My mother’s upbringing powered her intense control over her children’s names. She was brought up in a formal household, and we all had serious names: Laura. Paul. Helen. (Is there a more serious name than Helen?) She wanted to name her fourth child Ruth, after a spinster friend of her mother’s. Paul and I hadn’t been old enough to have a say in Helen’s naming, but we begged her not to saddle another sister with an old lady name. We prevailed, and she is Lisa.

Those names all have something in common: they don’t lend themselves to nicknames. My mother despised nicknames, but had married someone whose entire family was called by something other than what was on their birth certificates. My father’s parents were Lou and Sal. He, James, was called only Jim, his brother Thomas, Tom. His sisters Jean and Geraldine were (and are) Jeannie and Geri. The 17 cousins of the next generation all had more personal, often humorous nicknames—except our branch. I have to imagine she shut down any attempts to rename her kids, as I had to do when my otherwise-wonderful Uncle Ken tried to stick my son Gregory (now Greg) with “Snort.”

There are nicknames, and then there are nicknames.

My father called his in-laws “Mr. and Mrs. Crandall” throughout their 17-year marriage. She called his “Lou and Sal,” but never without discomfort. It’s not that she would have preferred to call them Mr. and Mrs. Foti, just that she cringed at names she would never have found in her own family.

Yes, as a WASP she was uncomfortable with un-serious first names and an Italian last name, for herself and her children. She made sure we all had middle names that we could use when we grew up, saw how the world worked, and dropped our “ethnic” surname so we could attract the kind of mate she wished she’d had. She herself went back to Crandall the minute the divorce was final.

I was named after the character in the movie Laura; my great-grandmother’s maiden name, Huntt, replaced the single-t Hunt of the movie. My brother, named after her father, has Crandall as a middle name. Helen got Butler, which actually came from my paternal Irish grandmother’s lineage. (Dad had to have a win every now and then.)

When my mother explained her naming scheme to me, sometime around my parent’s divorce, I was both appalled and impressed. That is some long-term planning! But what a slap to Dad. And what a confusing and bigoted message for her own offspring.

I loved my father and knew how badly the divorce she initiated had affected him. To pile on by dropping his name—which I had no beef with—felt cruel and gratuitous. Yet, when I moved on-campus my sophomore year of college, she convinced me to give it a try. And for one semester I did.

Every time I went to my mailbox from September through December, I felt nauseous. By January, I stopped and I pretended it had never happened. I am a proud Foti. Just don’t call me Laurie.

I’m struggling to tell the story of my mother, her choices, and their effect on my life and the lives of my siblings. I call the book I’m writing a memoir about my mother. But I wonder: am I really just telling my own story with her as a major, but not the major, character?

My insecurity about the quality of what I’m writing can be debilitating. The book has made almost no forward progress in months, and I can still hear her needling, “You move slower than molasses in January.”

So far, after more than a year of writing, all I really know is that I don’t know what I’m doing.

I’m discouraged not just about how long it takes to figure out my complicated mother, but about finding an approach to telling her story. I want to capture the immediacy of past events that still sparkle like fireworks in my mind. There’s a murky line between her powerful nurturing and shattering effect on her husband and children. Navigating that line is giving me agita.

Memoir. Biography. Autobiography. Nonfiction. I’m writing all of the above, and it’s sort of a mess. I thought I had a head start because I created an outline and dumped in a bunch of stuff from the materials I’ve been spotlighting in this Substack: diaries, letters, calendars, photos…extensive personal memorabilia. But those pieces veer between just-the-facts recitations and emotional analyses, making my first draft a crazy collage that will take a lot of effort to polish into the gem she deserves.

See? Even that sentence has mixed metaphors and a sense of hopelessness.

Arundhati Roy pulls off a mother memoir in her amazing book Mother Mary Comes to Me. Earlier this year, I read her opening paragraph, about returning home after her mother’s death, and came to a jaw-dropped stop at this sentence:

She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself.

This poetic and masterful set-up of the tale of her mother walloped me. I debated putting away my own manuscript and taking up knitting; I knew immediately that I was not up to the challenge of capturing my own mother as she was poised to do (and does) in her book.

And yet, I persisted. This Substack has helped. Maybe I’ll never hit the perfect note and tell the perfect story as Roy did. But I can churn out short bursts of who my mother was and the consequences of her life. And little by little, that has helped guide me toward a deeper understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish in capturing her.

As I’ve mentioned (a couple of times!), religion was fraught in my family. In some ways, it still is: I am the only non-Catholic in my immediate family, and one of the few in my extended family. Because I remember my parents’ personal Crusades, I avoid organized religion of all kinds. I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve stepped inside a Catholic church in the past few decades.

When I was young, my brother and I went to Protestant churches with our mother, until my father determined he’d erred in giving her control over our religious upbringing. He pulled a switcheroo, one I believe holds the key to the failure of my parents’ marriage, and suddenly my siblings and I were Roman Catholic.

