Trying to connect.

I’m writing from a seat in the sky, somewhere between Los Angeles, where I’ve lived for the last twenty-five years, and New York City, where I was born and raised. I am heading to what will always be my “Mom’s house” even though it’s an apartment, not a house, and even though she doesn’t reside there anymore. She doesn’t reside anywhere anymore as far as I know, except in my mind and in my DNA. Maybe I am closer to her here in the sky than I am anywhere else, or maybe I am always close to her now because I carry her in my heart every second of the day.

It’s not ideal, writing on a plane — every so often I lose the wifi and a message pops up: Trying to connect.

Aren’t we all, I think. It’s not ideal because the words are flooding through me and I don’t like the forced pauses, but I don’t like a lot of things these days. I took a Lyft to LAX and I was talking to the driver on the way, and he said his trips to LAX are down significantly.

I said I was not surprised, I imagine there are a lot of people who are scared to travel right now. Scared to leave the country for fear of not getting back in, and scared to come here for fear of ending up in a detention center. I had a little trepidation myself, wondering if I should delete my social media before I went through security — which is a bonkers thing for me to be thinking, except it isn’t. My facebook page was banned last week for hate speech, but there wasn’t any hate speech, I assure you.

There was just me, saying some things that are true, with some pictures to back it up. Things like, hey, if you love the 2nd Amendment then you can’t say citizens run the risk of getting executed for carrying a holstered, registered gun to a protest that wasn’t even a protest. Then I posted pictures of a bunch of dudes carrying assault weapons to protests, and I bet you can guess who they voted for…and somehow that’s hate speech.

My Lyft driver started telling me that he and his family went to Mexico for vacation a few months ago. It was him, his wife and their six-year-old son. They are Armenian. He said there was no trouble at all on the way out, they had a wonderful vacation, but when they came back they got stopped at customs. Suddenly this agent is saying there’s no record this child is their son. Another agent comes over and asks whose child this is. He and his wife say he’s ours, what are you talking about? Incredulous, as any of us would be.

They ask the little boy, are these your parents? Their son is scared and confused, he nods, and leans in closer to his mom, wraps his arm around her waist. The agents say you’re going to have to wait in this room over here, we have no record this boy belongs to you. Now his wife is getting feral, just like I would if someone did this to me. What are you talking about, she snarls, this is my child, this is my son, my boy. Now their son is crying. The agent tells her not to be aggressive, to calm down.

The fury I felt in the back seat listening to this. How many times have women been told to “calm down” by a man pushing them to the brink? Her husband realizes where this is going if he can’t cool things off. He says, Please. Please, check the outgoing flight, here is the flight number, and you’ll see the three of us flew out together. This is my son. This is my wife. Please, you’re scaring my boy, you’re scaring my wife. We’ll wait.

An hour went by. He told me no one came in to update them. His wife was shaking. She called her mother, her mother found an attorney, and the attorney started advising them. His wife kept asking, if they don’t think he’s ours, where will they take him? I won’t let them take him.

Then one of the agents came in and said, “Okay, you can go.” That’s it, no, “So sorry about that. We apologize for traumatizing you. We got it wrong.” Just, “Okay, you can go.” Okay, we’re done getting off on your powerlessness. We’re done making you suffer for now, you’re excused. Consider yourselves lucky you get to go home.

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I’m going to my Mom’s house because my stepdad and brother are going to move. It’s a long story or maybe it isn’t, but the punchline is we’re giving up a rent-controlled apartment on the Upper Westside. A three-bedroom, three-bath in a pre-War building in a great neighborhood. If I told you what the rent is you’d think we’re insane. I never imagined we’d leave. I’m saying “we” even though I haven’t lived there in years. I thought one of my kids would take the lease over eventually. I’m saying “we” because I promised my mom I would take care of things.

I can’t share the why’s of this decision, but I can say I’ve been over it in my head ninety gajillion times and I can’t see a way around it, even though I am heartbroken. The thought of ever being on the block and looking up at the building and saying, that’s the building where I grew up, but not being able to walk through the lobby and up the stairs and through the door is painful. Or maybe the painful part is that I can still feel my mom there, and now I won’t have access.

I’ve already gone through her things. The photo albums and letters, her clothes, her jewelry. I wear her engagement ring on my right hand. The ring was her mother’s — my Nanny’s — and one day it will be my daughter’s. But I’ve never gone through the apartment the way I will this time. The way you do when you think, “I’ll never be here again.”

I’m going to go through every closet, every drawer, the storage room downstairs, everything. I’m going to pack her good china — the stuff that only came out on Christmas — and ship it to myself, even though I’ve never seen myself as a fancy china kind of gal. It doesn’t matter, the plates remind me of her, and I find it comforting to have things around me — physical, tangible things, things she also held in her hands — around me. The china is from a restaurant she and my stepdad owned for a year when I was seven. It was a French restaurant called The Little Club.

He wasn’t my stepdad until I was eight, though — that was the year everyone got married, and by everyone, I mean my dad and stepmom got married a month after my mom and stepdad — but that story is for another day.

Now I’m writing from the desk where I wrote for so many years, in the room where I cried myself to sleep so many nights. I went to Staples with my brother this morning and got boxes and packing tape and bubble wrap. After we checked out we went toward the front door, but it became clear there was a commotion, and I realized there were feet sticking out from behind a display. As we got closer, an old man came into view, he had fallen, he was on his back, and there was an alarming amount of blood pooling on the floor around his head. There was a Staples employee on a walkie talkie. I asked if she’d called 911 and she nodded.

