On My Mother
A Sum of Contradictions or A Feminist Pimp
My mother was a feminist pimp. Not figuratively. Literally. She was defined by her contradictions: an indestructible fortress of a woman with the muscle power of a man and the face of an angel: ocean eyes and a neat nose met rose-shaped lips, on display in a gold frame. A combination which didn’t exactly read, my Klitschko-fist will turn every bar fight into a game of Wack-A-Male. Judging my mother based on her appearance was as reliable as judging a book by its cover.
Born into a working-class family in post-war Berlin, her childhood didn’t deserve to be called one. It was defined by rape, parental alcoholism and motherly blood-spattering beatings. At only 16 she escaped the underworld and was soon to find refuge on the other side in the world of the rich and famous. She was a double-sided coin in the hands of fate. So naturally, I was born with one foot on each side of the Iron Curtain between nothing and everything.
News and reality TV programs paint tragicomic pictures of the lives of the lower class, whereas Hollywood features polished tales of the bold & the beautiful drowning their indifference in Dom Perignon. The media never offers an insight into the lives of those caught between heaven and hell. I grew up in purgatory. I was the human bridge closing the wealth gap. Among my friends were trust fund babies, who used $4k champagne bottles as super soakers alongside homeless alcoholics and abused orphans. I was surrounded by billionaire parents on the Forbes list as much as I was in the company of heroin addicted cab drivers and ex-con crackheads who beat my mother like a piñata. While my mother struggled to find enough money to get food on the table, my father took me shopping at Dolce & Gabbana, bought me my 5th iPod and spent New Year’s Eve with me in the Maldives. It was a life you don’t read about in magazines or see in an episode of Gossip Girl. The life of a door stopper wedge.
In the 1980’s my father, a rising film director who avoided night life like a reverse-vampire, met my mother, an aspiring actress and Berlin party scene IT girl without a high school diploma or money in her pocket. While he had both feet firmly on the ground of life, she was a loose kite floating where the wind carried her from actress and pin-up girl, to bartender and vinyl vendor. She was street smart over book smart. Where he wasn’t enough, she was too much from the mask painted on her face to the twenty silver rings she wore like armor. He fell asleep next to subwoofers in night clubs, she traded sleep for cocaine. He enjoyed life from the back row, she was the star of the show who always looked like a pretty woman, never like Pretty Woman even with her butt cheeks wrapped in black vinyl. Anything she wore, she wore with confidence, including lipstick on her teeth. He was embarrassed by everything; she was flustered by nothing. They were an infeasible human Venn diagram with one single, mathematically impossible overlap: me.
Unsurprisingly, they divorced briefly after The Overlap. She raised me with sole custody in an outrageously expensive apartment in one of Munich’s elite neighborhoods my father paid for. She declined her acting roles for the one role she wanted to accept, being a mother. Unfortunately, this meant trading magazine covers for mugshots. Her short lived but glamorous time in the spotlight was followed by alcoholism, promiscuity and domestic violence by the hands of her many too literal partners in crime. Introduced to multiple faces of violence, I was on a first-name basis with a burning tower of clothes in our living room, a carpet of broken glass which books under my feet turned into a skating rink to my mother’s blonde hair stained with her heart’s iron tears.
On this side of the curtain money grew on trees like carrots. No income actually meant no money, but although we suffered financial hardship, we did so in style (if expensive equates to taste that is). We paraded Louis Vuitton purses like keycards to an exclusive members-only club, hid the tired truth behind enormous faux Dior shades like Audrey Hepburn and wrapped our bones and flesh, running on frozen dinners, in offensively oversized mink coats because other’s approval was oxygen to our lungs. It seemed as long as we masked our poverty from the world, we refrained from admitting it to ourselves. An actress on stage, an actress in life. We kept our closets stocked with her ALAÏA evening gowns like rotting vegetables, worth over 5 times our rent each, waiting for red carpet invitations that never came. Body bags of a lifelong gone like morbid souvenirs. Our drawers were filled to the rim with autograph cards waiting for signatures that were never asked for. Remnants of a lifelong gone past their expiration date. Shed snakeskin. Their uselessness mocked us in deadly silence, but as long as we didn’t toss them, we didn’t fall apart.
