Permission to Land: Searching for Love, Home & Belonging

Prologue

How well do any of us know anyone?

How well do we even know ourselves?

Most people go through their day, even their whole lives, taking things as they come, living on the receiving end of life like a canoe bobbing on the current. What if instead of sitting passively in that canoe, floating along with the rocking water, just staying afloat, you could instead captain a motorboat with a strong engine that you could actively steer ahead toward the future? What would it be like to try that? It might be new to take control, especially if you haven’t done it before or in a long time, but how would it feel? It might be pretty great.

Please, allow me the liberty of extending this metaphor a little. Suspend any doubt you might have about my ability to spontaneously turn a canoe into a motorboat. You spend your whole life, until this moment, passively on that canoe, then you decide to command your own strong motorboat and take control. What causes you to choose to change and do that? For everyone, I think the catalyst can be a different thing—or a series of things. It could be ongoing trauma, surviving an accident, grieving a tragic loss. It could be the birth of a baby, a big windfall, or a lucky break.

As a regular journal writer and a self-aware person, I thought that I was in control and aware of the choices I was making. But, years later, as I turned around and took the long view back over the years of my life and read my own voice from my faraway past, I saw patterns and paths that I hadn’t noticed along the way, and the whispers of my own voice over more than three decades of writing finally allowed me to get to know myself more completely. Along the way, I discovered a few things that I need to share.

Through excavating my past and writing this memoir, I have told my own truth as I see it. These memories, stories, and experiences happened to me, and although they do involve other people, they are really not about those people. They are about me, the choices I made, how I behaved and thought and felt. This memoir is of my life, and because I chose to write about people without consulting them, I have changed almost all of the names of the living for their anonymity and protection. In some cases, I have conflated people or situations for ease of storytelling and brevity, but the tone, emotions, and experiences are as true to reality as I understand them to be.

We all suffer through and survive trauma, and while the details may change between each of our lives, the stories of others, what shapes and molds them into who they are is highly interesting and infinitely relatable. The pain that my familial mental illnesses, narcissism and addiction caused is particular to my experience, but millions of us share in the wounds and fears they caused. And hopefully, we also share the triumph of overcoming the pain and finding love, home and belonging for ourselves.

Although this is my story, it is also everyone’s story.

Thank you for picking up this book and coming on this journey with me.

Chapter 1

Grief, Loss, and What Never Would Be

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.

—Ann Landers

For the final eighteen months of my mother’s life, we did not speak. Not a word. We didn’t have any contact. This felt as terrible as it sounds, but my mother was bipolar and a prescription drug addict, and these afflictions turned her into someone else. Where once she was capable of being kind, generous, warm, emotionally available, funny, creative, zealous in her love for me, as well as judgmental, critical, impatient, and often short-tempered, she had become something else. She was a mean, cranky, vindictive, nasty person who was terrible to be around. Drugs and addiction turned her into the worst, most unhappy version of herself.

We had a huge fight in January 2012. She said she was coming over my house to join my children and me in cookie baking after dinner. When she arrived over three hours late to find that we had baked the cookies two hours before, she lost it. Suddenly, I was a horrible daughter who was raising two spoiled, selfish brats. I tried to remain calm as she stood in my casual but carefully decorated living room and screamed at me in her shrill, drug-altered voice. The louder she became, the calmer I was in response. No one was going to behave that way in my home, the home I built out of peace and love to cradle my children and me in safety. That fight was so scary and horrible that it left my kids huddling together on the bed in my daughter’s yellow, floral bedroom with the door locked, and me slamming my front door as she cursed me out from my own front lawn in the dark. This was a disaster of biblical proportions. It was a long time coming. Once I calmed my kids down, the first priority, I had the biggest stress-induced asthma attack of my life in the privacy of my own bedroom. I felt like I was wearing a corset that was getting tighter and tighter, squeezing my lungs until I could no longer breathe. Luckily, my inhalers and anti-anxiety medication are never far away.

Before this horrible night, I tried everything I could to help her find herself in the mess that her health had become. I tried privately and kindly talking to her, taking her to doctors, even staging an intervention with the family. Nothing worked. She refused to listen to any of us or acknowledge a problem. Few family members were willing to take a hard line along with me and stand up to her. So, my battle was harder than it had to be because I was the lone voice of reason in a crowd of well-meaning but cowardly others.