I was a little past the age of First Confession and First Holy Communion then, but was pushed through the confusing training and rites. Telling a stranger how bad I’d been that week? Praying with beads? Eating pieces of a body? I did what I was told, but it didn’t make a lot of sense.

I never embraced my identity as a Catholic, and shortly after my Confirmation, I left the church. My parents were divorced by then, my father not around to drive us to mass, or see if we went without him. When I told him I was agnostic, he heard it as atheist. If I wasn’t Catholic, I was going to hell anyway.

Last week I attended a funeral mass in a Catholic church that had all the bells and whistles, including communion and a soloist who sounded like my cousin Maripat. I remembered all of the prayers that I had said for years by rote, and could have recited them, except that a) I didn’t feel them and b) many of the words had been changed. The lord no longer restoreth souls or leadeth his flock in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Now he renews my spirit and shows me the right path because that’s who he is. It all felt jarring, and brought back memories of standing beside my father, knowing that my mother was seething, and ultimately walking away.

My friend Peter’s mother died last week. He’s one of my last friends to lose a parent. Yes, my generation of formerly youth-centric Boomers is pretty much all orphaned now, gobsmacked to find ourselves elders.

Peter was fortunate to have his wonderful mother until she was 96. He made her his priority, and was a tireless advocate for her medical treatment, to ensure her final years were extensive and vital.

As I mourn with him, it’s hard not to compare our mothers, and our own choices related to them. Peter never lived more than an hour or so away from his parents, and saw them frequently, enjoying his time with them. I chose to remove myself from my mother’s demanding orbit, moving 3,000 miles away in my 20s and making fewer and fewer efforts to spend time with her in person. When we did get together, I learned to bend to her will and keep a sense of humor, so I didn’t have to spend the time with my jaw clenched, seething over her selfishness.

Peter’s mother’s obituary reads, “Lorraine lived a life defined by kindness, generosity, and an unwavering commitment to family, friends, and community. She carried with her the values of hard work, compassion, and service throughout her long and meaningful life…She always put the needs of others before her own and was known for her warm heart, generous spirit, and willingness to help anyone in need.”

The obituary I wrote for my mother reads, “Paula was smart, beautiful, athletic, cultured, and engaged with the world on her own terms. She remained fiercely independent until her death.”

We get the mothers we get, and we love them as best we can. I regret not doing more at the end, but I also regret that my mother didn’t allow us the kind of relationship that encouraged and rewarded such a desire. I envy Peter his relationship with his mother. And I embrace the memory of my own, as different as it was.

The more I research my mother, the more clearly I see how her conservative, upper-middle-class upbringing shaped her. During the last decades of her life, when we were separated by more than 3,000 miles and opposite political beliefs, I sort of forgot how Nixon-loving, government regulation-distrusting she was. We had stopped talking about politics after the contested 2000 election.

Late in 2000, she’d called to tell me about a new channel she’d discovered. “It’s different than other coverage,” she told me. Sick of the whole subject of hanging chads, I tuned in. I lasted two confused days.

After we agreed to disagree about the value of Fox News, we avoided the subject of politics. As a resident of Puerto Rico, she was ineligible to vote in presidential elections. She despised California, where I had moved in my twenties, at a cellular level. “Fruits and nuts,” she’d sniffed in the 1970s, and never recanted.

She actively supported Goldwater in 1964, which got her ostracized from the liberal Unitarian church she was attending at the time. (I described this in “A Religious Smorgasbord.”) She loved Nixon (despite his California roots) deeply. We were together in New York in 1994 when the wall-to-wall news coverage of his death kept her glued to the TV. “I’m glad he’s finally getting the respect he deserves,” she said.

She disdained government edicts, especially in the area of food. I can still hear her complaining about the banning of three of her favorite foods: Sucaryl (an artificial cyclamates-based sweetener), food dyes (like the purple USDA stamp that used to bleed into all meat approved for sale), and swordfish

“I’ve been eating fish my whole life and mercury never caused me any harm!” she huffed.

I have kept several diaries during my life, for varying degrees of time. They are almost uniformly disappointing, typically starting out regretting that I hadn’t written in a while, then noting that I need to write about something important, but first I’ll catch up with happened since I last wrote. I get about halfway through the minutiae of however long it’s been since my last frustrating entry, and rarely get to the good stuff.

My most intense diary dates from the year I graduated high school. My parents had divorced the year before and things were very tense in the house. I document an unhappy time in my life in great detail. It’s informative as I write my that chapter of my book, but agonizing to remember how depressed and angry I was back then.

I stopped writing after that summer and did not keep a diary for many years. Instead, I had a life. I kept scrapbooks that were quasi-diaries. I pasted in news clippings, Vogue fashions, ticket stubs, and other memorabilia, and occasionally wrote entries tying them to my life. I kept these scrapbooks for 40 years, finally ending when almost everything became digital.

