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Mother’s Day: A Motherless Daughter

My mother was born in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1948. My grandparents could have given her a popular midcentury name like Linda or Nancy or Barbara, meaning “beautiful,” “gracious” or “protectress,” but they chose to call her Amy Ruth Garvin, meaning “a beloved companion of a rough or cruel fate.”
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May 7, 2015

My mother was born in Montgomery, Ala., in December 1948. My grandparents could have given her a popular midcentury name like Linda or Nancy or Barbara, meaning “beautiful,” “gracious” or “protectress,” but they chose to call her Amy Ruth Garvin, meaning “a beloved companion of a rough or cruel fate.” Her father was an outspoken — and spectacularly alcoholic — proponent of equality and racial integration, and my mother often found herself at odds with kids on the playground. It was cruel enough that she was poor and had to go to school with nothing but black coffee in her stomach, but the loneliness that came with doing the right thing seemed insurmountable; her parents were white and poor and Southern Baptist like the rest of the neighborhood, but they extended their literal interpretation of Mark 12:31 — “love thy neighbor as thyself” — to all folks, including Yankees.

Because she was constantly alone, she made friends with every little thing — from paper hearts to cotton buds to bees — and grew into a woman with a childlike fascination in life. She ended up marrying my father, a Jewish doctor from Brooklyn, and they moved to Los Angeles, where she converted to Judaism before giving birth to me in 1988. We moved into a house with big, Southern windows and an enviable garden. 

Things always fell into our pool. Once, a kitten, which we saved, then a nest of duck eggs. My mother and I would take a net to the water’s surface and skim out bugs. She would finger through the mess as if she were counting coins, then pick out the dead bees and line them up on the warm pavement.

“They ain’t gonna hurt you when they’re dead,” she’d say with a smirk.

I remember her getting down on all fours and breathing warm air onto a little bee. The thing quaked back and forth in her breeze, but remained inert. She let it dry on the pavement. Eventually, its legs began to twitch and its abdomen pumped slowly back and forth. When we returned, the bee was still on its back, but a halo of white fuzz illuminated its legs. My mother picked up the bee, dropped it in a mason jar and twisted the gold lid shut. She told me to check the jar after Shabbat dinner and went back to the kitchen to prepare our meal.

I found the bee buzzing in the glass. My mother took the jar into the dusk and untwisted the cap.

For the past seven years, I’ve asked myself what it means to be a motherless Jewish woman. My mother passed away in 2008, when I was 19. She suffered greatly from the same disease that had made her father unafraid of anything — of shame, of repercussion, of the hatred of a hundred men (he once hit the hooch and defaced a Ku Klux Klan sign by the side of a road). She died on New Year’s Day of alcoholic liver disease. I’ve been told that alcoholism and personality are inextricable, that they somehow enable each other, and that, often, the kindest and most altruistic people suffer badly from the disease. My mother served as a dean and counselor of a school for severely emotionally disturbed teenagers, and loved and protected them as if they were her own. Her middle name, Ruth, evoked the kindness and dedication of the Torah’s first Jewish convert; she was constantly moved to give everything she had. I think of a clichéd eulogy:

“My mother was my hero. She was the kindest woman I’d ever met. She always put everyone else before herself. Everyone loved her. She cared too much. She taught me what it means to love. She always had a smile on her face. She was beautiful. She glowed. I don’t know what I will do without her. She fought every day until the very
end. … ”

At the funeral, I couldn’t give a speech. Instead, I read the story of Ruth and Naomi. I’d never been religious, but I was tired, confused and could say only:

“Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay, I will stay. … ”

I was now a motherless daughter. I didn’t know anything about the future — whether I would inherit her disease, whether I would have children of my own, whether I would keep observing Jewish law. My mother was a proud Jew with a Southern fervor. She helped organize our sumptuous holiday dinners, cleaning our house as if the queen would arrive at any moment. On Passover, she was the only one who believed in the literal Exodus, the story of how God left his people to dry in the desert so they could up and fly away. 

I am still trying to figure out what it means to me to be motherless, and what it means to be a motherless Jew. Right now, it means that I need to re-establish my relationship with the unknown, with bringing little things back to life, with understanding that an emotional universe exists alongside the physical one and is a place where anyone — or anything — can exist.

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