This time, I was taking the toughest-love approach and would do whatever I needed to do to help my mother, and, above all else, to protect my children. Growing up with my mother like this took a toll on me that I felt throughout my life, and I needed to shield my children from the continuation of this cycle. I didn’t want them to suffer any more; it had gone too far already. Since talking to her hadn’t worked because she grew so defensive that she didn’t hear me at all, I decided to write her a letter so I could calmly, slowly, and succinctly craft my language to tell her precisely what needed to be said. And because it was written, she could read it, and digest it in her own time and refer to it as often as she needed. It took me a week to write the letter. I was so nervous about sending it to her and at last drawing my irrevocable line in the sand that I sent it to her best friend of over forty years to make sure I was kind and loving while also firm and clear. She read the letter and told me that it was beautiful, supportive, kind, loving and very clear about my intentions.

In the letter, I wrote that I loved her but couldn’t allow her to treat us the way she was and had for a long time. I implored her to accept help. I made a promise and gave her a choice. I would be with her every day of her life, holding her hand and supporting her, if she would check into an in-patient drug rehabilitation hospital and agree to do the necessary work to change her life. We would circle her with love and support every day, and she would never be alone again. Or, if she chose to do nothing and continue along her path of self-medicating with her oxycodone/ psychotropic drug cocktail, she would never see us again. She would never see her only daughter or her grandchildren again.

It was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I had to try tough love to save her and remove my children and me from this toxic situation, no matter the cost to my relationship (such as it was) with my mother.

I never heard from my mother again.

I did learn from her best friend, my Aunt Marie, who agreed with how I was handling this and was working toward the same result for my mother in her own way, that my mother was beyond angry with me and thought I was 100 percent wrong. She was indignant. She could not admit she had a drug problem. She could not admit she was out of control. She dismissed everything I said, saying I was an English teacher and not a doctor. What did I know?

Of all the people in my mother’s life, I was the only one to challenge her about her health and take a stand. In all fairness, she had a bitter, mean, awful mouth on her when she was under the influence, when she felt vulnerable and afraid. It was very difficult for everyone, including me, to stand up to that onslaught even if it was in her best interest. Part of me gets that. But only part of me. I always tried to please her and actively wanted to make her proud of me and love me. I think that I always knew there was something extra-sensitive or unpredictable about her and even as a child worked really hard to earn her love. Somewhere deep inside, I learned to doubt if I was a good enough daughter to be loved. When she got angry and blew up, even if it was not my fault, I felt the tension and anxiety of it deep in my bones and would do anything to cheer her up and change the energy of our interaction because when it changed and became positive, lighter and happier, I felt safe and loved. She had been so temperamental for so many years and I felt so beaten down that even though standing up to her destructive behavior was what I had to do, it really hurt me to take that action. It laid me bare and vulnerable to her defensive incursions and I really wished I had a normal mother who baked me cookies and hugged me without baggage and agenda.

I was also in a unique position as her only daughter and the mother of her only biological grandchildren; I was in the hot seat. Many times, she attacked me verbally and insulted me to my face when she was under the influence of the drugs, which was most of the time. She flew off the handle and screamed at me for perceived offenses. She cursed me out after my daughter was born because my newborn took my attention away from her. She made impossible demands of me and took no responsibility for her actions. Not one single time did she ever admit that she had said or done any of the hateful things she did or said. It was like they never happened, like I had imagined them. Either she really couldn’t remember the events because of the drugs, or she was so deeply embarrassed by her behavior that she couldn’t admit it. For her, it would be better to ignore and deny than to face any of it.

No relationship in the world is like that of a mother and her daughter. (As the mother of my daughter, I know this to be true.) Although I knew, as a mother, this was the right decision to protect my children, I felt deeply guilty as a daughter. The guilt was ever present, simmering in the background of my life. For a long time, every time the phone rang, my stomach clenched, and I held my breath until the caller ID showed me who was calling. Once or twice, it was her calling to scream at me (her best friend had warned me), so I didn’t answer. Not surprisingly, she didn’t leave any messages. And then nothing. Silence.