I greatly admire true diarists: Anne Frank. Virginia Woolf. Anaïs Nin. The anonymous diary published as Go Ask Alice--all of these affected me before my 21st birthday. My mother gave me her copy of The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considered to be the first modern autobiography, and I loved its diaristic tone. Since the book was published posthumously, I have to believe those who finished it had a diary or two to refer to.

I I just finished reading Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother, a sequel to her remarkable Fun Home. In it, she quotes from her old diaries, which for a period of time she narrated and her mother transcribed. I cannot imagine this in my case, at any age. I turned inward early and did not share much with my mother. I would have been horrified if she’d read my diaries.

My mother told me that her own mother had read her diary and lodged complaints about what it said. I was furious on her behalf. She said that she would never invade my privacy that way, but I wondered if she could resist, given the opportunity. I tried hard not to give it to her; she was by nature a snoop.

Last week, I was in New York with long-time friends and family. I saw my junior-year college roommate. I visited with friends so close that when I bought my first home I made sure it was practically next door to theirs. I stayed with a dear friend (and her dachshund) who lost her husband earlier this year. We shared World Cup games. We laughed and cried. And I closed out the trip by spending precious time with my sister and her family.

Being with these people who are so important to me left me emotionally expansive. I realized only later that I had taken virtually no photos and written nothing except last week’s Substack during this time. This is a good sign that I am Being Here Now, not always easy for me.

My mother was a presence, especially when my sister gave me…drumroll…her baby book! I never even knew this volume existed. It’s in its original box, almost pristine, whereas the top of my baby book’s box is sideless. (I did break off one side of my mother’s book box on the flight home. I will repair it as the museum piece it is.)

On the eve of my niece’s departure for graduate school, the family was doing some cleaning out and reorganizing. Among the items I saw for the first time are things my mother left behind when she moved to Puerto Rico in 1988, including the baby book, lovingly filled in by my grandmother, and the receipt for her 1934 birth at Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, DC (read it and weep!). I also saw for the first time scrapbooks she kept on movie stars Laurence Olivier and Paul Henreid.

My mother had a lifelong obsession with Olivier, and even founded a fan club called L.O.L.O (Lovers Of Laurence Olivier!). I’d seen a L.O.L.O. scrapbook, but thought it had been destroyed. Perhaps there had been more than one, because this one is pristine. I had no idea about the Paul Henreid.

These new additions to my archive place some new pieces into the 100,000-piece puzzle that is my mother, and I am already incorporating their insights into my book.

What is a personal moral code, and where does it come from? Does it develop in childhood and remain firmly fixed? Does it evolve over one’s life? Is there an absolute “right” and “wrong”?

Despite extensive religious training, including Sunday School and bible camp (Protestant), catechism class and three-sevenths of the sacraments (Catholic), and many years involved in Hebrew School and attending services (Jewish), I don’t know if there are definitive answers to those questions. But I do know my personal answers. I’m confident in my moral code, but know that it didn’t come directly from religious teaching. It is a deeply felt sense of right and wrong instilled primarily by my parents and modified since childhood as I began to reject some of their teachings and take on new ones.

I believe we exhibit our moral code through intuitive actions that are, in effect, decisions: to save someone from a burning car, intercede when a child is being abused, offer a seat on the subway, make a secret donation to a stranger in need, refuse to participate in a crime, to take a stand or even start a revolution against an inequity. Such decisions are a moral code spurring action through the internal message: this is the right thing for me to do.

My mother had a strong sense of justice and moral indignation that sometimes drove her to take unpopular stands, and never to waver in seeing them through. I have written about her becoming a a local pariah when she worked to save a local beach threatened by development. I can’t help but notice, though, that she took action only when she personally was affected. If her efforts had the benefit of unmasking hypocrisy or helping others, she was glad to have a byproduct that helped her gather support and achieve her goal.

Her moral code was of the “those who can’t do, teach” variety. She told me not to steal (this lesson didn’t take until after my teen shoplifting phase), but felt righteous about pilfering in certain circumstances. She trained me to put others before myself, but mostly did what she wanted without consideration of others—including her own children.

She taught me, “Intentions aren’t important; it’s what you do that matters.” But, when I pointed out she was doing something that didn’t align with her moral teachings, she said, “I know. It’s just going to have to be enough that I wanted to.”

This is my 50th Substack about my mother and the process of writing a book about her. Since I launched Archival Memoir almost a year ago, I’ve dug deep into photos, videos, writings, and my darkest and sunniest places, in service to understanding her—and our relationship—better. In this installment, I write about a mental shift that made our last few years together so meaningful.

From puberty on, I kept my litany of mother-inflicted wounds close. I could drop a twisted tale about her like a party trick. Until, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my anger and resentment vaporized. Suddenly, uncontrollably, I no longer wanted to see her as an insensitive kook.

I don’t know why. Maybe being in lockdown gave me time to contemplate her more deeply? My own aging brought me empathy and perspective? For whatever reasons, my arm’s-length detachment morphed instantly into an embrace.

