FAMILY SILVER

Most of you who read this are old enough to remember the Iranian Hostage Crisis in the late seventies and the daily countdown telling the world how many days they were in captivity.

In our Freshman Household we are into day eight of no communication from the other side. If we get to day sixty my husband promises me an Hermes bag.

There is something I always tell my screenwriting students that I’ve learned over the years in my work. People always say this happens all the time with Hollywood executives; they say the last act of a story doesn’t work. Fix the last act.

I always tell them if the last act doesn’t work, go back to the first fifteen pages: if in the first fifteen pages your story has not been laid out properly or there are problems, you can assure yourself of an unsatisfactory ending. If the beginning doesn’t work neither will the end.

In the story of our lives the first fifteen pages often starts long before we are born. Now that does not mean we cannot fix it in our lifetime and make sure, despite the fact our parents or grandparents had convoluted plot points and personality issues they did not attend to and thus ended up either miserable or making those around them miserable, that we in turn have to inherit those qualities, make them our own and then pass them down from generation to generation like the family silver.

We can, with introspection, work, and a willingness to look at the tough stuff make every attempt to make sure it doesn’t repeat with us. It’s not always easy, it takes courage and sometimes those around you prefer the devil known, but it can be broken. It is my life’s mission to do so.

A day on this blog would somehow not be complete without a quote from Larry – he said this to me the other day.

“Once we know we cannot not know anymore.”

I think that says it all.

Now knowing and acting are two different things. Knowing and changing are two even more different things.

But I always need to know. And once I know, I can somehow always find my way back to that place of knowing and get myself out of the trouble I got myself into.

At my fiftieth birthday party– now this is going to sound like total name dropping, something I hate to do as it is one of my mother’s worst traits and one I have spent a life time running from. Hard to do when you work with celebrities: ”When Goldie and I were in Delhi…” I hate to do it. But for the purposes of this story it fits.

At my fiftieth birthday, Carl Bernstein got up to make a toast and he said this thing I found so touching and not because of what he said, but because without my knowing it he had been watching me for years and in that way I suppose only one of the greatest investigative journalists of this or perhaps any generation could do, he saw me to my core, quietly and astutely.

He said, “Tracey may come off as this blonde, funny girl but she is always digging beneath the surface, she is looking for the truth of who people are and who she is. And if you don’t get that eventually she will tell you.”

It remains one of the greatest things anyone has ever said about me – he got it and it continues to mean the world to me.

The first fifteen pages in my story go back to my grandmother and her mother. There are now four generations of women: my grandmother– though she is gone, she remains; my mother; me; Taylor and Lucy.
My grandmother did not go to her mother’s funeral. My mother did not in turn go to my grandmother’s funeral. I have heard through the Santa Barbara grapevine that upon my mother’s death I’m not even allowed to enter the 805 area code zone. There are right now strict orders at the gate where my mother lives not to dare ever, never, ever let me through. Not while she is alive or dead. You’d think I was a member of the Manson gang.

If you ask me that is one fucked up beginning of a story and we are only on page one.

I have the task to make sure this does not become my story and thus my children’s stories.

I have already told everyone I want to be burned and scattered in the Ganges in my adopted homeland. And Lucy has told me she will be happy to do it. I know Taylor loves me as every time I mention my death she runs out of the room with her hands on her hears. Lucy seems to have no problem with the concept.

Why my grandmother did not go to her mother’s funeral I don’t know. She never talked about it with me. My mother would casually mention it but it was not a big topic of discussion.
My grandmother apparently adored her mother, and in fact took very good care of her, as she was very sick with asthma in the days before there were the drugs we have today. Taylor and I both inherited the asthma, a genetic trait I find much easier to cope with than the funeral scenario.

My grandmother was a caretaker. She really came into her own while caring for others. She ran the blood bank in LA during WW2. After my grandfather had his heart attacks she found salt free bread and fat free foods in weird places and had them sent in from Europe and spent nine hours skinning chickens. This was long before these things were known to hurt you and other options were not in the market. So my guess is, and I’m guessing here, she took amazing care of her sick mother. But according to family lore her mother preferred her baby sister who had all the personality and I guess she was so busy amusing herself and others with it did not pay much attention to her own sick mother.

All my grandmother’s attention did not make up for the fact she was not a laugh riot to be around. She just wasn’t. Knowing what I know now about people, I can say she lacked irony about anything, had no real sense of humor, and her paranoia reigned over her too much of the time.

If I think about this through the scrim of my mother being a child it had to have been very difficult on her, being the only child of someone like this. Though she was loving at the same time, as far as I know. Though I never saw her be affectionate with my mother and my mother, once I grew up, stopped being affectionate with me. Growing up in our family was not embraced.

My mother oddly ended up with much of the personality of her Aunt Violet: bubbly, social, funny, with no interest in caretaking. Thinking about that for the first time it must have driven my grandmother a different form of crazy. But now in her old age she seems to have meshed the two sisters’ best and worst qualities.

My grandmother was dour in many ways – though not with me. But I guess the bubbly Violet was more soothing to her sick mother than my grandmother, who I imagine wanted to be the favorite in exchange for her immaculate care. Life does not always work that way. If fact, it works in the reverse most of the time. The one seeking love never really gets it. The one who can walk away and live without it gets it in buckets.