A little over a year later, in March 2013, I saw my mother in a dark, somber funeral home at my uncle’s wake after his shocking and sudden death. I knew there would be a large crowd of family members and friends paying their respects and expressing their grief and empathy. I was very upset about my uncle’s passing, but I was also anxious about seeing her there. I insulated myself with my cousins, who were all around my age, for protection. At some point, a group of people shifted, and I could see into the back of the room, and there was an older woman, who looked sallow and gaunt, sitting next to my stepfather. It took me a hot minute to realize that that older woman was my mother. She looked like she’d aged twenty years since I saw her last. It was truly frightening. Had I seen her on the street, without the context of this event, I would not have known it was her.

We had no contact at all, which was fine by me. I missed the mom she was when she was in a good mood and a good place. I wished I could have her back, but since I could not and life gave me this mom, I did not want to fight with her at all, especially at my uncle’s wake. We were all grieving, and I couldn’t handle it. Actually, I didn’t want to have to figure out how to handle a skirmish with her there of all places. Later, at my cousin’s house, where we were all gathering for solidarity and support, she stationed herself on the opposite side of the split colonial style house in their brand-new kitchen and did not allow my nephews or my stepfather to talk to me. If they were loyal to her, they were not to talk to me at all. That’s how she wanted to play it, and they were willing to go along. I was shocked. How weak could they be? Fourth-graders know better than to submit to such coercion. I never saw my mother alive again.

In October 2013, over eighteen months after we had had the fight to end all fights, my mother, at the age of sixty-nine, died of heart failure during an afternoon nap, according to the coroner, most likely due to more than twelve years of drug abuse. Her body just gave out. She didn’t suffer. It was painless and quiet.

Overwhelmed with sadness, loss, and grief, I tried to process the anger I felt toward her. She had chosen drugs over her only daughter and biological grandchildren, and now my attempt at tough love had failed utterly because she was dead. The little girl inside me was devastated and lost; the grown-up woman was angry and disappointed. I struggled with guilt over what I could not control and tried to make peace with my raging emotions. I had longed for a close mother-daughter relationship, built on trust and love. I had craved it.

I would never have that with my own mother, and at that moment I vowed to have that with my daughter. Together, we have worked very hard to create the bionically strong bond we have. We have misunderstandings and fights. Sometimes, I have to be more mom than friend, and she bristles a bit but knows everything I say is from genuine love and caring, from my fierce desire to nurture and protect her.

How could I reconcile my complicated relationship with this belligerent woman who used to be my beloved mother? I had no idea. I cried alone. I cried to my therapist. I cried with my children, my friends, my aunt. Answers were stubbornly slow in coming.

We all deal with grief in our own way. My nephew, my stepfather’s grandson, had called me after the coroner left with my mother’s body. He had gone to her house to visit and found her already dead in her bed. Now that she was gone and the restrictions were lifted, that side of the family was free to talk to me again. It took my mother’s death for them to again include me as a member of the family. It was a very awkward and hard-to-process situation.

I was given the responsibility of picking out what she would wear into her final resting place. Walking into my mother’s bedroom after so long was otherworldly. Her perfume still hung in the air. Her well-used, cream-colored terrycloth Dearfoam slippers were on the floor next to her bed. Her reading glasses were cast aside on her night table with a well-worn book of word search puzzles. The furnishings were unchanged since I had been there last; the gold-and-jewel-toned coverlet was on the bed, and the matching cornices hung above the windows, overlooking the overgrown backyard.

I remember her almost endless indecision when she was choosing the shape of those cornices. She always struggled with decisions like that. It took her no fewer than ten trips to dress stores to pick out a dress to wear to my wedding. Picking my wedding gown was quicker and more painless. It took her weeks to pick out siding for her house, only for her to second-guess the decision and not do the project.

I don’t remember what I picked out for her to wear, loose black pants and a colorful flowy top of some sort, I guess, but I made sure she had those slippers on her feet. Comfort was key. I don’t remember her jewelry or anything about her appearance. Jews have closed-casket funerals, but I wanted to see her one last time. She didn’t look like herself. I could tell it was her, obviously, but she looked old and altered. It was hard to stand there, knowing it was the last time I would ever lay eyes on her, knowing it had been so long since she had hugged me. I placed a letter in the casket with her, one that I wrote on stationery with a beach scene, telling her how devastated I was. I needed to have the last word.