I started calling her frequently. I let go of opportunities to spar, and as if in response, she stopped giving me those openings. I started ending conversations with “Love you,” then the real deal. After a few times hearing it, she said it back. I guess when you start to hear “I love you” after a long drought, something shifts. Then she started to say it first. We relaxed. About a year later, I took her on a two-week trip to Florida and reveled in our time together.

I’d called her my crazy mother, but she wasn’t crazy, really. She wanted to be loved. She wanted to be a part of something bigger, not just alone with her dogs in a place where she never learned to speak the language. She wanted to let go of a lifetime of fear and emotional solitude. I don’t know how I knew this, but the knowledge guided me.

I realized I had understood her just enough to blame and resent her, not to care what forces drove her. I took my cue from her own mother’s harsh judgment of her. Finally, I recognized how I added to her pain. I turned to kindness, started telling her how smart and interesting and beautiful she was, how little her past mistakes mattered anymore.

She began to open to me, and I to her, in ways I always imagined “normal” family members related: without tensing in anticipation of a hurtful remark. With awareness that we were on the same side, saw each other. Trusted and loved each other.

Now that she is gone and I am parsing our life together—and hers before me—I endeavor to remain in that final phase, to keep the perspective of kindness and love even when acknowledging the pain she caused. To remember that, more than a mother, she was a human being, and if she hadn’t had the flaws she did, she would have had others. I got what I got, and exploring what I got is a fascinating adventure.

This week, exactly five years after the horrifying fall of the Surfside condo building outside Miami, an official report was released. The Wall Street Journal headline: “Surfside Collapse Started Three Weeks Before Final Breakdown, Federal Probe Finds.” I only wish I could discuss the findings with my mother.

She was fascinated by the Surfside disaster for a confluence of reasons. She had spent her first five winters in Miami, and returned for shorter vacations there after she’d started school in Washington, DC. She had a (pun unavoidable) warm spot for the city, and a clear image of it as it was in the late 1930s: sleepier, but with its wide-open vistas beginning a frenzy of post-Depression development. Her father, himself a developer, instilled in her an understanding of the logistics of construction.

“Daddy always said that building on dredged landfill was destined for disaster,” she told me, when we took a trip to Florida in 2022. “Everyone wants to be on the water, but they don’t want to think about the risks.”

The condo building stood on Collins Avenue, a traffic-choked road where, about six months after the collapse, we inched along for more than 30 minutes so she could have a look at the hole in the ground. The building, she informed me, had been constructed on a barrier island, expanded many years earlier with material dredged from Biscayne Bay. (This week’s report does not suggest that reclaimed land gave way. Instead, design vulnerabilities and maintenance issues are cited as the main causes—along with the high groundwater and saltwater intrusion inevitable with coastal fill.)

During her final 35 years, when she lived in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico, I repeatedly suggested my mother move to Florida. I even identified some possible homes for us to check out when we were on our vacation there, but she refused. “Sometimes there’s a freeze in South Florida,” she said, reminding me of the (rare) news stories about orange groves requiring heaters to survive. “I’m not living anywhere there’s a chance of that.”

I’ve been thinking about degrees of relationships, especially those among family. I imagine a sliding scale of connection, from shallow to deep. After all, you can’t and wouldn’t want to know everything about everyone. (Take that, social media!) The sliding scale has, say, your mail carrier at one end, then a variety of attachments, such as co-workers, neighbors, newish friends, childhood friends, siblings, parents, romantic partners...You arrange the order of your own unique scale.

It starts when you’re young and taught not to share family secrets because other people don’t need to know your business. You visit your friends’ homes and see that their lives are different, in ways small and large. Not all of those differences make sense—one set of parents has shabbat dinner in Hebrew every Friday night, another installs a mirror over their bed. You start to understand that you will never know other families as well as you know our own.

As you get older and bond in new and more numerous ways, the sliding scale expands, but also becomes muddled. You build new relationships and shed others. You stop speaking to a sibling, then reconcile. Some relationships leapfrog what once seemed the sacrosanct maximum knowledge: parents.

Secrets push parents down the scale: No way are you telling them what’s really going on with that person you regret introducing them to. No longer will you discuss politics with them. They still know you at your core, of course. But the fact that they changed your diapers and cried at your graduation no longer defines them as the ones who know you best.

And how well do you really know them, years after you shared a roof? They have their own secrets, including those they have protected you from knowing.

Toward her end, my mother told me something about herself that she’d hid my entire life—hell, she’d hidden it her entire life. When I expressed shock that I hadn’t known it, she said she had other secrets to tell me. She wanted to remove the power they’d held over her. I told her I wanted to hear anything she wanted to share, as long as it wasn’t hurtful about my father.

Immediately after that conversation, she had a stroke that silenced and then killed her. In my heart I know her secrets were fighting back against being revealed. I will forever mourn her and her inability to let go of her deepest pain. But even without hearing her release it, my mother occupies the outer limits of my sliding scale. I have dedicated myself to understanding this singular human.

