Coming home

I’ve been at my parents’ house in a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale for the last 3 days. It’s the same salmon-colored stucco house we moved into a few weeks before I turned 10, and a few days before Hurricane Andrew ravaged South Florida. For the most part, I grew up here. I escaped from here. I celebrated my marriage here. I nursed babies here. I grieved for my father here.

My childhood room in this house looks about 70% the same as when I left it, when I moved 2000 miles away to go to Boston University at the age of 16. The southwestern motif mural that covered one entire wall when we bought the house is still there. The white mica dresser and nightstand my mom and I picked out when I was 12 is still there. The plywood shelf over the closet, displaying a whole lot of dusty stuffed animals, each tied to a specific moment and memory, is still there. Another shelf above the mirror, with the carousel horses my uncle sent me each year until the collection was complete, is still there, too.

The bed has gotten bigger—expanding from a twin to a queen. And most of the drawers aren’t filled with my stuff anymore, but rather my mom’s preventative stashes of books and picture frames (you never know when you’re going to need a quick gift).

The rest of the house looks pretty much the same as it always has, too. The early 90s mauve and black colors still set the tone in almost every room, even the bathrooms. The leather couches in the family have creases and craters from the collective weight of 30 years of sitting. The giant glass coffee table in front of those couches is still filled to the edges with photos, although over the last three years, it’s shifted from solely being a gallery of grandkids to being a gallery of grandkids and mementos of their grandfather.

It’s pretty remarkable to notice how many of the physical characteristics of this house haven’t changed over the last three decades. But I think what gets me the most, every time we’re here, is how much the spiritual characteristics of it haven’t changed, either.

This was never a calm house. Not because there were any kind of extraordinary things going on—no big dinner parties or anything, although we did host every Jewish holiday—but because of the constant tension between my parents, which eventually spilled over to me. There was always someone to blame for something going wrong, someone who wasn’t listening, someone shouting, or someone muttering under their breath in a heated rage that was almost too hot to let boil over.

My mom has always been the antithesis of “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” If she were to write a book, it would be called “Everything is a fucking disaster.” My dad would have made a great corrections officer, because when something wasn’t done the way he thought it should be done, whew boy, he let everyone know about it. All of this made this house an incredibly stressful place to be, so you can understand why, for the greater part of 1999, I was literally counting the days until I left for college. I didn’t know a single person in Boston, but whatever it was going to be would be better, and different, than whatever I’d come from here.

I know this all sounds dark and brooding and traumatic. Much of what I remember in this house had elements of all those things. But there were some good moments, too. Loud middle-school sleepovers with my friends, when we’d all pile onto air mattresses in the living room and stay up till midnight doing who knows what. Pool parties with giant floating island rafts, and cold drinks in plastic glasses with brightly painted toucans on them. Big family gatherings for Rosh Hashana and Passover, sometimes with 18 people crowded around the dining room table that was handed down to my mom from her mother. My cousin’s bris in the family room, with plenty of bagels and lox and pastry for afterwards. The Shabbat dinners before my Bat Mitzvah, and before my wedding, for all of our out of town guests to celebrate the simchas with us.

Every time I’ve come back to this house—whether it was for college summer break way-back-when, or for Passover seders and my own kids’ spring break, like we’re here for right now—all of the feelings and memories and moments and scars reemerge. My mom, I think, carries all of them with her on a daily basis. They’re etched into her skin, along with her freckles. She gets angry and says she can’t take it anymore if she accidentally breaks a glass, instead of chalking it up to “things that just happen.” She sees the Kosher meat market being out of something she needs as a sign that nothing ever goes right for her, instead of, you know, a supply chain issue. She is the walking glorification of “everything that can go wrong will go wrong,” but only because that’s what she believes. I think somewhere along the line she forgot how to see anything else.

I know she’s thankful for her kids and grandkids, and loves us all fiercely. But I wonder what else she sees as a blessing in her life, rather than a frustration. She survived breast cancer at 42, and it was only because of the money she received from a cancer insurance policy that paid out after her diagnosis that she and my dad were able to buy this house. My parents had 45 years together, with two kids and four grandkids (although I can’t say they were all good years, so I’ll leave out any adjectives for now). While my dad’s no longer here, my mom has enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life, though she’s wildly uncomfortable spending it. She is healthy, and mobile, and could be as active and busy as she wants…except that she doesn’t seem to want to be either of those things right now.

I used to let the gravity of all of this weigh me down whenever I visited home. It was like being sucked into an emotionally-contagious vortex. I’d get so frustrated by having to remind my parents, when my dad was alive, to stop the effing yelling—that my kids could hear them all the way from the other side of the house, their snapping voices carrying loudly from the kitchen to the bedrooms. I’d fall back into old patters, being annoyed at all the questions my mom would ask about incredibly mundane and inconsequential things, like what I ate for lunch, or which brand of cottage cheese she should buy (now that I think about it, there’s a common thread of food related things here). The physical and emotional sensations of being at home always made me want to leave again.

