It was 1972. Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. When I search my brain for memories, I’m never sure if they’re scenes from my past or snippets of an early Woody Allen comedy. My parents were born-and-bred Bronx Jews. My father was a first-generation American, his mother and father part of the Russian immigrant exodus hoping for a better life. While my young parents were busy building a family (me and my younger brother) the outside world burst with the promise of civil rights, colorful polyester pants suits and disco. It was a more manageable circus — though still a circus — than the flowery-revolution and mayhem of the sixties. The Vietnam war is over, Richard Nixon is President and The Godfather is released. Against this backdrop, my young life was less wild but no less out-of-control feeling, especially as I navigated the temporary loss of my mother.

I wasn’t what you’d describe as an “easy child.” When I was one year old, I learned to shout in somewhat coherent sentences to get myself out of my crib. “Out Amie crib!” I did it over and over again until “I won.” It was less of a game and more of a fight to the death. When I was two, I’d shriek if my mother tried to put me in pants instead of a dress, kicking and punching until I got my way. At three, it was my shoes. Unless they were tied so tight my skin pinched, I refused to leave the house. I remember the way I often felt tight and sad, an angry pit of exhaustion bubbling in my young stomach. It’s familiar even now, over forty-years later.

At three years old, with a newborn brother, I was barely aware of anything or anyone beyond my young mother. She was my everything. My love and my nemesis. My comfort and the target and cause of my anger and frustration. Her floor-length, clingy red-and-yellow patterned dresses and giant silver-hooped earrings fascinated me. The cigarette that dangled from her fingers and the spiky high-heeled shoes she wore, even in the house morning and night, take up space as important characters in these memories. My mother’s moodiness and emotional swings were easy foils for my own erratic behavior.

Storms brewed within the walls of our apartment. Storms which developed and grew and moved and shifted as the clouds, depending upon my parents’ moods. Depending upon my mood. Depending upon what the TV screen flashed or what my grandmother droned, to my mother, on the other end of the phone-line that day. A steady supply of matchsticks ready to be ripped against a strip of sulfur at any moment. A toddler, I breathed in the fumes daily. Anxiety coursed my own veins fueling my frustration.

We lived in a boxing ring, dancing around each other, waiting to face off and never sure when the first punch would be thrown.

My father was young, like my mother. Not teenage young. But innocent- young in the way that most men who marry at twenty-three, and take on the responsibilities of a family and a career at twenty-five, are. He wore his hair picked into a fuzzy brown afro. Everyday he zipped himself into his suit like a sad superhero fighting for nothing more than a simple, regular life and headed to his job at a bank, where he lived by order and rules.

My parents’ relationship was imbalanced and clearly doomed. Even at that young age, I felt the trail of desperation as they went through their days and nights.

My mother wasn’t ill-intentioned when she married my father. She needed an escape route from her life under her abusive father’s roof and my father’s nice-guy, no-waves demeanor provided the map, the route and the destination. My father had been beaten down by his own overbearing Russian alcoholic father, a furrier by trade, and had little time for his timid over-protective mother who ironically offered little protection from my grandfather’s emotional elements. My dad was a rule-follower terrified to break out of the good-boy mold.

They came together — my mother and father — broken and lost.

We lived in a boxing ring, dancing around each other, waiting to face off and never sure when the first punch would be thrown. At least it felt that way to a three-year old with a big mouth in a Queens apartment in 1972. It was these emotional swings that became the crux of one of my first memories.

I could see it from the moment my mother was led from our large, carpeted apartment, past the black, faux-leather couch in the foyer, my father holding one arm, my grandmother the other. She wasn’t well. Even at my young age, I understood that on some level. Her stiff brown hair sprayed straight, escaped in frizzy confusion. Her eyes were open and yet it appeared she couldn’t see a thing. She especially, terrifyingly, couldn’t see me.

Wide-eyed and petrified I watched them. Sleepy and scared I tracked my mother like a wild animal, as they steered her gently to the front door.

“Mommy! No!” I am close to hysteria.

