Long Plastic Arms

Remembering my editor, therapist, witness, mother.

(Many thanks to Denise Tanton, who took the pictures in this post and helped me to remember my mom.)

She had no angle, no ulterior motive, no secret wish that I make something of myself. Her only request of me: Keep writing. 

I disappointed her in this regard, taking years off writing anything personal — I didn’t want to spook investors or employers. And writing for the sake of writing felt like an indulgence best left for my hazily imagined retirement. So she relished the scraps that she found online — marketing newsletters, a musing on LinkedIn about blockchain. Weeks before she died, I wrote a series on startup marketing that delighted her. Even if she didn’t understand any of it, I was writing again. That’s what mattered.

Her profoundest joys were her kids’ personal, not professional, meanderings. The movies we loved, the articles we read, the music we preferred. Anything we wrote. She read every blog post I’d ever written, calling me sometimes minutes after posting something to tell me she loved the post, and if I had a minute maybe I could fix a typo two-thirds of the way in. 

I gave her access to my TypePad account so she could copyedit for me, initially as a joke, but eventually because I needed her help. She knew how I operated, in bursts of energetic inspiration followed by grammatical loose ends, unread emails, unnoticed backlinks. It wasn’t unusual in 2005 to receive a call from my Mom.

“You read the comments from your post yesterday?”

This was how she got me to respond to them. 

She understood that I was always interested in others’ reactions to my work, but I was also distracted by the future. She was my engagement. She knew my struggle with being present. I outsourced this work to her.

She was the family documentarian and witness; our first call to share news, both good and bad. When my sister separated from her husband I was visiting with my Mom in Chicago.

“Did you talk to Julie yet today?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“You should give her a call.” 

I was a sporadic record keeper and relied on her to give me birthdays, new addresses of family members, the number to reach someone in the hospital. She wasn’t religious about religion, but about tradition. At Christmas she set up her plastic tree and every single ornament ever purchased or gifted to her. And when she got “too creaky” to do it all herself, she enlisted my brother to do it, at the same time every year, Thanksgiving. She sent birthday cards, anniversary cards, sent me cash every year on my birthday, up to my 50th. The last one she’d live to see.

She was a hoarder of sorts, of memorabilia. After a flood wiped out a good portion of her family archive, she realized she needed to distribute her collection for optimal safekeeping. She sent me my high school and college articles, most of which I didn’t remember writing, a yellowed New York Times clip, my first and only, published in the City section, and a baby book stuffed with achievement certificates, notes from parent-teacher conferences, and my grade school report cards. 

And she printed copies of all my blog posts. I made fun of her at the time for it, but then, through a template change snafu on TypePad I lost access to the previous five years of blog posts and was grateful she had kept all of my writing.

In college when I had to pick a major, I kept my options as open-ended as possible, choosing English Literature. I was interested in journalism and broadcasting, but even this branch of liberal arts was too restrictive, I had thought. What if I changed my mind? I could always apply for journalism school later if I wanted (which I ended up doing and then didn’t go; a decision I was to repeat multiple times, with multiple grad programs in multiple disciplines). I don’t recall my Mom having an opinion about any of this, other than she knew I would figure it out. She had never gone to college and thought that all of her kids making it through undergrad was accomplishment enough. 

One thing she always made clear: You could always come home. She had asked me to stay when I was 21 and graduated from college early, anxious to get on with a career in New York City. There was no rush, she said. My bedroom still looked as I’d left it, just more picked up.

“I don’t want you to go,” she told me.

I can’t stay, I told her, but I promised I’d come back. 

I never came back to Chicago to live, but my room would stay largely intact for 20 more years, converting very gradually into my Mom’s office.

I never intended to employ my mother. But, being my mother, she engaged with people who commented on my company’s blog and had started writing her own, developing her own community. Her dedication and interest in engaging and supporting other writers inspired one of my BlogHer co-founders to suggest that, perhaps, we could bring her on as a community manager. I thought that made sense, so long as she didn’t report to me.

By now I was living in California, though traveling to New York and Chicago several times a month and would often stay with my mom when I was in town. She sat with me, often speaking to me with my laptop between us as I could only justify my downtime if it was spent catching up on email. She was always willing to take the errant drips of my attention, for years never getting the full stream. I would share what was to me at the time the most critical news about my world – venture funding rounds, landing major accounts, preparing for our annual conference. She took all of it in, every tedious drop, knowing that I would eventually spill the good stuff. My joys, my fears, the shit that made me laugh.

We talked about dreams, not the future-facing, rainbow colored ones: Mine were always classic anxiety-driven dreams: Being late to class; being unprepared for a test; being back in college and realizing I had not only failed to study for my exams, I hadn’t shown up for class, hadn’t even registered. I’d wake up from these dreams still trying to mentally unspool my actions, asking myself, “what were you thinking this whole time?” I had been sure I had done SOMETHING toward my future. What was it?

My mother shared her own recurring dream: She was on top of a tall building with her four children, and in the rapid succession of a twisted video game one of us would fall off the edge, forcing her to extend her freakishly long plastic arms to catch us. She never let on if she failed to catch anyone.

Over the last 10 years we spoke by phone most days. By then Mom wasn’t traveling anymore, and she became less willing to visit friends or have visitors. For some people close to her it was an affront—a sign that my mom didn’t love them anymore. My sisters believe that she just wasn’t feeling good, and she didn’t want people to see her that way.

It was hard for me, in the months before her death, calling and, shortly after sharing a troubling thought or confidence hearing her say, “Well tell the girls I love them,” meaning, “I’m done talking now.” Her capacity had been limitless, and I started to feel soft contours of a boundary—something my mother had never established before in my lifetime. 

Looking back, I think she was trying to gradually, lovingly, wean us off of her as an omnipresent reminder that we mattered. We’d have to start doing that for each other, and on our own.

Weeks before she passed I told her about yet another career transition, a new mission, and how strange it felt to me to not be in a panic about the details of execution, or about how it would all turn out.

“I’m not worried,” she said. “You know you are going to be just fine.” 

There wasn’t a tinge of persuasion in her voice. She said it like it was a fact, like every other affirming fact she had told me my whole life. 

I suppose that was her ultimate gift: the underlying assurance that whatever it was I would do with my life, I would be OK. I was OK. I was worthy of anything. I had nothing to prove. 

I wish for the same for my girls; the reassurance of those long, plastic arms.