“I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan…” Sometimes I grab this lyric to punctuate the broad spectrum of what it means to be a woman. The 1962 Peggy Lee hit reworked into a 1979 perfume commercial summed up the women’s lib mentality when I was coming of age. And I deeply inhaled the message: I could “have it all,” even though my definition didn’t include frying bacon or reminding someone he was a man.

The original 1962 song had very different lyrics, closing out with, “I can make a dress out of a feed bag and I can make a man out of you.” And that’s pretty much how it was back when my mother was having her third child and making sure dinner was on the table every night when Dad walked in the door.

She wasn’t a natural homemaker, but she gamely made some of her own clothes (not from feedbags). She learned how to clean, although, as I later learned from watching my friends’ mothers, not well. She read to her children and made sure they went to good schools. Man, did she expend effort trying to get things right.

Until she didn’t.

By the 1970s, she’d stopped doing all those things and begun reinforcing a different message: Women need to make their own money. Women need to control their own lives. Women need their independence. She shifted from telling me never to let a man know I was smarter than he was to advising me to go Dutch at all times. Her shift mirrored society’s, but also came from her disillusionment with her marriage to a husband who forbid her to work and changed her children’s religion. (Tomorrow would have been their 70th anniversary…)

My generation is inculcated with freedom of choice in education, employment outside the home, and later (if any) marriage and kids. Some of the “have it all” messages turn out to have been overly optimistic, as illustrated by many highly educated women leaving the workforce to raise children and the concept of the “trad wife” ridiculously gaining mainstream traction. But overall, boomer women have received a consistent message: do whatever you want.

My grandmothers’ generation was also socially consistent. Both my grandmothers were born in the aughts that opened the twentieth century, and both died without a college degree or a divorce. They understood that times had changed for younger women, but they’d led rich lives and didn’t resent any missed opportunities—just having their car keys taken from them.

My mother’s generation, though, got crushed by changing times. Those women were both young enough and too old to surf second-wave feminism. When my mother finally entered the workforce, she was 39. She had an outdated college degree and zero experience except as a homemaker and volunteer. She never made a decent salary and never broke out of the low-paid, traditionally female jobs of secretary, receptionist, and (briefly) teacher. She started and ran her own small newspaper, but ultimately gave it up. As she recorded in a career workbook in 1977, “I feel I need direction, a way of looking at what I am, have done, am doing and can do creatively so as to progress with assurance & confidence.”

I've been making collage birthday cards for friends for more than a decade. I have never made more than one card at a time, except for Christmas, and even then I make them for specific recipients. But on June 13th, I'm selling my collage cards at the wonderful Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. For the last month, to prepare for the sale, I have been making tons of them for strangers.

Collaging is my happy place. I am unable to read a print publication (not that I come across too many these days…) without mentally stripmining it for future artworks. Starting when I was in high school, I was the same way with scrapbooks, and have decades’ worth filled with whatever grabbed me at the time: New Yorker cartoons, politics, art, fashion, all kinds of weirdnesses. Ialso kept travel scrapbooks that prepared me for and tracked big trips. But I let my print subscriptions go and didn’t want to print out pages from the internet, so I let scrapbooking go, too. That’s when I ramped up collaging.

The parallels are obvious between collaging and writing a memoir using a vast archive of stuff from my past. With writing, as with collage, there are no shortcuts. Even when things fall into place in a way that feels like magic, there's still plenty of work that needs to be done. Trimming, Positioning. Tidying up. Just as I love finding an old letter, journal entry, or artifact that fills in a blank about my mother, I love seeing two disparate elements come together to make a statement in collage.

My personal memorabilia archive is vast, but so is my collection of collage materials. It features magazine and newspaper bits and pieces dating back to the 1950s, as well as everything from museum brochures to repurposed greeting cards I've received. Maps. Catalogs. And then all the non-paper stuff, like old jewelry, shells, buttons, coins, fabric scraps…almost anything that crosses my path could end up with glue on its back.

Similarly, everything that has shaped me is potential memoir material. Most of it isn't worth including, but it's the process of culling and combining that gives me joy.

I saw Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen this week, and it sparked all kinds of New York memories for me. Its Manhattan Plaza setting was a place I’d also spent a lot of time. I ate regularly at the long-gone Curtain Up on the ground floor, had a breakup by the pool, knew people who knew people who were talented enough to live upstairs.

Many of the times I was at Manhattan Plaza, I was with my mother. We went to dinner and the theater regularly, with tickets purchased at the TKTS half-price booth. I fell hard for New York, and claimed it for my own, but I realize now that my mother is the one who introduced me to it, who ran a successful public relations campaign for city life while teaching me to wear my purse crossbody.

When I finally, thrillingly, gratefully moved to New York City to attend NYU, it was not just because I already loved the place. It was to get away from her—yes, she who had built it up to me. We’d lived in the suburbs, a 30-minute ride north of Grand Central Station, and had visited frequently to go to museums and see shows. As I got older, I came not with her, but with friends and even alone, to buy things you could only find in “the city”: out-of-print records, textbooks, trendy but cheap clothes.

