i love my mom
I almost didn’t come home for Thanksgiving that year. It was 2020 and the line to get into urgent care wrapped around the block. I called my parents in hysterics, refusing to wait in line for a test. CAN’T YOU WEAR A MASK INSIDE?? my dad yelled over the phone. NO!!!!!! I wailed back. He picked me up in Brooklyn a few hours later, sans mask or test. During the weekend my dad excavated a box of old home videos that hadn’t been watched in at least fifteen years. In one video, baby Jamie’s splayed out on my parent’s old bed while toddler me bounces up and down next to my mom. She asks me to jump on a pillow and I say TWO PILLOWS! No! Just one! my mom exasperatedly replies. She drives me CRAZY!!!! she mouths to my dad behind the camera. SEE!!!!!!! adult me cries to her. This is why I’m so FUCKED UP!!!
I don’t think I’ve always had curly hair, but I can’t be sure because my mom used to blow dry it for as long as I can remember. I would sit on a stool in front of her bathroom mirror as she pulled each section tight and blasted it with hot air. Sometimes I liked this, sometimes it was boring. Many years later this image would come to me in a dance class, this feeling of being taken care of.
Before I would lie about being sick to get out of school and lie about not being sick to hang out with my friends, I would just be sick. My mom would prop me up in my parents’ bed and bring me a tray of juice, toast, soup, and soda. Always soda. I would watch movies like George of the Jungle and I’m not sure what else because that’s the only one I can remember. When I get sick now, this is all I want. A big bed, lots of pillows, an antique serving tray, some soda. Whenever I try to recreate it, it never feels the same.
I’m accompanying my mom on errands as I often do. The experience of being a child running errands still haunts me. The boredom of hitting DSW, Target, the mall, not to buy anything fun, probably returning, and if we’re buying anything, it’s not for me. This is confusing because when I’m an adult I consume myself with errands. If I do enough errands I’ll finally feel good, or at least complete. On this day my mom and I are going to Shoprite. She slips on ice outside of a dusty chocolate store that I’ve never seen anyone in (and might still be in business) and the Friendly’s where I go with my friends to eat chicken fingers (no longer in business). She starts crying. Get up. Stop crying. I command her. Moms aren’t supposed to cry. She definitely isn’t supposed to cry.
Here’s a list of reasons why I’ve called my mom crying: getting denied trying to use her credit card at the H&M in Soho while going back-to-school shopping, my ex-boyfriend dumping me at the U Street Metro Station in DC (and then calling her every day for two months to get to the bottom of why he dumped me), my next ex-boyfriend dumping me after I returned from a sleep-deprived trip to Iceland (I had to beg her to call my landlord and ask him not to kick me out even though he said he would kick me out if we broke up after signing a lease), any other time that landlord threatened to kick me out, experiencing ambiguous health problems, getting a UTI, having my period or PMSing, over-drafting my checking account, being angry with one of my friends but I’m too scared to actually say something to them about it, my dad being mean to me, taking the wrong train home and ending up in Summit, NJ, and so many more.
This weekend in 2019 I wasn’t crying. My dad’s going out of town so I come home for a self-care weekend with my mom. It’s a Taurus full moon and we order Thai food and I do the expensive face mask her gay friends in New York got her for her 60th birthday. We smoke her bowl while watching Summer House. My mom thinks Carl’s work woes are hilarious. But Carlito needs to make…his SALES GOAL! she chokes while laughing hysterically. I love hearing my mom laugh really hard. Carolina and I come home for a weekend during COVID and want to cook a grilled shrimp recipe. My dad goes outside to fire up the grill and returns with a grave expression on his face. I have terrible news he starts. The grill won’t turn on. THAT’S the terrible news?? My mom’s in tears. I think he was less upset when his parents died. We laugh about it all night.
She’s not going to like this part, especially since I told her this was going to be a nice piece, but I’ve felt really angry at my mom for the last few years. It started around that Thanksgiving, when I was trying to stop drinking. Taking away alcohol exposed the hell that had been burning inside my brain when I wasn’t looking. Overwhelming anxiety, criticism, and fear consumed me for years and I blamed it on her. It was because she said I was irresponsible. It was because she said I was disorganized. It was because she said I’m too emotional. Mothers go through pregnancy and labor and raising their daughters only to become their scapegoats. But wasn’t I her scapegoat too? I was probably messy because I had undiagnosed ADHD! She dismissed me when I took a quiz in YM magazine that said I had ADHD! This resentment ate at me for years. I had trouble talking to her because I thought I would explode. Luckily through treatment I was able to see her as a full person. She made mistakes but she tried her best. I could move on.
My mom and I are on FaceTime while I heat up my dinner. We’re discussing mother-daughter author duo Erica Jong and Molly Jong-Fast, since I’m reading Erica’s Fear of Flying and my mom had recently read Molly’s How to Lose Your Mother. I won’t read this passage for a few more months, but towards the end of Fear of Flying, main character Isadora Wing is alone in a dingy hotel room. She’s broken down, coming off a weeks-long bender with her paramour who abandoned her in Paris and who also isn’t her husband (sorry, spoiler alert, this book is like 50 years old). In her mounting anxiety and depression, she longs for her mother to make it all better. YES! I think. I’ve felt this way often. Whenever I’ve felt worse than I thought was possible, especially in the last year, all I wanted was my mommy. I wanted her to materialize in Brooklyn and soothe my terrible stomach pain and rub my back until I fell asleep. But when I would call her, she would mostly ask me logistical questions about my meds. It’s not her job to fix me anymore, but I still long for it.
You would love it if I were famous she says to me over the phone. Then you could write a book about how I abused you!
MOM!!!!! I gasped, hysterically laughing. I mean, you’re not wrong.
* this was published with approval from my mom who hates when i write about her lol. she also had permission to correct my grammar, which she’s been doing since i was a little girl and i never listen to her.
Billy T also has a grill problem and being sick in your parents bed is the best thing ever. I watched game shows and sipped ginger ale from a sippy cup for far too long.
Pegs 🫶🏼