Mother, Can You Not? (6 page)

B
iologically speaking, I am my mother’s only child. In my mother’s eyes, however, I have loads of siblings! Of course, that’s only if you count our pack of five dogs and two cats as humans, which my mom definitely does. Her intense love and scrutiny extend to each and every member of our family, no matter how much some of us may drool.

Just look at her boundless devotion to our (arguably psychotic) Chihuahua named Thor. When he started
viciously growling at walls and seeing things that weren’t there, thousands were spent on doggy therapy bills, doggy Prozac, and doggy acupuncture. (Which is a real thing!) Once someone is part of the Friedman-Siegel family, they will never be left behind. Canine, feline, or otherwise.

Practically speaking, what this means is that each time our front door opens, a gaggle of violently yelping Chihuahuas alternate between piddling, wagging their tails, and humping legs with the kind of excitement I’d imagine Snow White felt when Prince Charming woke her up (though I doubt Walt Disney allowed any humping). My mother always shouts a greeting over the pandemonium and shrugs her shoulders as if to say, “What can you do,
right
?”

In fact, there is a lot she could do. For instance, the first time my boyfriend visited, she could have left the dogs in my father’s office, instead of allowing my siblings to gangbang his ankles.

On the bright side, though, we never have to worry about Jehovah’s Witnesses.

And the cats? Humans and dogs alike understand that the feline occupants of my parents’ home have first right of refusal for all horizontal surfaces. But no one has ever ruled the house quite like the all-white cat we inventively named Snowflake. Every parent has a favorite child, whether they’re willing to admit it or not, and when I was growing up, my mom’s heart unquestionably belonged to this little furball.

Snowflake was just a three-week-old kitten when we found her cowering in the middle of a twisty street in the Hollywood Hills. My mother swerved to the side of the road and leapt out of her car, scooping Snowflake into her arms.

That tiny kitten looked up with one green eye and one crusted blue eye, her malnourished frame covered in fleas, and my mom fell in love. She spent the next month nursing her back to health, bottle-feeding her, and composing songs for her. Hell, she practically breast-fed her.

And when Snowflake grew up, my mother treated this cat better than she treated me—she bought cat
toys like it was her job, she brought Snowflake to “take your child to work day” instead of me, she forced my dad to prepare her home-cooked meals (mostly wild-caught salmon), and she even bought her a special orthopedic cat bed.

So, when Snowflake died suddenly, my mother was devastated. Like, borderline psychotic break devastated. Unfortunately, her grief didn’t manifest with tears or weight gain; her anguish presented itself in the middle of the cat funeral being held in our backyard when she leapt into the tiny cat grave my father was filling and snatched the box containing Snowflake’s ashes from the dirt.

“No!” My mother clutched the container to her chest. “She can’t be in the cold ground like this!”

From then on, whenever one of our animals passed away, a place on our mantel was cleared for a new designer urn. At this point, our fireplace is 90 percent animal remains. I just thank God my mother never got hooked on taxidermy.

Like most normal humans who lose a family pet,
my dad thought it would be a good idea to get a replacement cat (after the appropriate grieving period). When he suggested this at dinner one night, making sure to qualify the idea with, “Not that anyone could ever replace Snowflake…” my mother spat at him, “So if you die, I should just go out the next day, find another husband, and pretend you never existed?”
Grief takes many forms.

That weekend, my father and I dragged my mom to the city animal shelter, and a woman named Pat with a military haircut greeted us at the door of the cat room with a brusque: “Do not open the cages. If you want to see a cat, talk to me.”

It was a bright, fluorescently lit space that only marginally made you feel like you were gagging on the scent of cat urine. The walls of the small room were lined with cages, and my mother was the last to enter. Her arms were folded tightly across her chest, her sour attitude palpable.

I noticed a cage in the far corner of the room. It was barely visible, and intentionally pushed off to the side.
Inside was a tiny all-white kitten with blue eyes, even smaller than Snowflake was when we found her on the street.

“Oh my God! Mom, come look at this kitten!”

“We don’t need another animal—” She trailed off abruptly as she came face-to-face with Snowflake’s spitting image. “Oh my God!” She reached toward the lever on the cage.

“I said, don’t open the cages!” Pat shouted from behind us.

“Oh, right. Can we see this one?” My mom gestured toward the kitten.

