The Origin Story of the Strong Woman with a Small Potato ... or ... How I Met My First Therapist ... or Memories of Mother

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My mother, Dorothy, was the Queen of Small Portions. More please was not in her vocabulary. She never experienced being full, overindulging, having too much. She gained exactly seven pounds while pregnant with me and was proud of that fact. Her motto (having skipped all the parenting books) was “You shall not thrive." As her only daughter, I obliged. 

You've heard the phrase "canary in the coal mine." It turns out the dogs of my childhood were my would-be canaries. I should have watched and learned how she treated them, so I could know what was coming. The abiding emotion my  mother displayed with her dogs was callousness. Her default was when in doubt, put them out, not just out of doors when they were causing her any measure of inconvenience, but also out and down ... forever.

God knows what she thought of me, arriving to upend her meticulously curated life. Nothing out of place. Ever. The one thing we could count on in her orbit was a flashing red stop light at every turn. No green lights and no thriving. Just controlling, contorting, contracting. 

She "unwound" by cleaning out her drawers (the kind in a chest or a bureau, not her undergarments). She whipped those drawers into shipshape, going after their contents early and often. She spent more time with her drawers than her friends. Or her dogs. Or her family.

One of a long line of her furry, faux friends was an adorable, black poodle puppy named Jeremy. Jeremy, it turned out, needed an advocate. When he broke his hind leg on the stairs, my mother's solution was to have him put down. She didn't shed a tear. She simply swapped out Jeremy with her next placeholder poodle, Georgie. After Georgie bit the dust, along came Bobbie. They were her dogs and they were for show, not love. Kind of like her children. 

I'm surprised she didn't cash me in when I started to disappoint her. Somewhere around my tenth birthday, she likely started to realize that she gave birth to a Ford Comet, not the Mercedes that matched her elan. Thankfully, around that time we got a family dog, a Springer spaniel we named Freckles. He became my therapist. We had moved from my mother's house in Cheviot Hills to a fancy-pants condo on the Wilshire Boulevard Corridor. My brother and I were not allowed to touch the furniture or enter the kitchen. We basically lived in a museum and she was the Statue in Chief. Reticent to reveal any smidge of humanity, she even ran the faucet when in the bathroom. She didn't want anyone to hear her peeing. Bodily functions were no-nos. I only remember her leaving the bedroom, what with all her comforting, militarily-organized drawers, to use the bathroom. No lounging around in the common areas with us. No cooking (God forbid), no changing our diapers—she always had help in the form of a maid or three to execute the doldrums of domesticity. No walking her precious poodles. 

The upside of her reclusiveness was that I was able to sneak into our modern, mid-century kitchen to plop down on the cold, crumb-free floor with my aforementioned therapist, Freckles, lying beside me. He was an excellent listener even though every day he heard my same lament about living in a joyless house. 

Then one day, Freckles was gone. I could only surmise he was given to a new family because he was too messy. Or too needy. Or both. She never told me that she had him put down or why. After Freckles disappeared, I feared for my life. I, like the dog, came with a certain amount of untidy fallout. Surely, my days were numbered. She could have written the book (long before the puppy murderess Kristi Noam came along) called How to Disappear Your Dog (or your Daughter for that Matter) in Three Easy Steps.

Her first step was to control and restrict portions (she counted the dogs' kibble, I kid you not). I was allotted one small potato and three ounces of beef for dinner. It was a surefire recipe for anorexia and it worked. After all, I learned from the OG. Dorothy (and her little dog too!) experienced anorexia nervosa before it was added to the DSM.  

Step two was to make the people around her feel small, inconsequential and insignificant. If she had to starve and take up less space, so did everyone else. The condo was roomy but she made it tiny, claustrophobic, leaving the rest of us, including the dogs, nowhere to hide.

Her third and final step, designed to ensure that I died a little inside with each passing day, was to judge and hyper-scrutinize my childhood proclivities, in general, and the foods I ingested, specifically. I was more likely than not doing it (whether it be clothes, friends activities but mostly food) wrong, all day, every day. 

Her favorite words were DON’T , CAN’T and NO. She was determined to yank the life force out of me, dressing me in doll-like clothes, inappropriate for the playground and a hindrance to childhood frolicking. Better to be prim, proper and presentable than ... committing child. My mother would have preferred a drawer to a daughter. Drawers didn't talk back, wreak havoc or create discord in what I now recognize was her "NLE," non-living environment—not to be confused with my subsequent if inevitable SLEs. 

My life's work since surviving Dorothy has been to swap out that sanctioned small potato for a big one of my choosing. Without compunction. 

Memories of my mother include, but are certainly not limited to, the time when we were strolling through a park, and I put my arm around her. "Don't do that!" she snapped. "What will people say?"

On another occasion, we were sitting in a waiting room at her ob-gyn's office, when my mother noticed a woman corralling small children.  Mother turned to me and wondered out loud what it would be like to be a grandmother. I reminded her that she was a grandmother of two lovely grandchildren to which she replied, unblinking: "Oh, I forgot."  

Her failure to register that other sentient beings—be they dogs, daughters or grandchildren—depended on her to be a loving parent was the overarching theme of my origin story. Like Jeremy the puppy, I needed an advocate. Fending for ourselves was comprehensively overrated, a hard truth that I processed at length with Freckles. 

My mother's last poodle, Bobbie, was "adopted" (some would more accurately say rescued) by my beloved cousin, Ann. "Free at last!" I imagined Bobbie bark-thinking as he leapt out of our lives and into Ann's arms. Years later, when he started peeing all over her carpet, cousin Ann simply cleaned up after him. It never crossed her mind—much less her beating heart—to put him down for being imperfect. Thanks to Ann, Bobbie had a happy ending. 

I'm still working on mine.