Once, in high school, I’d arranged to do research at the lion-flanked New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. I was meeting a friend out front, but when I saw my first “No Standing” sign, I started walking in circles because I didn’t want to get a ticket for standing still. Now those days of being a hayseed were over. Now I was going to be a smart and savvy New Yorker.

Theoretically, NYC was in decline, deep into a financial crisis, excoriated and written off. But it was a young person’s delight. I loved the graffiti-covered subway cars, the conmen and buskers in Times Square. I loved that there was a garment district, a plant district, meat and fish districts, my beloved theater district—and so much more to discover. I loved the filthy old buildings. I loved the edginess of the dark and deserted streets.

After all, those streets led to places unlike anything in the suburbs—or elsewhere. By luck, I’d arrived at the pinnacle of disco and punk rock, and the club scene was insanely fun and accessible. (Except Studio 54, damn them!) Foreign-language and independent films were all over the Village, and early on I got a job at one of the theaters where John Waters came to introduce his latest and Rocky Horror became a midnight movie mainstay. Bookstores were vast, like the Strand and the two Barnes and Nobles on lower Fifth Ave., and I stayed for hours reading and, occasionally, buying. And the people! They operated at a higher, more interesting, level.

Then, six months into my bliss, my mother showed up with my two young sisters. I was horrified…but she settled in on Roosevelt Island and that was that.

Hell’s Kitchen is primarily the story of a mother and daughter, and mine could not be more different from it. But my mother and I did share a love of New York that never wavered. Even though we both moved away in the late ‘80s, we went back separately and together countless times over the years. Her voice still plays in my head when I see a shot of the Roosevelt Island tram, or a projection of the Statue of Liberty against a musical’s backdrop. “My” New York is not just mine, it’s ours.

My mother loved babies. She always said she’d been thrilled each time she was pregnant, to have reveled in her expanding belly. (These were the only times in her life that she felt free to embrace her body’s size.)

I only remember her final pregnancy, when my youngest sister was gestating and I was 10, but she spoke frequently about her love of babies and being pregnant. After she got divorced, at 39, she started ruminating about having what she called “a change-of-life baby.” By then, I was then 15 and often stuck babysitting for my two sisters. My brother was on his way to getting kicked out of three—count ‘em, three!—high schools.

Our family was a total mess. We already had what I, the grim eldest, considered too many kids. Another baby? I was glad to be graduating early from my one high school and getting the hell out, away from her (ultimately unfulfilled) dream of a change-of-life baby.

Sometime after my youngest sister was born, my mother casually mentioned that she’d had two miscarriages. I remember exactly where I was, driving with her down our street, when she shared this revelation. That moment remains frozen in my mind, and I was instantly heartbroken for her and my father, having to lose children. Then, when I started to imagine more siblings, I blocked it out. (Forgetting things I don’t want to think about is my superpower.)

Those miscarriages were never mentioned again until I had a miscarriage of my own many years later. Then they became a way we could bond over the craving for a baby.

What my mother didn’t think through was that babies aren’t babies for long. Before you can say, “Wait, my local public school only ranks in the 20th percentile?” they are children. Then tweens, then (shudder) teens, then quasi-adults, then, hopefully, adults. Craving babies can be a dangerous game.

Telling the story of my mother and myself involves my siblings, who deserve their privacy

This is not what I was going to write about today, but a text conversation with my sister has brought me back to it. I try to push the issue aside during the memoir-writing process, figuring I’ll address it during the rewrite. But avoidance is never easy. What am I referring to? The effects on others of writing about my mother.

Because I was not an only child (much as I craved that status during my difficult adolescent years), when I write about my mother, I’m writing about the mother of my siblings as well. Even when they aren’t part of the story, their mother is. Her story can reveal elements of their upbringing or relationship with her that they prefer to keep private. I know I need to respect their privacy, and to some extent bake that in when I write. The true dance is figuring out how much to respect hers.

I have a pretty good handle on my mother’s major life events and the relationships that shaped her—and, by extension, us. Some of those make her a victim, some a hero. Many are frustrating, many illuminating. Then there are the mysteries. For example, I was perusing a spiral-bound notebook entitled “Career Handbook” this week. It’s one of very few documents I have that could be compared to a diary. It’s from 1977, and in it she strove to work out her career plans.

In an opening personal statement, she wrote, “In 1969 a religious experience changed my life and I began to seek meaningful outside activities and contacts with people.”

This remarkable sentence stopped me cold. I had no idea what this “religious experience” could be, and immediately texted my sister, but it didn’t sound familiar to her either.

I believe my mother joined the Mamaroneck Methodist Church around this time, but her husband and kids were Catholic, and we did not discuss religion anymore. I doubt she told Dad about any religious experience, since the subject was so fraught. She had her own inner life and beliefs and chose not to share this particular life-changing moment. Certainly she goes into no detail in the notebook.