“No.”

“Why not? Is she already adopted?”

My mother turned back to the cage, clearly convinced that this kitten was her precious Snowflake reincarnated.

“No, we have to put it down. It’s sick, and it’s too young to survive on its own.”

“So you’re just going to
kill
her? What’s wrong with her?”

I could see my mother’s blood pressure rising as Pat stepped between her and Snowflake Reincarnated.

In Pat’s defense, the sad truth is that many animals, even perfectly
healthy
ones, are euthanized at animal shelters across the country every year due to overcrowding.

“It’s just too weak, and we think it’s got intestinal parasites…listen, just go find another cat. This one’s too sick to adopt.” Pat shoved the cage farther out of view.

“You people call this an animal shelter?” my mother asked, her voice getting louder with each word. “Ha! More like an execution chamber! I’m not leaving until you let me adopt that kitten!” Her skin turned three shades redder than I had ever seen it get.

“Can’t do it.”

Now, I’m not sure if this is an official government policy or if Pat was just an asshole who didn’t want to do extra paperwork, but she shrugged and clearly was not going to budge.

“Oh, really? Well, then, how about I call all the local
news stations, and you can explain to them what part of your job tells you to murder innocent kittens when there are families who are begging you to let them adopt them!”

“Okay, Mom, let’s just take it easy for a second.” I touched her arm.

“Take it easy? I will handcuff myself to these cages before I let them murder that kitten.”

As someone who had been arrested on multiple occasions for sit-ins and protests for causes she felt strongly about, my mother was not bluffing.

“Okay, let’s just all calm down here,” my dad intervened, recognizing that my mom’s rage-o-meter was dialed up to ASSAULT.

“I’m perfectly calm.” Pat folded her arms.

My mother paused briefly and then began to violently sob. This should have been the first red flag, as I had never once seen her cry. She was shrieking with apparent grief and turned toward Pat, sniffling.

“I’m so s-sorry about that,” she said. “I just lost my baby cat, Snowflake, and I’m just—devastated…I’m so s-sorry—”

And there was red flag number two! To my knowledge, my mother has apologized a grand total of five times in her life. And one of those times involved a member of the National Guard and tear gas.

“Can you please forgive me?! OH GOD, MY SNOWFLAKE!!!!!!!”

Her words dissolved into more over-the-top bawling, and she threw herself across Pat’s chest, pulling the woman into a bear hug.

“Uh, that’s okay.” Pat awkwardly patted my mother’s arm as she tried to inch away. “Hey, I’ll let you guys take a look around. Just come get me when you want to see a cat.” The door swung shut behind her.

My father and I walked over to my wailing mother, preparing to console her. As soon as the latch on the door clicked shut, she lifted her head and shrugged us off.

“Is she gone? Give me your purse.”

“What? Are you okay?”

She yanked the messenger bag from my shoulder.

“What are you doing, Mom?!”

“Michael, go stand over there. Look out the door
and tell me if she’s coming back. Kate, you too!” She glanced over her shoulder at the door and hurried to Snowflake Reincarnated’s cage.
My mother was about to steal a cat from the pound.

“Mom, STOP!” I reached for my purse. “No, you absolutely cannot do this!”

“Just guard the door.”

“Kim! Move away from the cat cages.”

“Michael, don’t even start with me. They’re going to MURDER Snowflake!”

Before either of us could intervene, my mom opened the latch, lifted the trembling kitten out of the cage, and gently placed it in the bottom of my messenger bag.

Unfortunately, when my mother closed the flap over Snowflake Reincarnated, we discovered that Snowflake Reincarnated did not like being carried in a small, dark handbag with peppermint gum fumes and spare change. In fact, Snowflake Reincarnated hated that.

We also discovered that the sickly, tiny body of Snowflake Reincarnated housed lungs on par with
Pavarotti. As soon as the bag was closed, the kitten began meowing at an eardrum-shredding volume.

My mother, my father, and I all froze, impressed as much as we were panicked. For those unfamiliar with the sound of a cat in distress, it most closely resembles the sounds a woman makes during natural childbirth.

We tore out of the cat room, while Snowflake Reincarnated wailed. The only way out of the shelter was through the dog run—a narrow hallway surrounded on both sides by long rows of dog kennels.

