I just came across this unfinished essay in my files. Wow. I wrote it when I was 27.
Like Mother, Like Daughter?
My mother used to pride herself on her sleuthing skills. Her eyes used to sparkle whenever she talked about uncovering a secret, or getting to the bottom of some domestic mystery, like the OJ Simpson case, which she followed religiously on Court TV (she took copious notes and made maps of the murder scene), or the mysterious poop on our lawn. (She once devised a stakeout mission to uncover the culprit. OK, so it turned out to be our next door neighbor’s dog, and we were on a lot with only their house, but c’mon, a stakeout mission? Hilarious.) Sometimes I used to wonder: if marriage, child-rearing, and domesticity hadn’t been her main priority in life, would she have ever considered pursuing a career as a private investigator? Perhaps a stint with the FBI or CIA would have suited her.
Instead, she chose a traditional and familiar path, a road well-trodden. It was the path of her mother, my grandmother. It was the proverbial path of the housewife: a world in which the man brings home the bacon and the woman cooks it.
My mother’s adeptness at sniffing out secrets is at once something I have admired and detested. My senior year of high school, I hosted a kegger at my house, while my parents were off enjoying the foliage and tending to their farm animals at their house in Vermont. Before their return, I spent hours cleaning every nook and cranny: I vacuumed; I scrubbed; I picked up every cigarette butt within a 500-foot radius. So you can imagine my surprise when my mother discovered my mischievousness by finding a tiny, yellowish spot by the hot tub – the stain immediately roused her suspicions. After analyzing, prodding, smelling, and even tasting the sticky blemish, she cried out in fury, “Someone’s been drinking malt liquor!” Luckily, I had a sympathetic older brother, who was of drinking age, and he graciously played the role of the sacrificial lamb while I sheepishly played dumb. I never dared have another party – my mom was too smart and too skilled a gumshoe for me to ever get away with such debauchery again.
As far as the job of mother is concerned, Nancy did a pretty good job. What she lacked in tenderness, she made up for with devotion and selflessness. I believe my parents had a good marriage – they both appeared content in the roles they played with one another and with me and my brother. Though she swears she wouldn’t have had her life play out in any other way, I can’t help but wonder if she ever coveted passion and excitement outside of home and hearth instead of looking to her husband, who was charming and hysterical and intelligent and successful, and children, who pursued paths that she never did, to provide her with validation and purpose. Was she really content sacrificing her entire being for her family? Did she have dreams beyond “I do” and diapers? Why didn’t she do anything with her degree in library sciences, investigating books the way she did her daughter’s secret parties?
Once, when I was a young twenty-something living in Boston, independent and free yet conflicted and confused about my life and its inevitable trajectory towards adulthood, I sought answers and support from her. I rarely went to my mother with these types of concerns; we existed together on a very superficial level, restricting our conversations to the weather or the latest political news. When I finally mustered the courage to speak to her about my escalating mid-life crisis (and those pesky panic attacks that came with it), she responded without the tenderness and empathy I sought. By the end of our uncomfortable conversation, she said with a sigh, “Neel, it’s my time now.” By this comment I deduced one thing: she could no longer be bothered by the role of mother because she, too, was lost. Tired of giving and providing for her children and family, my mother had simply decided it was finally time to focus on herself. I was angry and hurt by her reluctance to help me in my time of trial, but there was nothing I could do.
My mother’s quest for self-realization got me to thinking about how I had arrived in my own crisis-mode. Who was, Nancy, the woman, beyond the role of Suzie Q homemaker, and how had her life decisions affected mine?
Growing up there seemed no right answer. I was bombarded with so many mixed messages and conflicting notions of what it meant to be happy and excited. On the one hand, I was raised in a somewhat insular environment in which my mother’s greatest hopes were for me – her only daughter – to marry, have babies, and follow in her domestic footsteps. This is what she knew; it’s what her mother knew; and her mother’s mother knew. She never asked about my jobs. I guess she never really cared all that much. But on the other side of the laundry machine, there was the outside world, the burgeoning feminist culture, female liberation. And Sex and the City episodes that were telling me the key to happiness was through a career, independence, and casual sex.
As a young woman, I took these two conflicting ideologies and came out somewhere in the confusing middle. My mom went to college to get her MRS degree; perhaps she thought I might do the same. But all I got was a lousy B.A. Sorry, mom! And while I was always gainfully employed post-college, often with prestigious companies, I never really had passion for what I was doing, nor did I know where I was headed. Superiors at work would always ask, as they’re programmed to do at year-long reviews, where I wanted to be in five years. My fellow female colleagues always had visions of career grandeur, of climbing the corporate ladder, but I was always meek by comparison. “I don’t really know, exactly,” I’d reply. Sometimes I’d make something up, just so I could avoid their judgment, scrutiny. Shouldn’t all women in the working world have ambitions and want to make their way to the top? I know that’s what they were thinking. But I didn’t really care, not because I hated working, but because of this indescribable magnetism of another life, the one that I knew my mother thought destined for me but one that I wasn’t sure why I was supposed to want.