No one in the family was willing to eulogize her: not her sister, her cousins, her husband. As her only child, I was compelled to step up and give her a respectable send-off, despite our complicated relationship and the eighteen months of silence that preceded her death. For two days, in between making arrangements for her funeral and the actual burial, I pored over seventy years of family photographs and forced myself to remember the good times: the themed birthday parties, the holidays shared with family and friends, the laughter over stupid Halloween costumes, graduations, weddings, bar mitzvahs, vacations, and silliness.

I saw her as a beloved child with her parents and sister. I saw her laughing with friends, smiling with my father in good times and later with her second husband. I saw her thin and curvier. Little by little, I started to see my mother as a flawed, imperfect human being who had a dreadful disease. She suffered and endured pain and disappointment. She had ileitis, kidney stones, and Crohn’s disease. She loved her family with all her heart, and when she could, she tried to make each of us feel special. My mother was never happier than when her friends and family were around her. She had been a generous, beautiful soul who became lost and couldn’t find her way back. I stood in the front of the room at the funeral home and told the assembled family and friends what I knew about my mother to be true. I made it through my eulogy with grace and kindness, emphasizing who she was before her illnesses and addiction, focusing on the woman she probably always wanted to be, and trying to ensure that others’ last memories of my mother would be happy ones.

The bright, cream-colored room in the funeral home was filled with the many people who came to pay their respects and say goodbye to her. I was happy there was such a good turnout. So many of her friends from years earlier came to share the grief and tell me stories about her that I never knew.

My eulogy for my mother:

Thank you all for coming here this morning as we share in our grief over the loss of my mother, Janet. Where do I begin? How do I sum up my feelings for my mother and our relationship? Over the last few days, images of our relationship have been playing in my mind like a slideshow. The sweet, loving, and nostalgic mixed together with arguments and anguish, as our lives blended together so that no one memory is completely good or bad. Everything is laced with essences of the other.

My mother was a complicated woman, who was haunted by her own issues for most of life, but she had a heart of gold. She had a generous, loving spirit, and she bathed those she loved with more warmth than one hundred suns.

My earliest memory of my mother is from when I was about four years old. I was wearing my favorite long, white and green gingham dress with the blue fabric flower on the blue-ribbon waistband, running down the sidewalk into my mother’s waiting arms. She held me tightly up to her body as she walked into our house. The memory fills me an overwhelming feeling of safety and makes me realize that no matter what our relationship evolved into because of her illness, she always loved me with every cell of her being. That is what I am trying to hold onto while letting all the other feelings go. Her love for me has allowed me to love my own children as steadfastly and intensely as I do.

When I was a little girl, she wanted to have the house in which all my friends wanted to come to play. She created a home filled the laughter of children, which was one of her favorite sounds. My friends and I would bake with her, do arts and crafts and a thousand projects. When my younger cousins were born, they would come, sometimes for weeks at a time, and join in on the fun. Some of our best memories growing up were of these times.

We used to love our shopping trips at the Walt Whitman Mall for clothes, shoes or gifts and used to make a game out of eating the chocolate truffles from the chocolatier out of their waxy paper bag. We held the luxurious chocolate between our tongues and the roofs of our mouths, relishing every bit of the creamy goodness. We felt so decadent.

My mother was a consummate party thrower. She’d stress over making everyone’s favorite foods, the tiniest details like ornaments on the Chanukah tree, and tiny dreidel-shaped erasers and toys for the little children; her parties and Seders were always the hits of the holiday season. She would shower her children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews with very generous gifts because my mother loved to give people things that made them happy. She was happiest when giving to others.

To my mother, family was the most treasured gift. She loved her parents, sister, best friend Marie, aunts, cousins, grandchildren, nieces and nephews with such steadfast loyalty and devotion. She always said to me that family is the most important thing. That one should always be able to count on one’s family no matter what. This was a lesson that she said she learned from my grandmother Betty and her three amazing sisters, Mattie, Sylvia and Gertie. They had learned to love this ferociously from their mother, my Great-Grandmother Anna. So, my cousins and I grew up in a matriarchy of love and devotion. No one ever had to guess, with any of these amazing women, how they felt about you. If they loved you, you knew it without a doubt. They did everything they could to make us feel loved, treasured and protected.