Now, as you may have heard, cats and dogs sometimes don’t get along. I have never been more keenly aware of this concept than when my mother grabbed my wrist and pulled me into an all-out sprint down this hallway. My dad followed, and as we ran, Snowflake Reincarnated meowed like no one was watching, and fifty-plus dogs erupted into a symphony of woofing. The deep barks of pit bulls tangled with the sharp yips of terriers to create a truly earsplitting uproar as we charged down the hall.

I glanced over my shoulder as we reached the door.
Pat emerged at the far end of the corridor and ran over to the first cage, trying to figure out what had caused all the dogs to riot.

We rushed outside before she spotted us and made it out to the car unscathed. My mom carefully reached down into the messenger bag and pulled Snowflake Reincarnated onto her lap, clutching the kitten protectively against her chest.

“Drive, Michael!”

“Kim! Have you lost your mind!?” He sat in the driver’s seat, dumbfounded.

“She’s an innocent kitten!” My mom looked back at the shelter door.

“Enough!” I said. “We don’t have time to argue right now! Dad…it’s done, we need to get out of here. Mom…you’re a lunatic, we’re never taking you outside again. Now let’s go!!!”

My father peeled out of the parking lot and floored it all the way to our veterinarian. We also stopped to pick up medication, kitten formula, and every accessory Petco had to offer, and I’m happy to report that we did in fact nurse Snowflake Reincarnated back to
health. The kitten went on to live a long, happy life as a
male
cat named Buster. (Because we busted him out of the pound!
GET IT?
) Buster was sick for a long time and needed a great deal of attention once we got him home, but he was family the second my mom looked into his hopeful little eyes.

And this is one of the best things my mother has ever taught me: you never, ever give up on a family member. Even if it turns out that
she
has a cat penis and is not the reincarnated spirit of your beloved dead pet after all.

W
hen I was growing up, I relied on my mother to lull me to sleep every night with a new installment from her original bedtime saga,
The Teeny Tiny Tim Chronicles.
Each chapter would begin the same way: “Once upon a time, there was a teeeeeeeeny teeny teeny tiny teeny tiny teeny tiny little mouse, and his name was Teeny Tiny Tim…” and would end with, “and when he grew up, he went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and had a wonderful career and a happy life!”

The stories centered on a mouse called Teeny Tiny Tim and his mother, Ethel the (human) Opera Singer, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a beautiful apartment with a terrace that overlooked Central Park. The Teeny Tiny Tim character was living my mother’s idealized version of my life in that moment—if I was playing water polo, Tiny Tim was the
captain of his tiny mouse team. If I was studying for a history test in school, Tiny Tim was on the National Mall, meeting with the president.

Recently, I was thinking about these stories and realized that there was an interesting thematic trend: stalking. This was a crucial part of the narrative for about 95 percent of them. For instance, after being told by a Broadway director that a mouse would never be cast in one of his shows, Ethel and Tim chased him all around Manhattan, shouting, “YOU’RE A MICE-IST! LET ALL SPECIES ACT!! SPECIES BLIND CASTING!!!” Of course, Tim got the part. In another story, he wasn’t allowed to ice-skate at the Central Park rink. Ethel and Tim marched into the mayor’s office and refused to leave until he reversed the city’s controversial “mice on ice” ban. In another rather prescient installment, Tim and Ethel waited outside of the prestigious Dalton School after Tim was denied admission. As soon as the headmaster emerged, Tim made an impassioned case for Mice-ffirmative Action. The next day Tiny Tim was dressed in his tiny Dalton uniform, holding his tiny
mouse pencil, crushing Advanced Placement calculus like any other mammal in the room.

And this early emphasis (brainwashing) makes sense, in light of how much stalking we ultimately did, especially as it related to my education and, more specifically, to my campaign to get into college.

During high school, my mother and I embarked on an utterly miserable week of college tours that nearly led to a matricidal incident on I-95 South. Anyone who has gone on a college tour with their mother can probably relate to the rage-inducing claustrophobia that comes from spending a week in a car with the one person in the world more invested in college admissions than you. Between the teen angst and the menopausal mood swings, the car becomes a pressure cooker of hormones, ready to explode at the slightest perceived criticism. That said, I’m willing to bet that
your
mother did not map out the local Fantastic Sams in each college town and force you to get a blowout before every interview.