The old man was asking someone to tell his wife, I had to get close to him to make out what he was saying. She was in a red Mazda outside. I walked out with my brother and another man. I left my brother with the boxes and bubble wrap, and walked with the man toward the only red Mazda there was. A woman had already come out of Staples to find her, and she was walking toward us, shaking her head. “She doesn’t realize how serious it is,” she said. We got closer. The woman in the Mazda was now attempting to parallel park, but she cut the wheel way too hard and rammed into the curb. The man and I exchanged a meaningful glance. “Damn,” he said, “she’s gonna need the ambulance, too.”

Then she pulled forward and tried to park again, and this time she cut the wheel at the right moment, but she backed up hard, into the car parked behind her. “Yikes,” I said. We would have laughed if her husband hadn’t been bleeding profusely inside. She got out of the car in a fury and slammed the door. She looked about thirty years younger than her husband. No judgement, I’m telling you for a reason. “I told him not to go into the store!” she yelled at me, as if I’d said, “How could you let this happen?” I asked if she had everything she needed from her car. “You’re going to end up riding to the hospital in the ambulance,” I said. “Oh, great!” she retorted.

She marched toward the store. We followed. I passed my brother on the way in, and said I’d be right back. Still no ambulance, and I wanted to make sure the old guy was okay. I can’t say his wife was making me feel confident he’d be looked after. Now he had paper towels pressed up against his head, and blood was seeping into them. The Staples employee was on the phone explaining that she needed an ambulance, now.

The woman started yelling at her husband, “I told you not to come in here! This is the third time this has happened!” The Staples employee asked her to be quiet so she could hear the ambulance dispatcher, but the woman kept yelling, “I’m his wife, I can yell at him if I want to!”

An older woman who looked like a soap star I couldn’t (and still can’t) place approached her and tried to talk to her, and they exchanged some words I couldn’t hear. Then the wife yelled, “Everyone thinks they know, but you don’t know! This is the third time this has happened!” Then we heard sirens. I walked over to her and asked if she needed anything. I thought maybe she was just scared. Maybe she was overwhelmed.

I thought about my dad and how he refused to use his walker at the end of his life, and how terrifying it was because he needed it. Then, when I could convince him to use it, he’d race across the Walgreens parking lot like a speed demon. One day the front wheels of his walker tipped over the curb, and I managed to dart out in front of him and catch him in the nick of time, but I couldn’t hold him and also lift the walker, so we were stuck there, facing each other, me in the street, looking at my dad, holding him up while he yelled at me that, goddammit he didn’t need my help, and the walker, hanging there between us until a woman in a wheelchair came by and lifted it back up onto the curb. My dad was so prideful and embarrassed he didn’t even thank her, but I did. Then he took off racing again.

Maybe this red Mazda wife was just tapped out and losing her mind at Staples, in front of all these strangers who were judging her and thinking this snapshot was the whole picture. Maybe she was usually kind to him. The soap star walked by and said, “When you marry someone thirty years older, this is what you get. You could at least be nice.” Before the woman could respond, we heard sirens right outside the store. Then paramedics were walking in, and I knew they’d be okay. The man I’d walked out with a few minutes before came back in and handed the wife a parking receipt. He’d paid for two hours of parking for her. She started crying.

I’ve spent the last two days sorting things into categories — what are we packing, what are we donating, what are we throwing away? It is wild how many things you find in the place where someone has lived most of her life. My mom and dad and I moved into the apartment when I was two. My mother was so organized about some things, and so disorganized about others. She had a few albums, but most photos were kept haphazardly in tins and shoeboxes, and some in sterilites on a high shelf inside a closet. I opened a bedside drawer today and found a whole bunch just scattered there. They are all mixed together so I often find pictures from my childhood I have never seen before, along with photos from her childhood, and pictures of her mother, my Nanny, when she was young. Which means I can’t not look at every single photo.

I also found a banner I made for her one Mother’s Day. My mother needed gifts and cards and a huge commotion made out of Mother’s Day. Brunch and balloons and as big a spectacle as possible. It was rough for me because of the drinking and the rage and the violence. I found this cloth banner I made that said World’s Best Mom in huge, colorful block letters big enough to be seen from the second-floor window if you were looking out of it down to the street where your daughter was sitting in a horse and buggy, holding it up — which I was one year. I remember making the banner. It hurts my heart to think of it, for both of us.

She was not the world’s best mom, and we both knew it. No banner in the world would make that different. I wish I’d written, You Are Not Perfect But You Are the Only Mom I’d Ever Want — and I Treasure You.

I wish I’d written in a card: One day when you die I will panic not knowing where you are or where you’ve gone or how to keep walking on a planet where you no longer walk.

Today is Valentine’s Day and tomorrow is my birthday. My mom used to bake me heart-shaped cakes which you never would have guessed if you’d seen her in a rage. There’s a lot of pain in this world and sometimes it bends people as they’re trying to grow toward the light, just like trees in the forest. That doesn’t make it okay, it’s just the way of things. There’s a lot of love in this world if you look carefully, too.

Me and my mom a while ago.

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Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. I love you. Thank you so much for being here. Decided to run a week-long Valentine’s Day/Birthday, love-for-all-of-us special if you have been wanting to become a paid subscriber. 25% off annual subscriptions for one year, and I promise I will not work with 25% less dedication xo