From my mother, I learned some pretty invaluable lessons. Through the way she lived her life, I learned how to love and be generous with my heart, how to look at the positive side of any situation, how to do research to help make a decision, creativity, flexibility, patience, resilience, independence, self-sufficiency and not to let fear stand in my way. Together, my mother and I painted our house, figured out how to lay tile and linoleum flooring, tended our vegetable and flower gardens -- although the rabbits ate most of our crops, we kept planting anyway. I learned from each of these experiences and am, in turn, teaching them to my children.

She always had projects in varying degrees of completion. Creative projects that she dedicated herself to 100 percent. For PTA fundraisers, she would organize fashion shows, write whole scripts for plays and songs to parody famous songs and movies, she designed newsletters and organized phone chains. She wanted to be involved in my education as much as possible, and her long-term commitment to the PTA was her way of doing it.

She loved to go to Atlantic City and play the slot machines and people watch and used to take frequent trips there with my grandmother and great aunts. She and Allan loved to go fishing out of Captree with their grandchildren. She loved to get together with her girlfriends or cousins and go out to dinner for a night of laughter. She loved to hang out with her grandkids, nieces, and nephews and play with them and continue the tradition of arts and crafts projects. She loved to throw parties and fill her home with the sound of laughter of her friends and family. She loved to come over to my house and play board games or bake cookies with my kids and me. My mother loved to spend time with her best friends, Marie and Tommy, talking to all hours of the night, going shopping and just being together. We spent days, long weekends, and our annual Christmas Eves with them making treasured memories as members of their extended family.

I’d like to share a funny story that I have always loved from my mother’s adolescence. Somewhere around 1960, my grandparents were away on a trip, shortly after my mother got her driver’s license. Mom was eager to drive, and somehow, she persuaded her younger sister, my Aunt Maggie, that they should adopt a duck for a pet. She convinced her sister that their parents would think this was the greatest idea, and they drove from Syosset to Sayville for this duck. It was a cute duckling that waddled around the house. Needless to say, my grandparents were none too pleased when they returned home but saw how in love their daughters were with this duck and let the duck stay. My grandmother even bought the duck a red leash, and they walked it around their neighborhood in Syosset. But ducks grow, so does their mess, noise and ability to climb two flights of stairs. Eventually, my grandfather couldn’t stand it any longer and tried to give the duck away to a restaurant called Villa Victor because they had a lovely duck pond. He drove over, placed the duck in the pond and drove away, but the duck followed him. So, he drove back and again placed the duck in the pond, and again the duck followed him. After the third or fourth attempt at this, he finally paid a gas station attendant from across the street to hold the duck until he was out of sight, then place him in the pond with the other ducks. He then told his daughters that the duck was better off there in the nice pond with his friends. So, when I heard this story, and I was asking to take the baby chicks home from my first-grade class, my mother couldn’t say no.

Toward the end, my mother’s world shrank as she struggled with illness, but I know that her love and devotion to her family and friends never shrank—her heart was full of love and cherished memories. Her impact on all of our lives will never be forgotten as we will treasure our own private memories of her forever. Someone once said, Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending. Let’s make today the day we all start anew and recommit ourselves to living the best lives we can, stay in touch between milestone events, try something new, call an old friend, let go of an old grudge. Let’s pay tribute to my mother by keeping her commitment to friends and family in our hearts.

The funeral and shiva were hard to get through as I found myself explaining excerpts of the story of our last year or two to countless people. I was trying my best to be strong for my children, to provide them with comfort and peace, but inside I was screaming.

I was desolate and outraged that she died while all that had transpired between us was unresolved. I felt wounded. Incomplete. Shattered. I had no closure. How would I heal the emptiness and betrayal I felt after my mother chose drugs over me? I had found some measure of forgiveness through the photographs that helped me to eulogize her respectfully, but I was still aching for comfort from the woman she had been before the disease of drug addiction took her away from me—the woman she had been many years before, who genuinely loved me and was proud of me. I hadn’t seen that woman in so long, it was hard to remember who she was. During the day, the distractions of life diverted my thoughts and occupied my mind, but every night, I slept with a hole in my heart.