“Don’t leave me, Mommy! Peez! No! Mommy!” I’m certain I will collapse and die on the spot.

My grandmother gingerly drops my mother’s arm and comes to me and in her thick Bronx accent tells me, “Amie, Mommy will be okay. She needs to leave for awhile…to get better. Stop screaming.”

My Dad says nothing. Like an overgrown little boy he grips my mother’s elbow and stares at me. I read his eyes: I’m sorry, Amie. I have nothing. His silence engulfs me like a lonely fog.

If I could, I would chase after my mother into the dark, running as if in a dream, unfamiliar sites a distraction on my way to find her.

No one tells me anything. Except. She’ll be back. We don’t know when.
Lindsey, the teenager who lived on the ground floor of our mid-century, brick apartment building, comes up to spend the night with me.

I scream. I shriek. I cry as if my body will burst, spilling guts over the rust rug, sticking to the threads of the shaggy pieces where I pretend my weebles sneak through magical forests on happier days.

My grandmother tells me to stop crying so loudly. Lindsey holds me tight so I won’t run away. If I could, I would chase after my mother into the dark, running as if in a dream, unfamiliar sites a distraction on my way to find her. The lady with the lacquered brown hair, stunningly strong nose and painfully vulnerable blue eyes.

I miss her deeply already. She needs help. She is frayed, buckling into herself. Leaning on my father, gently propped up by my compact grandmother with the stern face.

And then she is gone. I’m left with the sounds of my sobs, hiccuping into my babysitter’s red bodysuit top. She holds me tight. My baby brother sleeps through it all. Pleasantly unaware of his own abandonment.

I dont remember falling asleep in my bed. But I did drift off at some point, the weight of a million dry tears upon my cheeks. I don’t remember the next morning either. Although I’m sure my tears began again upon seeing my father and grandmother, both exhausted after a long night of not sleeping.

There were days and then weeks we spent without my mother, the only real comfort I had ever known up until that point in my short life. Terror gripped me in the early mornings when I was reminded in that shimmery static between sleep and wakefulness of her gone-ness. When all else failed, even if my mother yelled and screamed, she just as fiercely loved and hugged and kissed. The softness and kindness of life seemed to fall off the ends of the earth and though I knew my father loved me, he did not offer the comfort and connection that my mother did. I was empty, floating, cloudy, and confused.

I am not allowed to come up to the hospital ward to help retrieve my mother. My grandmother tells me my mother has “rested up” and that “she is no longer sick.”

It’s a sunny day, but chilly. The clarity of weather that New York City autumn breeds so well. When the sun is strong enough to cheer you but the temperature stays crisp as you crunch dead leaves beneath your shoe. Outside, amidst the big hair and brown sedans, wide ties and short skirts, I can breathe. Manhattan was still gritty and base in 1972, with dirty streets and color. But when I step out of our apartment building holding my father’s hand, I gulp the air like I’m on the top of a mountain.

We arrive at the hospital and allow our bright blue AMC Hornet station wagon to idle at the curb. I am in the backseat. My baby brother lay swaddled in my grandmother’s arms, outside the car, bouncing with the nervous tapping of her patent-leather shoed feet on the sidewalk, waiting for my dad to appear with my mother on his arm once again.

I am not allowed to come up to the hospital ward to help retrieve my mother. My grandmother tells me my mother has “rested up” and that “she is no longer sick.” I don’t ask any questions beyond, “when is she coming out?” It seems to me the only question that really matters.

And then she is there. Walking out of the building slowly, unsure of herself, as if nervously avoiding land mines.

She looks tired. She doesn’t seem all that rested to me. But then she smiles. And the world stops vibrating, the fuzzy edges come into focus and the heaviness weighing on my tiny head and heart disappear. My mother is here, right now, headed towards me. She is back in my world, and for all intents and purposes she may as well have risen from the grave.

I cry. I hug her legs covered by the rough barrier of her pantyhose. It is my mother in the flesh. The same softness of her body, the same auburn brown hair, and kind eyes peer down at me as I imagine melting into her body.

