It was day 53 of the detox when I broke down and called my mother.
I wondered if there was something significant about the number 53. I googled 53 Jewish number meaning and found nothing, only information for the number 36:
The number 36 is a holy number, because it is twice the number 18. In Jewish numerology, the number 18 means chai or life. The number 36 is holy, because it is two lives.
Great, had god wanted me to call my mother at 36 days?
My mother’s phone rang until her voice mail picked up. It was after midnight on the East Coast, and I knew she would be asleep. I didn’t tell her I’d been fired that day. I didn’t tell her that my heart hurt. I didn’t address the detox either.
I simply said, “Hi, it’s your daughter. Just calling to say hello. I’ll be around tomorrow.”
Then I hung up.
Then I cried. More than anything, all I’d ever wanted was a total embrace, the embrace of an infinite mother, absolute and divine. I wanted to lose the edges of myself and blend with a woman, enter the amniotic sac and melt away. I wanted a love that was bottomless, unconditional, with zero repercussions. I wanted an infinite yogurt, a mystical and maternal yogurt, something of which I could have unlimited quantities that would not hurt me.
But nothing was unlimited. Every cup had a bottom. Miriam and I were done. Certainly, my time in the womb had ended, harsh and abrupt in the cold hospital, bright light, a stranger’s pair of hands, searing consciousness. The woman who had carried me inside her for nine months had become a stranger. Even those women whose mothers loved them unconditionally, that love too had an end.
Still I wanted it. I wanted a love contingent on nothing finite. I wanted a love without end. Everyone was always saying you had to give it to yourself. Self-love, self-love. What did that even mean?
Dr. Mahjoub said it all the time: Mother yourself, parent yourself.
It seemed impossible. I had no idea how to be a mom, let alone my own mother. But what about daughterhood? Was it possible that I could be my own daughter?
This seemed more doable. I wondered if the universe, in its roundness, somehow already contained my daughterness. Perhaps I’d been being held there, a daughter all along, until I woke up to it. If I could not be my own mother—or at least not the kind of mother worth having—then maybe I could be my own daughter.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I heard myself saying, roughly from a place in my throat just below my Adam’s apple.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I said again, and found that I had put my arms around myself.
I sat down on the wood floor and began to rock myself. Then I moved over to the sofa, because it was softer, and rocked myself there.
“I’m so sorry, daughter,” I said, tears in my eyes. “I’m sorry that you felt I had abandoned you.”
“That is okay, Mother,” I said. “You were always here. I just didn’t know how to find you.”
I heard myself talking to myself. I wondered if I had finally lost it.
“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I said.
“Yes, Mother,” I said. “Promise me you will never disappear from me again. Show me how I can always know you’re here. Show me how to share my joy with you, that you will be happy to receive it.”
“Oh, my daughter,” I said. “You will forget that I am here. This is the way of human beings, to forget. But you found your way back to me once and so can find your way back again, because I am always here. The world will hurt you again and again. You will hurt yourself again and again. And when it does, and when you do, you will remember me again and again. You will drop to your knees. You will hold yourself. You will be your own daughter again.”