All the screaming and murderous fantasies became
worthwhile the moment I walked onto Princeton’s campus. Maybe it was the university’s undergraduate focus, maybe it was the preppy man candy, or perhaps it was the vast selection of snacks at the twenty-four-hour Wawa on campus (The Wa!), but Princeton became my first choice. The crusade to get in overshadowed everything else in my life.

I attended every information session Princeton offered in the state of California and met with any Princeton alumnus in the Los Angeles metropolitan area who would agree to see me. Literally anyone. I even spent an hour with a shy urologist, who was as perplexed as I was to be talking about his pre-med experiences with a student who was about as interested in bladders as he was in musical theater.

I wanted to go to Princeton more than I had wanted anything in my life up to that point. I spent every non-application-focused moment poring over college admissions message boards, trying to calculate my odds of getting in based on the chatter of a hundred equally neurotic, type-A teenagers on CollegeConfidential.com.
I was up for anything that might give me an edge over my Internet chat room archnemesis: PrincetonGuy11. Anything to wipe that smug “double legacy” digital smile off his face.

When my mother told me that meeting and impressing a Princeton admissions officer named Mr. Bowman might give me that edge, my response was, “Great. Let’s hunt him down,” and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look more proud of me. According to a fellow mom she trusted, Mr. Bowman was a champion of arty candidates (like me), and Princeton had just received a $100 million grant for the arts, so he had more pull than ever in the decisions room. My mother translated this to: “If you meet and impress him you’ll get in; if you don’t, you’ll end up at DeVry.”

As soon as I was on board, she picked up the phone and dialed the number to Princeton’s switchboard (from memory). She placed the call on speaker, so I could hear as well. Also, because cancer.

“Hello…yes, Mr. Bowman’s office, please, in Admissions.” She was using a beyond-unconvincing
southern accent to disguise her voice. The Princeton switchboard operator, whom my mom spoke to roughly fifteen times a day, recognized her voice immediately.

“Oh, hi, Kim, let me transfer you.” The phone clicked and began ringing, and my mother thickened her drawl.

“Hello, this is Mr. Bowman’s office.”

“Well, hi there, my name is Mrs.…Carpenheimer.” First,
not
a real name. Perhaps it was a cross between her gastroenterologist, Dr. Oppenheimer, and just the word “carpet”? Either way, it was certainly not the name of a woman with the genteel southern accent my mother was affecting.

“Now, my daughter’s applyin’ for the class a 2011, and I’m a-wonderin’ when that delightful Mr. Bowman’s gonna be a gracin’ the campus with his next admission information session?” And we suddenly shifted from Atlanta high society to a banana-mash distillery in the Appalachian Mountains.

The plan was to schedule our annual New York family trip to coincide with his schedule and wrangle a meeting with him at Princeton. I’m not sure how
we would have done this, as admissions officers aren’t supposed to meet with prospective students one-on-one, but I’m pretty sure my mother would have faked a heart attack if it meant alone time for us in the ambulance with him.

“Oh, this time of year, Mr. Bowman is only hosting admission information sessions in the South, Mrs.…Carpenheimer, is it?”

I couldn’t help but feel a pang of disappointment. I could rationally see that meeting Mr. Bowman probably wouldn’t make or break my entire application, but I was like an addict, and good news about Princeton was my crack. Any setback, no matter how minor, was crushing.

“Yes, yes that’s right, Carpenheimer. I see. Well, can you at least tell me when he’ll be returning?” My mother’s accent slipped back to her native “Jersey Girl” as her frustration mounted.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t. And he’s going on a much deserved vacation as soon as he finishes this tour.”

“Oh really?!” My mom perked up, and I prayed she wouldn’t actually say what I thought she might. “Well,
where is he going to be vacationing?!” Of course she said it. The conversation pretty much ended there. She shrugged as she hung up, “Well, it looks like we’re headed south!”

We turned back to the Princeton website to research Mr. Bowman’s schedule of southern information sessions. The only one that worked with our budget was in Virginia. Two weeks later we used all our miles and were on the cheapest plane my mother could find. She called the hotel the day before the admissions event to confirm his travel plans, pretending to be Mrs. Bowman.
*
¹
So, we knew he would walk into the hotel at some point on the day of the information session. Unfortunately, we did not know
when
that would be. What this meant was that my mother and I would need to camp out in the lobby all day if we wanted to intercept him and sneak in a private conversation. Naturally, we did.