I was terribly confused by all this noise. If I threw myself into work and career where would that leave my love life? And since I was convinced that a fulfilling career couldn’t bring real happiness, I deduced that a man could. I’d never find excitement in the world, unless I met a man, who could fill me up, who could make me whole. I could only be validatedthrough marriage, and by having babies. And so, while I had jobs and functioned quite well in them, I placed a ton of emphasis on finding a man, sacrificing desire for promotion for the desire to find connubial bliss. The result was mediocrity on both fronts.
One would think that a woman who is plagued by the pressure of finding a man to sustain and fulfill her, well, that she’d be a serial monogamist. But the truth was that I was incapable of sustaining a long-term, intimate relationship. I ran from intimacy and chased after the unattainable guys, the ones who played women the way Yo-Yo Ma works away at his cello – fast and furious. And always, always, I was disappointed by these men, usually because they had no desire to commit to me. Without the drama of men of such character, where would I find excitement in my life – certainly not my career? I found purpose in attempting to seduce guys and became addicted to the feeling of fleeting romances and the lure of Mr. Bigs. Though I considered myself something of a prude, I was the quintessential Carrie Bradshaw. And in true Carrie form, I had to ask myself: Were both the traditional culture and the feminist culture failing me?
A few years ago, my parents and I were at a squash tournament dinner party (both my father and I are squash nuts). We were sitting with a couple about my parents’ age – the man was in my father’s draw, and his wife, a Peruvian firecracker who I could barely understand, was there to cheer him on. My mother, a firecracker in her own right, and the Peruvian lady began discussing marriage and the role of woman within and outside of that holiest of unions.
Amidst the hullabaloo, my name was called out – I was to answer their questions. “When you get married and have kids, Neel (notice the “when” not “if”) do you think you’ll continue to work or will you stay at home?” my mother inquired. “I-I don’t know,” I replied. The Peruvian then looked at me intensely, cocked her head, and said (and this I could understand perfectly), “Neely, NEVER give up your career, without your career, you are nobody, you are nothing. You will always regret it if you do.” “No, no, no, Neel! A career will never make you truly happy,” my mom squealed, her arms flailing about, like a monkey who just had its banana stolen. Back and forth the argument went, an agreement to disagree it’s only moment of relief. A few years later, I heard that the Peruvian woman got a divorce.
I’ll never forget that heated conversation, and the way that woman looked at me, and the way the words came out of her mouth, and the passion with which she felt her sentiments to be true.
THIS IS WHERE I STOPPED. There's so much to add, so many things I've learned over the past four years, and yet, I've so much more to figure out. That's the best part of self-discovery: it never has to end.
However, lately, I've grown weary. Ever since the rumor mill started churning out claims that the show is fake, I have begun to lose interest and respect, though I still do watch (but the season finale was the first time I've ever felt like, "Yeah, I could skip watching this and not have a pulmonary embelism for missing it"). So, apparently Heidi doesn't work at Bolthouse, Lauren and Whitney don't really work at Teen Vogue, Heidi and Spencer don't even really live at their shared apartment, etc., etc. The first season had me at "I'm living way too extravagantly for my age." The second season, ok, I started to wonder. And the third season has solidified my suspicions. And for some reason, I'm having a hard time putting the fakery behind me - it's almost as if the show has become tainted. I was sold a false bill of goods. How many times are characters going to accidentally go to the same places; how many times do I have to watch a facial expression that probably doesn't match up with the real dialogue that was spoken. It's all just getting a bit tired, stale. Thoughts?
I walked outside my apartment building a couple weeks ago only to find a small demonstration occurring in front of the Four Seasons hotel. When one of the protesters handed me a flier, I read through it and then, as most people who are handed fliers on the sidewalk do, walked to the nearest trash can to throw it out. But then a thought occurred to me: Maybe this would be interesting to write about; at 
Online dating has taken off over the years, losing much of the stigma it possessed back in the early to mid-90s. Indeed, finding your soulmate on the WWW is no longer considered weird or lame or desperate. In fact, there's a matchmaking site for practically everyone nowadays, creating what one might call niche dating. I guess it makes sense because you're narrowing the playing field to people with whom you have things in common.
Sometimes, I would declare the B-word softly, under my breath, as I watched Alexis Carrington Colby manipulate and deceive her fellow super-wealthy compatriots on the popular, nighttime soap opera Dynasty (which, by the way, I was addicted to).
