My Mother Reads My Blog by Elizabeth Tannen

Elizabeth Tannen is a former NPR producer, Huffington Post contributor and student in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She writes Dating in the Odyssey Years, a blog that not only her mom reads — I do, too! We’re thrilled to present her essay on a subject all mothers and daughters will relate to — just how much should we share with each other? Let me know what you think.

I write a blog about my romantic relationships, and my mother subscribes. You might think this would mean that my mother and I have healthy, open communication about my love life. We don’t.

In general, my writing is tame and abstract — nothing too provocative or explicit. But once, I wrote about sleeping with two men in one weekend. I hesitated to publish the essay — a mock open letter to Tiger Woods, seeking advice on simultaneous affairs — out of concern for my parents. But, ultimately, I liked the idea too much to resist.

The day I publish it, I pace the parking lot of an Albuquerque bar and dial my parents’ house in Brooklyn. All day I’ve been waiting to hear any response from them. I haven’t. It’s my mother I’m more anxious about, but my father answers the phone.

“The part about John Edwards was cute,” he says.

“Can I talk to Mom?” I feel the tremors in my abdomen rise to my chest as he passes her the receiver.

She asks about my day, I ask about hers. But I can’t wait. I ask.

“It was cute,” she says. “I liked the jokes about being Jewish.”

Later I describe the moment, and my parents’ general unease about discussing my love life with me, in a blog post. I conclude it’s because, darn it, they just love me so much. When you think, I write, about “the discomfort of knowing that I want something so badly, that I have such a hard time finding it, and that there’s really nothing they can do to help … they’re right, there really isn’t anything to say.”

Moments later, my dad leaves a comment — using the pseudonym, as he does, of their deceased chocolate Labrador, Wilbur: “Precisely!” A few hours after that, my mother comments, too: “Amen. Hugs. Mom.” None of us brings it up again.

A few months later I go home for my brother’s engagement party and meet my mother at her Upper East Side office. She’d suggested that we get our hair done together, but when I arrive, she tells me she had to do hers the day before. Still, she says, she’ll come sit with me at while I get a trim and blowout.

She embraces the owner as we walk in and whispers to me some concern about the woman’s husband — my parents may be slow to register concern with my emotional life, but this has never held true for complete strangers — and then sits down with an outdated copy of New York magazine on the pink vinyl bench by the window, situating herself just too far away from me for comfortable conversation,

By the time we get to the train, it’s rush hour and the subway is packed. But like all lifelong New Yorkers, my mother is expert at strategizing for subway seating: by 59^th Street she’s maneuvered herself between a large black man listening to too-loud hip hop and a bundled Eastern European woman probably bound for someplace in Queens.

The night before, I’d written a blog post about reconnecting with an ex-boyfriend who I’d long told my mother about and I knew she’d read it. I hover above her, clenching my wrist around the metal pole, and wonder if she will ever ask me about him. Or about anything.

“So, do you not want to know what’s happening in my life?”

“What do you mean? Of course I do.”

“I mean, is there anything you don’t want to know?”

She glances sideways before looking back up at me. “No,” she says, quickly adding, “I mean, not the really, you know, intimate details …“

“I know, I know, I know,” I interrupt. “Then why don’t you ask me about it?”

My mother has never produced a satisfactory answer to this question, and this moment proves no exception. She lifts her shoulders in a sort of twisted shrug. She turns down her thick, red-painted lips. She elevates her arms slightly, and turns up her palms. With her entire body, and eventually her voice, too, she says, “I don’t know.”

At the same time that neither of us knows why she doesn’t ask, both of us, also, do: it’s just the way she is. I can’t explain why I compulsively overshare, regularly exposing details of my personal life to strangers. I don’t think my mother knows why she is the opposite: somebody private, who isn’t comfortable discussing things that are personal or difficult or intimate.

As I get older, both my mother and I increasingly desire something like a friendship. And yet, neither of us is ready to let go of the parental piece of the relationship. She still reminds me to pack my toothbrush and visit the dentist. I’m still prone to snap at her unreasonably. But, still, when my plane lands or the class I teach goes unusually well, she is whom I think to call.

My mother has always been extremely supportive of my writing. On the sprawling mahogany bookshelf in her bedroom, she keeps a beige, leather-bound album in which she catalogues all my publications, dating back to my first published work — a story printed in the elementary school newsletter called “My Dead Dog Alex.”

And while I’ve told her repeatedly that she doesn’t have to read my blog, the truth is that I want her to. Her pride pleases me, even while it makes me self-conscious: a dichotomy that characterizes my response to her forceful brand of love for me. I take it for granted, enjoy it, expect it, at the same time I find it overwhelming, burdensome in its immense weight.

A few months later, my parents come visit me in New Mexico. The first night, I give a reading of an essay that mentions sex and masturbation, alcohol and cigarettes. They laugh along and beam with pride. Afterwards, friends and colleagues commend them for their tolerance.

“Oh, we’re used to it,” they assure them. “We read her blog!”

At the time, I was dating a guy named Jake — someone I’d met over spring break in Los Angeles — and had waited until my parents arrival to tell them his plan to come visit me. When my mother virtually ignores my announcement, I seethe.

Over dinner the following night, I drink a few glasses of spicy Spanish wine and decide I need to bring it up again.

“It’s kind of a big deal that Jake is coming to visit me,” I say. “I know it’s not super serious or anything, but I don’t see why you can’t be a little bit happy for me that someone likes me enough to spend three hundred dollars on a plane ticket to come visit me.”

My father holds his face expressionless, drapes his arm around my mother’s chair as we watch her muster something like an apology.

“It’s just that, reading your blog,” she stammers, “from reading your blog I get a certain impression about your love life.”

“What kind of impression is that?” My voice drops at least two octaves.

“Well, it kind of gives the impression that you, that you sleep around.” Those last two words spill out like excess milk foam from a cup of cappuccino — inadvertent and sloppy.

I know this. I know, perhaps sooner than she does, that my mother doesn’t truly mean these words. But this recognition does not translate to sympathy.

“First of all,” I say, “I can’t believe you just said that to me. Those words are offensive to anyone, much less your own daughter. Second of all, that’s complete bullshit.”

At this point I continue to rant on a range of subjects with varying degrees of relevance: about the notion of “persona” in nonfiction and the fact that just because I present myself a certain way doesn’t mean that’s the way I truly am; about how things were entirely different when they were young — how they have no idea what it’s like to be twenty-something and single; about how every writer has parents, and I can’t possibly go through life censoring myself on their behalf.

“You’ve never even lived outside New York,” I lecture, as though it matters. “You have no idea what it’s like, you have no idea how hard it is to live on your own in your late twenties. You can’t possibly understand what my life is like.”

In retrospect, it strikes me as generous that neither of them pointed out how, similarly, I know nothing of what their lives are like: to have three sons and lose your wife in your mid-thirties, like my father; to, at twenty-five, marry a widow with three boys — like my mother.

Later in the evening, both of us sheathed in the oversized terrycloth bathrobes from our hotel suite, my mother hugs me and tells me, again, that she’s sorry.

“You know,” she whispers. “I did date in my twenties. Before I met your father. One of these days, when he’s not around, I can tell you about it.”

Almost a year later, we still haven’t had that conversation. I know both of us want to. As with so many things, I know that if I were to ask her she’d be thrilled to talk, and that so long as I don’t, she’ll be too shy to bring it up. I know I should accept this, and just ask — but I don’t. Because my mother is the only person with whom I can act like a petulant child. And so I do.