After a miserable red-eye flight, we walked into the lobby of a Courtyard Marriott hotel in Virginia at 8 a.m.
on the big day. The well-trained front-desk clerk rose from his seat and asked us if he could help us check in. In an unbeatably sneaky move, my mother told him we were meeting an old friend of hers from high school. When he politely asked, “Oh, where did you go to high school?” she said, “South.” Just the word “South.”
So smooth.
After a few hours in the lobby, I’m pretty sure he thought we were a mother-daughter call-girl team looking for johns. I felt like Julia Roberts in the lesser-known classic
Neurotic Woman
.
*
²

At 4 p.m., a man wearing an orange-and-black tie (Princeton’s school colors) walked through the front doors. Showtime! My mother and I looked at each other, steeling ourselves for what would be the performance of a lifetime. You think Lady Macbeth is a challenging role? Try feigning surprise after you have traveled 3,000 miles and just spent eight butt-numbing hours on a plywood bench listening to a loop of torturous lobby music. We were ready, though. I had my entire résumé memorized as dialogue, and my mom
had her scripted “spontaneous” interjections down pat. I channeled Meryl Streep, and we approached him casually.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bowman?!”

“Yes…?” He turned toward us. He looked exactly like the photos from all the internet stalking we had done—classic Northeast Ivy Leaguer: khakis, blazer with leather elbow patches, and of course, a fun tie to pull the look together.

“This is such a crazy coincidence!” I laughed with my carefully cultivated “surprised delight” giggle. “I’m Kate Siegel. We met at an information session at Princeton a few months ago; you probably don’t remember me.” I knew for a fact that he did not remember me, because while it was true that I attended an information session, Mr. Bowman was not the admissions officer who hosted it. “I’m applying next year. This is my mom, Kim. We’re from California, but we’re in Virginia for a family bat mitzvah! And I just love coming back here, because this is where I won my national speaking competition. What are you doing here?”
Résumé bullet point one, check!

I paused as rehearsed, waiting for him to ask me about my speech contest, but also entirely prepared to humble brag unprompted.

“I’m here to host an information session. What a happy coincidence. And whose bat mitzvah? Mazel Tov!”

I froze. I couldn’t remember my line! Well, technically, I hadn’t rehearsed an appropriate line; in all our résumé prep, we hadn’t cast a bat mitzvah alibi relative. Sensing that I was choking, my mother improvised.

“Thank you for the Mazels! Her baby cousin Jamie Schwartz is becoming a woman! By the way, Kate doesn’t like to brag, but I’m the mom. That speech competition was a big deal. She won a big scholarship.” We were back on script, and the act continued flawlessly.

I asked all my carefully rehearsed questions about the theater department, subtly slipping in the impressive artistic elements of my résumé. Each query struck the perfect balance: bragging as much as humanly possible about my accomplishments while still being vaguely reminiscent of a question about the school. My forgotten line was a distant memory, and our play
was going better than I hoped. At the last second, my mother decided to veer off script:

“Are you headed back to Princeton tomorrow? We’re driving up to New York, so we’d be happy to give you a ride. Princeton’s on the way! It’d be easy!”

It would not be easy. In fact, if he accepted my mother’s offer, we would need to cancel our flight and stay overnight. That aside, what on earth would I talk to this man about for a full four hours? I had nothing left! I blew my entire résumé in this conversation! Even worse, what would my
mother
say? As he tilted his head, I saw my entire high school career flash before my eyes, my chance at Princeton slipping away in this tacky hotel lobby. Curse you, Mother, you greedy, greedy beast. I held my breath.

“That’s very kind of you, but I have a rental car.” Thank God for Avis.

The whole encounter was maybe five minutes long, but my mother maintains to this day that this conversation was the reason I got into Princeton.

All things considered, I got off easy. If this were a Teeny Tiny Tim story, Tim and Ethel would have
slashed Mr. Bowman’s rental car tires in the night and embarked on a fabulous road trip from Virginia to Princeton, during which Tim would write a Tony-nominated play, discover a cure for cancer, and also get a handwritten letter of acceptance to Princeton’s class of 2011.