How to Torture Your Jewish Mother, Part 1

After 39 years, I have ascended to Master in this field, my field of expertise. I can share the secrets of my success--no paywall or subscription play necessary! My toolkit is precise, refined, and simple. The most important tool I have, that enables me to torture my poor, aging, selfless, well-intentioned mother year after year, is ridiculously rudimentary: No Marriage. No marriage, no ring, no engagement, no long-term mench of a partner. In fact, no short-term mench either! Being single is the number one, foolproof method to torture your magnanimous angel of a mother, who raised you and your sister the best she could, despite it being the 90's and occasionally buying you girls Gushers at Costco to bribe you into going in the first place, even though it most certainly would give you cavities and get stuck in your braces.

When your mother is tortured, like mine is, by not being able to partake in the vacation picture sharing, marital status-updating, and general humble bragging of other mothers regarding their daughters, she might employ a toolkit of her own. My mother, after all these years of asking "What's his last name, what does his father do?" every time I tell her I like someone, has learned how to manage disappointment. My mother leans into it. After her surprising survival through my twenties, she's grown stronger, more resilient, and wilier. No longer does she ask the obvious questions that only lead to her heart being crushed as once again I mention a boy with the middle name Patrick. She has graduated from "But is his mother Jewish?" to more nuanced, sophisticated questions, like "Have you told him the clock is ticking and no one is getting any younger?"

This all points to the torture device that reigns supreme: grandchildren, or lack thereof. This is what my mother wants the most, and what she has wanted the most since I was out of college--during college, it was her greatest fear, but every year since then (and that was a long, long time ago) the desire has intensified, to the point of it becoming equally about her as it is me. There was the time I visited for Thanksgiving, and my mother was driving, and I was sitting in the passenger seat, minding my own business and thinking about actual reality. My mother turned to me, and said: "I have a dream."

Have I heard this speech before? Spoiler alert: I have not.

"I have a dream. I have a dream that I turn 60, and you meet someone, and you get pregnant, and your sister settles down and she gets pregnant, and you two have babies near each other and I am a grandmother at 60. That's my dream. I'm about to turn fifty-nine, Allie."

Different dream, turns out.