered me at chess and let me marvel at the textbook from the abnormal psychology class at Loyola College he’d been on his way to the afternoon of his accident. He idolized Thomas Wolfe, and, when he learned I’d won the creative writing award at my junior high school, appointed himself my mentor, intending to agonise over every syllable, as he’d read that Wolfe’s mentor had done. I wasn’t having it. He tried to kill himself (in part, I can’t

t help but think, because of my disinclination to be mentored), and failed, and tried again, and succeeded. Having lost two children in three years, Gram and her little dog moved back to West Los Angeles.

She was delighted when, as a university freshman, i took to coming over to her apartment on Sepulveda Blvd. to study. I’ve never completely trusted anyone delighted by my presence. I got older and less dweebish, with a red Porsche and a trophy girlfriend. People perceived me as rockstar-like in both dress and affect. I was too cool to spend much time with Gram, and when I did visit, I would make no secret of my exasperation at, for instance, her having conflated Jane Fonda with Vanessa Redgrave, who’d famously said something or other vaguely antisemitic. Utter asshole though I was, Gram never failed to give me a bagful of spectacularly delicious homemade blintzes and knishes before I left. I will never cease to be ashamed of rarely embracing or kissing her on parting. I was too cool for such behaviour.

She got dementia, and Mama put her in a “convalescent hospital” in Santa Monica where she died at around 84 without my being able to say goodbye, or to thank her for her implacable. kindness and generosity, or to ask her about her childhood in Odessa, and her marriage, and a thousand other thing. But the wonderful news for her is that she’s on my prayer list, one of the half-dozen to whom I apologise every night before drifting away.