I always knew I would write about my mother after she had died. That implies I will be sharing (and probably have already shared) things she would prefer not be revealed. I am getting it all out in the first draft and will decide in the rewrite how best to capture her honestly and as completely as possible, while also honoring her memory. In that process, I will honor my siblings as well.

Like much about my life, religion is complicated. Not on my father’s side: he was a devout Roman Catholic whose main regret, besides marrying my mother, was briefly leaving the church to do so. So, she obviously was not Catholic. What was she? A lot.

Her religious quest was unique, and I don’t use that term lightly. Before she moved to Puerto Rico in 1988, she attended churches in many different Protestant denominations. Among the smattering I remember: Unitarian in Maryland (I was pulled from Sunday School when her pro-Goldwater pin caused a ruckus during Social Hour). Congregational and Episcopal in Scarsdale, Methodist in Mamaroneck, Presbyterian in Manhattan. She was especially taken with Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller’s takes on the Reformed Church in America, an almost non-denominational approach that felt less dogmatic to her—although she read their Guideposts and Hour of Power publications religiously (sorry).

Despite 35 years in Puerto Rico, she never once considered attending, much less joining, a Catholic church. When I married a Cohen, she told me she planned to convert to Judaism, even though I wasn’t going to. (Spoiler: she took a few steps but didn't follow through.)

I believe her life as a religious outsider was caused by her parents’ own religious mismatch. Her grandmother had been one of the first Christian Scientists and knew Mary Baker Eddy. After a wild youth and what was then called a nervous breakdown, my grandfather—who had previously shunned his mother's religion—immediately signed on. For the rest of his life, Papa was all in: regular visits to the Christian Science Reading Room and no caffeine, alcohol, doctors, or medicine.

By contrast, my grandmother was a devoted hypochondriac, with a custom, extra-large medicine chest. This was only her unofficial religion; Mimi was a Methodist, a member of the same congregation for all of her 93 years. She was most unhappy about her husband's conversion; according to my mother, she considered Mary Baker Eddy a tramp and a charlatan.

Because my grandparents did not respect each other’s religions, they agreed to raise their two daughters in a third religion, Episcopal, so that neither parent won. Yet somehow the underlying teachings of Christian Science were passed down so effectively that I, and even my son, actively avoid medication. (Not caffeine, though!)

After the Unitarians shunned her, I don’t know which Maryland church my mother joined because my father returned to his, and insisted his children join him. His decision, like her own father's, created an impossible-to-ignore interfaith marriage. Ultimately, it led to my parents’ divorce.

I became a Catholic, and even got confirmed. But I learned to see religion as a battleground and a contrivance, not a solace. Today, I steer clear of all organized religion. My mother, who never stopped believing in an amorphous, Christian God, died without a religious affiliation.

As I have mentioned, my mother programmed the soundtrack to her children’s early lives. We did not embrace classical music as she might have hoped, but it remained a presence. And in 1975, I went with her to Carnegie Hall to see one of the seminal artists of her life, Vladimir Horowitz. I was a failed pianist myself by then, and she’d reluctantly accepted my decision to give up. Our outing was purely for her to relive one of the joys of her own childhood.

She had seen Horowitz perform in Washington, DC when she was 13. Exactly 25 years later, she embraced the opportunity to share his artistry with the only child of hers old enough and open enough to appreciate him.

Our tickets were in the rear of the upper balcony, practically eye level with the chandelier. In case you can’t read the small print at the bottom of the ad, those seats cost $5—with no hidden fees! Minimum wage, which I’d earned at my summer job that year, was $2.10 an hour. Middle-class life (or whatever the hell I was living) used to include easy access to great cultural events. Sigh.

We started our day at what was then the only Barnes and Noble store, on Fifth Avenue and 18th Street. Back then, New York was in the throes of a major financial crisis, and this was a faded and dreary commercial corridor. The garment industry had abandoned the area, and it was mostly vacant showrooms and industrial spaces. We didn’t care. We both adored NYC, the flaws almost as much as the triumphs, since they were more interesting, and kept costs down.

Here’s how it played out. I quote from my diary at the time:

Sunday was Vladimir Horowitz with Mom, but first we went to Barnes and Noble’s where I bought a bunch of books, including one for her. We had lunch at a frankfurter place because we couldn’t find the health food restaurant she wanted [Brownie’s].

Well, sitting across from us at the counter (they served hot dogs on a piece of waxed paper—a most peculiar establishment) was a spaced-out looking guy drinking a cup of coffee. The “waiter” (he kept pretending not to hear the customers) asked him if he wanted anything else. He said, “What can I get for twenty cents?” The waiter disgusted, said only a cup of coffee.

Mom whispered to me, “Should we buy him a hot dog?” I was shocked! But she did. He was extremely grateful, and a little embarrassed, I think. Mom said the place looked like a front for something because no one working there (there were only two) seemed very interested in doing work. Or maybe it’s just that good help is hard to find.