She died the night she disappeared through our front door. Or, at least, it felt to me as if she had. I had no idea where she was going or if I’d ever see her again. I only knew that a universe-sized black hole wavered at the age of my tiny world, waiting to suck me in, if she did not return.

Just as suddenly, she returned. Sort of. She was shaky, still. It’s true; or, she appeared that way to my three year old eyes. Weak, too thin. But she wasn’t flattened completely. Her strength had been muted by those with louder voices, stomped on by heavier shoes and more power. It was limping, with each uncomfortable step. But not gone.

There was a calm during those days without her — both within me and within the walls of our apartment.

Many years later my mother revealed to me the reason for her stay at the hospital. A mixture of pills prescribed by her doctor who, at that time in the early 1970s thought nothing of offering a cocktail of medication to help ‘control her anxiety’, and ended up scrambling her emotions uncontrollably. A break-down brought on by her doctor’s willful ignorance of her very real feelings of frustration, depression, inferiority, as she clawed at the air, cried loudly, blamed herself — with no one to guide her through the foggy space between leaving her parents’ home and becoming a parent herself.

Through these years of just-married, still uncovering her true self she was still a woman who had been beaten down, assaulted in her female-ness in multiple ways, throughout her young life, trying to understand her place in the world.

It was, I imagine, a story with which her doctor was entirely unfamiliar and so chose not to care — or to care in his own harmful way.

It’s also a story, I assume, many young women of that time can relate to. Women were infantilized, condescended to, and treated by the mainstream medical establishment as if their emotional state were nothing more than a toddler’s tantrum phase: something to be managed with proper tools so as to make sure they don’t hurt themselves or others. Women were not generally understood or treated as human beings.

I remained quiet in the time without her. Maybe unsurprisingly it was easy to tamp down my frustration and anger with my mother gone. There was a calm during those days without her — both within me and within the walls of our apartment. But there was also a flatness to our world that seemed scary. We — my father and I (and baby brother) — did not know how to exist together or apart, without the turmoil.

My mother believed she was on her way towards becoming herself, having shed the first two layers of now-dead skin: first, her angry father and then my methodical, straight-and-narrow father.

In time, my mother realized that my father’s zeal for structure was suffocating her desire for excitement. She wanted high-heels, cigarettes, poetry, and music. She wanted truth and vision and beauty. She craved complete acceptance in her incompleteness. He lived for the clarity of knowing exactly what was in front of him: a solid job that paid the bills, a strong family unit, and the ease of assimilation. She eventually left him and his broken heart behind, taking my brother and I with her.

Walking out the door of our apartment, three years later, into that bright, patterned, colorful world at 28 years old, with two children and a sad past, minimal work experience and a blurry future, my mother was every bit the tower of strength her doctor tried to demolish. She was petite and hard. Energy and love and fury. Uncertainty and vision. My mother believed she was on her way towards becoming herself, having shed the first two layers of now-dead skin: first, her angry father and then my methodical, straight-and-narrow father. She may not have reached her final destination at that moment but I saw a strength and determination in my young mother that I’ll never forget.

So, while this is my own story, as a daughter, of desertion and security; sadness and strength, it’s also my mother’s story of her irrepressible desire not to remain stuck in her own circumstances, in part created by a chronically sexist society. Her physical break down happened because of the dangerous mix of medications her doctor carelessly prescribed. But her emotional state, well, a constant misalignment between what you know yourself to be — a human being with strength, fear, love, creativity, anger, passion — and what society says you should be, can result in emotional trauma. Of that I have no doubt.

My mother tried hard, harder than many, to paint a different picture of what it meant to be female for her only daughter. And while I know her own struggles, like this one, cast deep shadows that I work, to exhaustion often, to step out of, there is a light that was released those days and weeks as well. It was the spark of recognition in my mother’s heart and soul that she could be more than her life up until that point — that she was more than what she had been taught over the years. It was the charge to keep fighting, loving, and making sense of this world for herself, for me, for the daughter I would someday have and for all the girls and women of the world.