Insight from a Psychotherapist: If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

I spent the first few months of the Covid 19 pandemic wandering around like the snowman from Frozen; lamenting all the warm hugs I yearned for. Spending time with my family, although not abstained from completely (we managed time together in outdoor activities) was definitely missing from my life. Watching a movie, draped over each other’s limbs on my parents’ massive sofa, seemed like such a simple and sweet reward for following the rules.

I am the eldest of two daughters. The burnt pancake. A rule follower.

I was born in Lusaka, Zambia, ten years after independence from the British Crown (until then, the country had been known as Northern Rhodesia). My mother found herself in Zambia after her father took a contract with the government. He and my grandma left England in the early seventies and lived for a few years in Southern Africa. They were both Veterans of World War II, so spending extended periods of time abroad was not abnormal. After Zambia, they lived in Spain and Australia. My mother, the youngest of three sisters, was working in a hotel in Brighton, on the south coast of England. She had plans to emigrate to South Africa, to study journalism like her aunt, but while staying with her parents my mum took a temporary office job in Lusaka, where she met my father. They married a year later, when she was just 22 years old.

Her middle sister had already emigrated to Australia and her eldest sister married a local farmer in Hertfordshire. My Mum and her family had settled there, north of London, but were originally from Sussex, in the South of England. My granddad was born in 1910 to a large working-class family in Hastings. My Grandma was from Yorkshire. Her father was a Solicitor and her mother had died when she was a teenager of unknown causes. My Grandma was asked to be her father’s Hostess for social functions until he remarried. When he did, she was asked to leave the home (by his new wife) and joined the Royal Navy. My grandparents met while serving on a British Naval Ship in Kenya.

After my grandma died, my grandad moved to Miami and lived near us. Unfortunately, a hurricane blew his home away in 1992 so he moved back to Australia, close to his middle daughter, which is where he died at the age of 90. In my entire life, I have probably spent a week with my mother’s family, whom she only communicates with by email a few times a year. They are not close but not acrimonious either. Distant.

My father comes from the Jewish Diaspora. A family born from blood, sweat, and many tears. He was the second of two sons. My granny, Devorah, and a man I never met, Jonaton, divorced when my father was a baby. That was kind of a big deal in 1950. Jonaton’s family were Russians who left Moscow for Palestine and became wealthy Industrialists, settling in Tel Aviv in the early 1900s. Jonaton’s only brother died fighting in the 1948 war.

My Granny was born in Palestine, in 1922; her great-grandparents were from Poland and Romania but she was a 3rd generation Palestinian Jew, as there was no Israel until years later, when she was already a mother of two. Devorah was the eldest of three and her brother, Dani La’or, would become an Ambassador for the State of Israel. My Granny has a large extended family that span Israel, from Haifa to Ashkelon, but their roots are in the wine growing hamlet of Zichron Yaakov. In her youth, she worked for the Haganah, smuggling Jews out of Czechoslovakia during World War II. Jonaton built his family’s successful business and was known to be quite the ‘ladies man’, even after marriage. They had a son, Yossi, and four years later my father came along.

During the War of Independence (in 1948) a young Zionist came to Israel from South Africa and my grandmother fell in love with him. She petitioned her husband for a divorce not long after their second child was born. She was granted her freedom on the condition that her eldest child stay with his father, while the youngest, my dad, who was still breastfeeding, could move with her to South Africa. Whatever the facts, it left a scar across all those effected by her choice to love, and her choice to leave. In 1951, my father, his mother, and his new stepfather moved to Johannesburg, South Africa.

My dad and his mother would continue to travel back to Israel every year to see their family. He and his brother, Yossi, had a new stepmother now, too; both boys came to love their adopted parents but the vitriol and resentment between their mother and father was nothing short of Shakespearean. Until I physically found myself in Jonaton’s home, as an adult, at the gracious invitation of his widow, years after his death, I had never seen a photo of him because my grandmother had cut his face out of every photo in her possession.

My father by then a handsome, confident teenager, showed signs of entrepreneurship from an early age. His father, who wanted to bring him into the family business in Israel, promised him women, money and power. My granny was having none of it.

At that point, her eldest son was already in the Israeli Army and she knew if my father were to move to Israel she would lose him, too. My dad knew that moving to Israel would involve mandatory military service. At 16, my father who was by then already a DJ at a teen club he had started in Lusaka, Zambia, made his choice: He changed his last name to honor the man who had raised him and never went to Israel again. His father disowned him of his inheritance, his country of birth declared him a Deserter, and that part of his life began to fade away.