And the little I remember of Violet  was that she was the exact opposite of my grandmother; she was funny and lively, had masses of friends and a really active social life. She had a good marriage, I think. I have no one to ask about this but I believe that to be the case.

She was playing cards and golf and was the life of her party well into her old age.

And then there was my grandmother in her old age– faking illnesses to get attention and eating alone at the Brown Derby because my grandfather was working or at the club or dead.

This is where one sees the destructive pattern start; to get attention my grandmother always used illness. When the money didn’t work she would get sick. And even if the money was working she would pretend to be sick. I have never thought of it this way before but it must have come from her relationship with her mother. She paid attention to her mother when she was sick. She did not get attention back. If she was sick maybe she could then get attention from my mother and perhaps in doing this rewrite her own history? She could play it backwards.

I believe a huge part of parenting – especially as our kids turn into adults, which is why I am going here, is rewriting our own history through our children. There is no question I do this in spades.

It sometimes works in my favor and sometimes blows up in my face.

But of course what Grandma knew was her mother was sick and she gave her attention, she didn’t get the love she wanted but her mother got her attention by being sick. So, she must have reasoned, if she (Grandma) was sick Beverley (her daughter, my mother) would have to take care of her.

But Beverley is not a natural caretaker, she hates it, it’s why being maternal wasn’t her thing; BFF’s were fine, but caretaking scares the shit out of her. It now makes sense why. She was emotionally blackmailed as a child and an adult into caring for her own mother, when kids do not want nor should they be required to do that.

And the amazing thing is grandma wasn’t sick. Ever. Really. Never.

She died in her sleep of old age at 86. She broke her hip running to a slot machine in Vegas at 82. She never had anything wrong with her in her life.
Compared to the shit I see around me with my friends and their parents, the woman was blessed with amazing health.

But in her world she was continuously at death’s door.

She had more heart attacks than I can tell you. And always on holidays or when she wasn’t getting what she wanted or was feeling needy. Perhaps they were anxiety attacks; those were not so well diagnosed back then. But for her they were heart attacks and attention must be paid to heart attack victims.

My mother and I spent more time coaxing her out of heart attacks or giving her oxygen, which got her momentary attention but in the end made us very leery of her motives and spending holidays with her.

Every holiday resulted in some form of her falling apart at the table, in the car on the way over to the restaurant, in the ladies room, in the grand ballroom. If there were a holiday she would wreck it.
This was her form of emotional blackmail I guess, her own distorted form of tethering her family to her.

It hadn’t worked with her mother so she would make it work with us. Again, my mother absorbed the deeper blows of this. But in those days we were so close we did lumber though a lot of it together. And I think that made it easier. But all my grandmother got out of it was the exact opposite of what she wanted. She didn’t remake her history, she relived it. And that so often ends up being the case. And that just made her all the unhappier and propelled her to keep doing it time and time again.

One Thanksgiving I was living in New York but coming home for the holiday with my family. The entire family consisting of my mother, my grandmother and me; not exactly the Waltons.

I remember endless consultations with grandma about where we should eat, and reservations being made somewhere fancy. So I schlep across the county, my mother and I pile in the car on Thanksgiving morning and drive to LA for the one o’clock reservation and we are late, by maybe ten minutes. This is decades before cell phones and what is ten minutes? In my mother’s world ten minutes late equals a half hour early.

So we get to Grandma’s, smiles on our faces, probably trepidation in our solar plexus and she is in her living room, not tethered to her family but tethered to her oxygen mask, dying yet again because we were ten minutes late and the they wouldn’t hold the table. Try talking sense into that scenario.

Now that I write it it’s interesting that she used oxygen. Her mother had what? Asthma. Her mother could not breath. None of this ever occurred to me until this second. It wasn’t even her oxygen; it was left over from my grandfather. She was replaying history with the right props.
So there she was and we tried to jolly her out of it. No use, she was going to be miserable and that was that. What did she want? We were there, we were spending the holiday with her. I had flown across the country; we had driven a hundred miles. But she was going to relive the pain of her own mother’s rejection by projecting onto the this day where it was a ghost and not a reality. But like many powerful ghosts it became a reality, hers and by association ours.

We missed the reservation not because we were late but because we spent so damn long tying to talk sense to her. It was useless; she trundled off to her bed in self-induced misery and my mother and I ended up at The Hamburger Hamlet in Westwood for Thanksgiving burgers.

These are the moments when a daughter can not give a mother what she wants no matter how hard she tries because the mother is so tied up in reliving her past the wrong way and not letting it go and enjoying her present. There is no question my mother was a victim of this as I was later to become one of my mother’s.

My grandmother felt abandoned, my mother felt guilty and angry and like she had wasted the day as she had five really good invitations she had passed up to only to watch her mother emotionally blackmail her into some scenario she didn’t want to be a part of.

And it happened time and time again. We would be seated, the menus would arrive and plop— her head would fall into her plate, and my mother and I would look at each other and think here we go again.

We eventually stopped spending holidays with her.

I stopped spending holidays with my mother ten years ago.

Lesson being when passing down the family silver make sure you clean it often and well. So well you can see your reflection in it, even if you don’t like what you see – it’s never too late to fix it.

FRESHMAN MOM