But this time is a little bit different. For me, anyway.

My mom isn’t different. She still cursed at the stack of plastic plates last night for being one-short of what we needed for the second Passover seder. She muttered under her breath to no one in particular when my uncle forgot to put soup spoons on the dining room table. She shook her head and spit out a terse “I just can’t take it anymore” when she dropped the drainboard while she was bringing it into the kitchen…even though it’s made of plastic or rubber and absolutely nothing happened to it, or to her, or to the floor where it landed.

I think she feels like she just can’t take anything anymore. But she’s been that way for as long as I can remember, so apparently she can take more than she gives herself credit for.

Our family without my dad here is different. He’s been gone for two-and-a-half years. This is our third Passover without him. I sat in his place at the head of the seder table for the last two nights, trying to channel my inner “Grandpa Mech” as best I could, but putting my own spin on things, too. Stepping a little further outside tradition than he might like, shortening portions of the Hagaddah readings here and there, trying to keep the kids engaged. We skipped one of his favorite songs, “Let my people go,” because no one else can sing it the same way he could, in a deep baritone voice, with a sly smile beaming across his face. We kept the revered Levine family tradition, though, of competing for who could hold the final note of Chad Gad Ya the longest. (It’s a bizarre kind of folk story/ballad about goats and cats and oxen that gets faster and more repetitive as it goes. At the very end, anyone who wants into the contest pauses before the final word, takes a super deep breath, and lets it out with a metered, guttural “yaaaawwww” sound to see whose lungs can produce that noise the longest, withstanding unnatural pulmonary stress to claim victory over the others at the table. I have no idea where this tradition came from, but it’s one of the best parts of the holiday.)

We’ve been at my parents’ house for three days now, and while some things, like Chad Gad Ya, are the “same as it ever was” (h/t to Talking Heads), the way I find myself moving through them is what’s been the most different.

I’m much less reactive to my mom’s frustration than I used to be. I’m reminding her that the eggs freezing in the fridge because the temperature was too low is not the end of the world—she can leave them out on the counter and they’ll thaw just fine. When she gets upset because there’s no room on the counter to make a salad because there’s so much other stuff that also needs to be taken care of, I’m walking up and putting things away to make space. When she’s flustered that she doesn’t know what to cook for dinner tonight because she hasn’t planned that far in advance, I’m offering to go to the store and figure something out. (I’m also really starting to believe that most of her anxiety is food related.) Because I’m able to navigate my own emotions better, and I’m more comfortable in who I am right now, it’s been easier for me to manage the impact of her emotions, too. I think that was the crux of why she and my dad were constantly in conflict. Neither of them knew how to self-regulate, so the frustration and anger would keep ratcheting up, higher and higher, ping-ponging back and forth between them until one of them snapped.

It took me nearly 40 years to unlearn that pattern. It makes me sad that my mom is almost 75, and she still hasn’t.

It also makes me realize that some things, and some people, will likely never change. It’s who they believe they are, and because of that, they’re afraid of doing the work to change it.

Coming home, this time, makes me think of a book I haven’t read yet, but have heard many podcasts about, called Bittersweet, by Susan Cain. There’s so much sadness in what this house has held and seen. There’s sadness in my mom, and the way she sees the world. There’s sadness in me realizing she’s not going to be here forever. There’s sadness in me wanting her to move to Atlanta, for her to be closer to her grandkids, but knowing that means she’d be further away from everything that reminds her of my dad. There’s sadness in the thought that, if she does end up moving, I’ll never be able to come home again, even though coming home has always been a double-edged sword.

There’s also happiness, though. Happiness that my kids are getting to spend this time with my mom, in the house I grew up in, and that she’s able to enjoy their antics in the pool, and 4-day-long Monopoly games at the kitchen table. Happiness that I’m able to recognize her emotional patterns and not get sucked into them (for the most part). Happiness that I’ve come so far, even if I haven’t been able to bring her with me.

Coming home, this time, doesn’t feel quite as constrictive or oppressive. It doesn’t feel like I have to revert back to old personas or reactive ways of behaving, and that some other, more angsty version of myself needs to emerge in order to get through it. I’ve brought my more spacious self with me, and as much as possible, she’s the one who’s going to be here for these next seven days. She doesn’t have to absorb the stress or frustration or rhetorical cursing that’s sprinkled throughout the house. She can be present to it, and acknowledge it, and practice healthier ways of interacting with it, but she doesn’t have to let it affect her. She can try to help her mom practice it too, but hold space for the reality that it’s going to make much difference.

Coming home this time is just visiting. We’ll make some new memories in this old house together. And hopefully, that’s all my kids will remember when they think back to these trips to South Florida. Just the good stuff. And our family. And the smell of my mom’s Passover buns baking in the oven.

Because you know, it always comes back to the food.