Down from Scarsdale - (a possible memoir)

xmas day 2025

We started moving down from Scarsdale slowly at first.  A kind of slow drip/grind of loss.  Where do you go if you start off high?  I don’t just mean as far as status.  I mean as an experience, a process, so that ultimately you end up an acetic or something.  I’ve been told I have too much clutter so I guess that’s why.  I like to hold on to things.

It could have been a divorce like any other. 

Wait, I should start earlier if it’s a memoir.  My parents’ marriage was…  Ok let’s just say we were somehow upper middle class - through the grace of my brilliant Grandfather - a genius of sorts, who supposedly went months without talking to my Grandmother.  Lovely, well-intentioned people who lived in a fine suburb.  I didn’t mind.  I had a loving family, a dog that ran away named Hector Protector (apparently we needed protection), and a big house, lots of friends.  We saw our maternal Grandparents every weekend.  We saw Dad’s parents a lot too.  I remember the wall paper at our big Scarsdale house.  My Mother said decorating was not her strongest suit.  But green and orange?   Whatever.  I remember the only time I saw her cry was when the dog ate the curtains.  They were expensive.  We had a fireplace.  I've never had one since.  I know how it sounds.  Spoiled girl!  

But the hits kept coming.  My Dad was a little like Jeffrey Epstein mixed with Donald Trump, sprinkle in some borscht-belt humor.  Narcissistic wounds came from his Mother, “Where’s the other two points,?” she scolded.  Or, "Look at my boy, how handsome! " And he was.  He was quick and clever too, just like his parents - a very bright couple.  Dad was boxed out of that marriage in a way.  His Mother was intense - a full-time working English teacher, as were many of the women in my family.  She would read us short stories, some quite disturbing, such as "The Most Dangerous Game." But of four brothers living well into their 90’s, my Grandpa Sy dropped dead at 62 on New Year’s Eve at the start of his well earned retirement.  All the luck. This was all with a background of great hope and promise in this country: Vietnam but Post-War optimism. JFK. Moon Landing. We could do anything. My Father was going to catapult from books to movies. He left.

At Yom Kippur, when I was 9, my Father shoved my Aunt.  I was scared.  Apparently fasting is not the best for every family.  

My Mother sued my Father for child support. That year when I visited him in California, he struck the process server with a lug wrench from the car seat.  Somehow then his arm was gushing blood, and, having just received my driver’s license, I found myself cruising to Cedars Sinai emergency down one of the Boulevards near LA.  This may have been the beginning of my people-pleasing to avoid my Father’s rage, narcissistic rage, because he was special, deserved special treatment, explosive when he didn't get it.  My Mother chalked it up to Bipolar Disorder.  That took me a long time to appreciate; the highs and lows of childhood - who knew?  Once she stated, “The year he was on lithium was the best year of our marriage.”

Me being the "golden child" of my Father’s doting attention, I could bask in the light of tennis (or anything with a racket), really thrilled to be his narcissistic supply. I behaved well.  I excelled.  In a few areas I had some minor weaknesses - a tendency toward disorganization shall we say?  I would lose things.  I still remember him whipping his head around after slamming on the breaks.  We would go back for it.  What is it called when you try to counter-act the pain of abandonment?  You over-try, over-compensate. Fawn, figure out and highly astutely slither through social situations as if you belonged in the Garden of Eden, tuned up by hyper-vigilance of your environment.  The snake was you.  I could get on so well in social situations that I became a therapist - my very own super-power! 

Oh wait.  I forgot the middle.  Is this a memoir?  My Father had a lot of ideas.  He was tall and handsome and grandiose.  But when he left us, and boy do I mean left us, he left me with the mistaken belief that he would still magically be there simultaneously and effortlessly by my side for all the experiences a young girl might need.  Full stop. Reality is what’s happening.  A weak grasp on reality is telling your kids you would ALWAYS be there for them and then moving 3,000 miles away.  OK it happens.  But the narcissism.  Yes O yes the narcissism.  Ever met an old man narcissist?  Not pretty.  

Don’t worry I did OK.  Married someone more eccentric and less social than my Father, but definitely more loyal.  Taught me much about loyalty.  And other things, many other things.  Oh, and my Mother died.  That was like sooooooo bad.  Do you see I’m just a regular girl trying to survive this cruel world?  

My husband became disabled.  Doesn’t define me.  I mean - the resentment is as hot as a poker on Christmas, which it happens to be today.  Years of nothingness without a Mother or Father or Husband.  My kids fulfilled me and exhausted me but that blur of time was everything.  I worked so hard to shield them from this harsh political failure while my husband railed against the rise of authoritarianism in the US, long before Trump.  We had friends, we lost friends.  We had family, we lost family.  His family treated me with utter disdain because they didn’t like him.  I didn’t deserve that.

I had a therapist who died of an apparent overdose.  Yep.  I met him at Kripalu totally random.  He was only the 3rd therapist I’d ever had in my life.  He was larger than life.  A Buddhist who had a vast trauma history and a flair for telling it, this guy was the real deal.  You wanted to be him.  I was utterly drawn to him in some strange, mystical way.  I think I’m an intuitive.  I feel/sense? things seconds before they happen.  Sometimes.  I still have a feeling/cling to the hope that a natural disaster is literally going to sweep Trump away.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about Christmas.  I copped out by being Jewish all these years.  I didn’t really care that much about Christian holidays.  But this year I decided to lean into it a little.  What is really going on here?  You work all freaking year for this one day?  Help me understand!  It almost seems cruel.  The build up/let down has GOT to be disappointing.  Build up to what exactly?  My client stated that the postman, whom she doesn’t like, slipped something under her apartment door!  Up until this moment, I still don’t think I understand.  Is that terrifying?  A girl alone in New York City, what is she to do?  Thirty years ago I still remember bumping into my old HS friend Aaron Sorkin on the uptown 4-5-6 subway.  I wasn't afraid then.

I’ve had a good life.  My friend says, “You’re so lucky, you haven’t had any bad stuff.”  What? (As my daughter constantly says to me when I sound incoherent after a long day).  Friend, I say, I've had plenty.  We all have.  You pick like a scab.  Obsessive but not compulsive we joke.  My friends and I like to laugh.  Some of my friends get into fights at pickleball.  I don’t.  (Of course).  

My husband is annoying and people don’t like him.  It’s OK.  Because he’s smart (book-smart like reads the constitution in the bathroom smart, can take any test smart) and tall (like can’t sit on an airplane tall) people find him intimidating.  Oh and also he is intimidating.  He wears black and knows a lot of things about a lot of things.  I know a little bit about a small group of things.  I don’t know how this marriage has lasted.  I’m just starting to realize that I actually do need him to look after me; not just the other way around.  I do things backwards a lot of times.  I fall.  Yes, even though I am athletic with a racket, I can’t dance and I am clumsy.  I fall into myself.

I shouldn’t be so focused on self-pity.  My kids turned out amazing!  I guess I need to be more like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which the same husband forced us all to watch on xmas Eve.  I need to appreciate what I have.  The dark night of my Mother’s solstice birthday.  The grim realities of my job getting overtaken by AI.  The prospect of my husband’s back ever getting stronger.  The panic as I see my kids launch into a society possessed, I tell you, by greed.  As if nothing else mattered.  My small, messy house is under-par.  But the family is whole.  Wholly messed-up.  Holly Holy Love.