A few weeks later, while going through her things, I found a letter she had written to me shortly before my daughter was born, twelve years earlier, while I was pregnant and before the very heavy drug abuse started. She was facing another intestinal resection surgery for her Crohn’s disease and, being the hypochondriac she was, she thought she was going to die on the operating table. She didn’t die then; instead, she had filed this letter away in her locked filing cabinet and had not given to me, but now I had it. In this letter, written in her unmistakably neat script handwriting on a piece of colorful paper depicting a sunset, she told me how much she loved my children and me. We were the light of her life and heart. No mother could be prouder than she was of me. I had trouble focusing on the words through the flood of tears as I read the letter over and over. This was her reaching toward me from beyond to give me the forgiveness and closure I needed. She heard me. Somehow, she led me to the letter at the moment I needed it the most.

In the six years since her death, I have come to know my mother more than I knew her in life. She was beloved and respected by many. She is missed daily, and the gifts of her spirit live on in her best friends, my family, my cousins, my children, and in me. What I learned is that we are all flawed and struggling.

Drug addiction affects more than just the addict. Its far-reaching effects change relationships and ruin lives. Friends and family are powerless and have no ability to fix the addiction if the addict refuses and is in denial.

We are each responsible for and capable of healing only ourselves.

We are the only ones on this planet over whom we have any control. Accepting powerlessness over others is the first step toward our own healing. We are all on our own paths, and sometimes we are lucky to have our paths merge with those we love and who can give us love in return, as well as guidance, advice, encouragement, entertainment, laughter, and hope.

Every day, we need to reach out and share our hearts and souls with those we love. Today and every day, we need to let them know how much we cherish them and the blessings they bring to our lives. Now is the time. Now is all we have. I have made it my practice to tell those whom I love that I love them every time I see them. Who knows when the last time will be? I never want to let anything important remain unsaid.

For weeks after my mother died, I was in tears. I’d be calm for a time and then flooded with sorrow all over again. Grief is not linear. I wept for the loss of my mother and the loss of the hope I had that she would get better and once again be the mother who loved me.

Alone in my house, I was sitting on my beige striped living room couch on a Sunday night. The house was eerily quiet because my children were with their father. Suddenly, I heard the upstairs toilet flush. This was not water pressure equalizing in the pipes. This was a full flush. No one else was home. At the time, I had no pets except for two finches named after characters in To Kill a Mockingbird: Jem Finch and Scout Finch. I felt some sort of energy come down the stairs, sweep around the house, pass through me and out the back of the house. This energy was pure, peaceful, and cold (in temperature). I had a very clear feeling that my mother flushed the toilet. Let me tell you, my mother had Crohn’s disease, so if there was a household noise that I would associate with her, it was a toilet flushing. Sorry, but it’s true. Before this moment, I was a hard-science atheist with zero belief in an afterlife, but that suddenly and irrevocably shifted. Despite having no explanation as to how, I was sure my mother had been there, and I had an overwhelming feeling of peace.

Several days later, I had a dream in which she was standing behind me in her bedroom in the Commack, Long Island house where I grew up. I was leaning over, resting my head on my folded arms on top of her dark, wooden dresser; she moved my dark brown hair away from the back of my neck and kissed me there lightly. I felt her move my hair and kiss me. The movement of my hair partially woke me up from sleep, and I felt the kiss on my neck. I knew she was in the room standing next to my bed. I didn’t see her, but knew she was there. I smelled her perfume. I talked to her. I wasn’t nervous or scared, although my heart was racing. I told her I love her and miss her and hope she is at peace.

Chapter 2

A Psychic’s Vision

You might have strong beliefs for or against spiritualism. I honor and respect that, and I don’t necessarily recommend that visiting a psychic is for everyone. I don’t claim to understand exactly what happened, but this experience brought me closer to understanding my relationship with my mother and grandmother and gave me hope in the next life at a time when I was feeling empty. Truthfully, I was a little freaked out as this was something I never considered before.

One morning on my way to work I suddenly decided that I would seek a psychic to get some answers and resolution. This was a very out of character thing for me to do. My mother believed in psychic power. I did not. I had never even considered this before and had no idea whom to see. I did a Google search of "Long