After the concert, which was incredible, and had me floating, we went up to Greenwich to a meeting of the Archeological Society in a huge mansion with a greenhouse, a landing pad for helicopters, etc., in the section where Ruth Warwick (Phoebe Tyler on All My Children) lives. We were both starved and really stuffed ourselves with crackers after the lectures, which were very interesting. I felt so rich, pampered, and, most of all, lucky this weekend.

Death is humanity’s shared destiny, an incentive to leave a mark during a lifetime that is inevitably “nasty, brutish, and short.” Death is partially what propels me to finish a book that can live on past my expiration date, and honor my mother’s life and death.

The how and when of death’s arrival are unique to each person. As a high school student, I was borderline suicidal, sure I would choose my time of death myself. In my first journalism class at NYU, we had to write our own obituaries in inverted pyramid form. I chose getting hit by a bus as my cause of death; I see that now as quick and easy for me, messy for the poor bus driver and witnesses. Strangely, I remembered that I had chosen to die at 100, but digging out the actual document, I see that it reflects my age at the time, 18.

Today, I pray for the ultimate “died in her sleep” death, at an age where I am still mostly coherent, my son is happy, and I’ve had just about enough. Oh, and my book is published! I don’t fear death, and have created a memorial service playlist on Spotify, since I don’t trust anyone else to choose my music. That said, I am in no rush.

Whether through illness, accident, disaster, or one’s own hand, death ends our physical connection to a person. Death puts a period at the end of the sentence. My mother’s death was my cue to solve the mystery of her jarring actions, to (hopefully) answer previously unanswered questions.

I’ve experienced a lot of death in the past year and a half, starting with my mother in October 2024. A sister. Two friends, both about my age. One friend lost her child. Another lost her husband. Another just lost her own dear sister, whom I also considered a friend. Death’s inevitability does not make its upheaval less wrenching.

I strive to process my grief through writing. Because she died, I have an opportunity to view my mother’s whole life, period. Now that I know how her story ended, I hope to capture it in depth, to showcase what happened and why.

My love of music came from my mother. When I was a child, I was exposed to classical, Broadway and movie soundtracks, and, mostly, Top 40. By the late ‘60s, she played Top 40 radio hours a day, at home and in the car, and bought records like she had a side gig as a deejay. At our local record store, The Village Shop in Mamaroneck, New York, she built a relationship with the record buyer. He put aside a copy of every new single for her, and she stopped by every Tuesday to peruse them and make her selections.

In our slope-floored den, my sisters and I stacked up her 7- and sometimes 12-inch gems inside the console record player and scratched them all to shreds. Beatles and Stones, Glen Campbell and Peggy Lee. Neil Diamond and the Box Tops, Dusty Springfield and Stevie Wonder, the Guess Who and the Supremes. We appreciated her good and wide-ranging taste.

Years later, I worked in the music business. I accumulated many records and made her mixtapes. I married someone in the business even more committed to expanding our collection, and we ended up with thousands of records and CDs. By then, technology had changed and I made her CDs to order. She delighted in the internet and especially YouTube, because it ultimately allowed her to track down whatever she wanted.

But in 1999 the “celestial jukebox” did not yet exist. She emailed me, “The tape you made for me of the Rolling Stones, the Eagles and Tommy finally wore out. The second, which I have, isn’t the same versions in every case doesn’t have all my favorites (like ‘Silver Train’). I’m thinking of ordering some of them from Amazon.com. I’m a purist when it comes to versions, I guess, and the Stones reworked a lot of stuff.”

I responded, “You don’t have to buy then. Send me the list of songs and versions you want and I can remake it.”

When she wrote back, she said she’d already made several Amazon.com purchases: “three Steve Winwood CD’s, which I love, and Edith Piaf’s CD, Piaf, which includes that wonderful song, roughly translated, ‘I Regret Nothing.’ I also bought the Supremes two-CD set for the song, ‘Nathan Jones.’“

She reminisced about her former record collection, lost in the confusion of divorce, moves, and the destruction of children. “Those great old albums I had, like Mamas and Papas and Joe Cocker, are probably all warped, if they still exist. Not to mention all the 45s and 78s from the ‘50’s by all the great black singers. I’ve looked for some of them on the net, like Freddie Slack’s (he was white, though), ‘You Came A Long Way From St. Louis’ and Stick McGhee’s, ‘Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee.’ If you turn them up, I’d be eternally grateful. I did get Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog,’ which is one of my all-time favorites. That beat does stir up those primeval feelings, doesn’t it?”

I had a couple of Freddie Slack songs on compilations, but couldn’t (and still can’t!) find his version of “You Came a Long Way From St. Louis.” I suggested alternatives, which she declined. (”I just liked the backup with Slack.”) I didn’t answer her question about “those primeval feelings”!

She was highly attuned to special moments in songs, and was relentless in tracking down what had moved her. Finally finding a theme song from the short-lived TV series Yancy Derringer, she wrote, “I heard the tune again, after all this time. Sort of an anticlimax, because it’s so short, yet very satisfying all the same. Would that all our wishes were so simple.”