Having rejected Judaism, his father, and Israel; at 21 my dad fell in love with my mom; a pretty, English WASP who refused to convert, much to my granny’s objections. When I was born, the first grandchild, she became slightly less awful to my mother but their relationship would always hover somewhere between contempt and disdain.

My granny would continue to visit Israel and see the family that still spoke to her. She and her second husband had a son ten years younger than my father. Her eldest son had married a very glamorous Israeli woman by then and they had they two children together. My dad only saw his father once again in his life, when my mother was pregnant with me. Jonaton called our home once, years later, and I answered the phone. I was probably fourteen but I remember the moment I heard his voice like it was yesterday.

My biological grandfather was in New York and told my father that he wanted to visit us. He never did and died not long after. Jonaton’s fortune went to his wife, Ruth, whom I eventually met in Israel. Although she acknowledged my father as his legitimate son, all of her money (when she died) went to Yossi’s widow and children.

My father had become involved in a professional organization in his twenties, the Jaycees International, and was elected from hundreds of candidates around the world to become the Secretary General at their headquarters in Coral Gables, Florida. This is why, my immediate family, which now included my baby sister, relocated from Zambia to Florida when I was five years old.

My grandparents would visit us every year and it was on one of these visits, while babysitting us, that another phone call was received I will never forget. The home phone rang and moments later a cry, so deep and sad, filled our entire house. Yossi, my granny’s eldest son, had died of a heart attack at the age of 36. He left behind a wife and two small children. My granny did not go to the funeral because she said she was looking after her grandchildren. What family still spoke to her could not understand yet another of her choices. It would be said in no uncertain terms that Yossi had died from a broken heart; having never recovered from being ‘abandoned’ by his mother. A few years later, her beloved husband, the man she left her son and country for, would also die of a heart attack. She moved from Zambia to Miami where both her surviving sons were now living with their families. She died in 2004, just before her 82nd birthday, with them by her side.

I often tell my patients that truth and honesty are not synonymous; truth will never release us from our pain. That is the role of honesty. Israel has their truth but so do the Palestinians. My grandfather had his truth but so did my granny. I have my truth (about why my family made me scream at them) and they have theirs.

By March, 2021, my family were fully vaccinated and quarantined, so we were eager to get together and headed off to a rented home in Orlando; big enough for all of us and our pets.

The smoke alarm went off one night during our stay while my sister was cooking burgers. She froze, then panicked, and asked me what to do. My niece and nephew ran to their phones. My parents just sat at the table with their heads in their hands, while I (and my husband) figured it out.

I think this tells you everything you need to know about my truth.

While swimming with my niece later that evening, she remarked that she had never seen me that angry before; at the age of not quite 11 she was sharp and observant, and she also hates tension of any negative kind. I told her I was angry which was just a feeling; it was okay, and then she said the truest thing anyone has ever said about us “…But we don’t get angry, we’re a happy family.”

I saw all of it in that moment. Every disagreement my mother and I had, resulting in my mother crying and my dad begging us not to fight. Every issue that we discuss behind each other’s backs but never address directly. Every time my parents chose peace and harmony over justice. Every time an annoyance chipped away at my patience until I erupted about something insignificant. I told my niece that night: if I make you angry — tell me. Don’t worry that my reaction will be one of outrage, tears, dismissal, annoyance, positive toxicity, punishment, or rejection. “If I upset you, you have to tell me; don’t hold it in and water it quietly, like a garden of resentments. If you’re mad at me, don’t stomp around in a tantrum or act in a way that shows me something is wrong but I have to guess, if I even notice. That ends with us, okay?”

We promised it would.

Anger has never had a place in our family because of the trauma my father experienced, the culture my mother grew up in; the awkwardness of confrontation, the fear of retribution. We, like many people, are conflict avoidant and it has made being a woman (in my family and in the world) so much harder than it already is. I am definitly one of those women who has been punished for speaking up, and holding truth to power; and as a result I start sentences with “‘I’m sorry, but…” a lot more than I need to.

This stuff has roots that go back further than we can ever fully understand; attitudes about our bodies, our abilities, whom we remind people of (and their projections onto us), our feuds and forced ties, our resentments and petty grievances; that is what a family is. Was this really what we’d been missing so much?!

When my sister packed up her car, after our week together was coming to an end and my parents had decided to leave a day early because they “missed their own bed,” we hugged goodbye.

In their embraces I felt the complicated feelings of their departure — from relief, to despair, to joy.

Those were some of the warmest hugs I’ve ever had.