Mothers, daughters...

When I was a kid fresh out of high school, I was faced with my very first major life decision: accept a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts, or join my bandmates who were already living in LA, anxiously awaiting my arrival. My mother, being an artist, nonconformist and a very big fan of unorthodoxy, was totally onboard with the idea of her eldest seeking fame and fortune in the far-flung land of Hollywood. She all but helped me pack my bags, waving goodbye with visions of being the mother of a rock star dancing in her head. Off I went, me and my hopelessly ridiculous teenage fantasies of hitting the bigtime.

It turned out to be the type of glory my once upon a time beatnik mother probably foresaw, rooming with bandmates in a rundown house in a dangerous neighborhood, writing songs and drinking cheap wine into the wee hours, rehearsing in a rat infested West Hollywood hovel, playing gigs for chump change, plus drinks. Not quite the dreamy scenario I had envisioned, but still, chock full of exciting fringy experiences to brag about to my friends back home. We gigged, struggled, went hungry, the usual stuff.

Then, a year in, I found myself in the grip of disillusionment. Tired of the up-all-night-playing-lousy-bars lifestyle, sick of leaving gigs smelling of cigarettes and stale beer, I wondered if it was too late to accept that scholarship to SVA. I sank into a depression, and became paralyzed with indecision. As if I’d sent that angst riddled message across the miles and directly into my mother’s psyche, she rang me up and demanded in that all-knowing motherly way, What’s wrong? And the next thing I knew, I was packing my bags and on a bus back to New York.

Back then, I didn’t know what it was that sent alarm bells ringing in my mom’s head, how she knew the thing I needed to hear was her voice and the words, Come home. We’d spoken only rarely, the 70s being a time when “long distance” meant exorbitant phone bills. Even so, our once in a blue moon conversations had been nothing but my thrilling accounts of gigging in crappy clubs and living the rock and roll lifestyle on the rock bottom cheap – all the things my mother found exhilarating, part and parcel of what she herself had experienced in her own misspent youth. Still, somehow she felt something, an undeniable urgency deep in her bones, a message that her kid was in distress and in desperate need of a firm, guiding hand. She may have wanted more than anything for me to stay and hit the bigtime, but the powerful pull of her mother’s intuition won out. The question I didn’t ask myself was, how did she know?

As a mother myself, I can now imagine the force that drove her to make that fateful phone call, an unnamable, hardwired connection that all mothers and daughters share. It begins with the egg that would one day become a daughter present and accounted for even as the future-mother baby is deep in the safe confines of her own mother’s womb. Three generations of women connected by a single body, all that blood and tissue and DNA nestled together, a visceral bundle of electrical impulses and psychic energy binding the three of them just like the thousands of generations of grandmothers, mothers and daughters before. Occupying the same fleshy space for nine long, glorious, miserable months, one woman’s body nurtures the double X babe within, where the seeds for her own future babies lie in wait.

My mother felt my turmoil deep in her bones as strongly as if we still shared a body. From across the country our brains communicated the eerily unsettling shift in mood and a longing to be somewhere else, a mysterious place that held the secret to our collective happiness. I was lost, upended, fearful of making the wrong decision, while 3,000 miles away, desperate yearnings consumed my mother like they were her own. Mom consulted her Tarot and threw her i-Ching, confirming her fears. She waited, not wanting to interfere, resisted making that call for days and weeks, hoping the clouds of despondency might part, until my distress grew so great she felt her own heart might burst. The day she picked up the phone and made that long distance call, I quit the band. The dark clouds parted, and with a mysterious sense of clarity, breathing a long, deep sigh of relief, I hopped a Greyhound home, never questioning my mother’s intuition. I didn’t need to. The answer was there all along, writ large in my DNA.