The higher up, the harder the fall and her fall was full of loss. My mother loved me to death. Her love was an umbilical cord tied around my neck like a noose. As a result, I never experienced the true meaning of the words loss or lack. Fancy marzipan cake and wrapped gifts on every birthday, a lavish holiday feast on the dining table with presents under the tree each holiday season. While she could serve Christmas Goose as a cover up, it was impossible to silence the eviction specialist’s angry doorbell rings or the bank’s impatient phone calls as it was to hide the pitch-dark mourning veil of unpaid electricity bills. Her face was not a blank slate but Munch’s The Scream on display in Oslo’s National Gallery. She tried to hide her panic on the inside too, but the cheap 3-liter bottles of pinot grigio and vodka only worsened the jittering of her soul. The alcohol in her veins was an impulsive puppet master who was rarely my friend. They say eyes are the mirror of the soul. To me, they were fortune-telling crystal balls. The cloudy focus of her pupils was my green light to leave the room to run run run.
I don’t blame her. I can’t imagine how terrifying existential fear must be for yourself, let alone once you’re a plus one. The constant state of panic turned into a depression which paralyzed her like a heroin addict: she was in the passenger’s seat of her life, watching the world swoosh past. The landscape’s greens and greys merged with the sky’s blues, forming an abstract painting of existence no longer clear. How long is a splash of color a painting? When does it become nothing more but a dab of paint? Her mental health paired with her taste in men convinced my father to invest in an all-day private school when I was 7 years old. This not only shielded me from the worst, but also surrounded me with first graders born with diamond spoons in their mouths who would grow up to be the Lamborghini driving rich kids of Instagram who wear Rolex watches on their wrists like medals. As the wealth gap expanded, my organs stretched like Hubba Bubba.
All of this may sound terrible, when in fact not everything was. She may have reversed our roles by drying her tears on my shoulder one to many times, but she never gave in to her death wish on the battlefield, instead she kept evading every bullet without ever really losing her joie de vivre. If there was one thing, she could have given a Master Class on, it was how to have fun even when she was dying inside. Free from high society’s cashmere straitjacket, she wasn’t afraid to climb trees with me, dance like no one was watching or laugh like a hyena smoking a joint. Not once did she consider herself too good for anything. Or any job. After acting on stage and on camera she became a bodyguard for the privileged and rock stars with a firearm license, a phone sex worker, a drug dealer, a bartender and finally, the owner of a brothel. Not of a fancy whore house designed to look like a Roman temple of lust with stucco on the ceiling and champagne sipping Venuses straight out of Renaissance style oil paintings welcoming clients in a white marble jacuzzi, instead it was a shabby living room on the wrong side of the subway map filled with toothless, chain smoking women past their prime who sold their rotting souls as they put low price tags on their empty outer shells. Raw meat in the lion’s den.
The gates to hell opened in 2012 when I moved out to study copywriting in Berlin. Regardless of my love for my mother, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief when I left our life of contradiction. A weight lifted not just off my shoulders, but off my chest, hands and feet. I was Alice in Wonderland, the giant version squeezed into a tiny house all her life, finally able to stand up straight. The noose was cut, I was free, free of shame. Growing up in both worlds, I was constantly ashamed. When I was a kid, I was ashamed of my mother who was a drunk and according to my private school friends, “dressed like a prostitute” as well as our tiny apartment with the cat-feces-stained carpet. Simultaneously, my mother shamed me for deliberately making friends with “the rich kids” and for trying “exotic, rich people foods” aka California rolls with my dad. At 22 in 2012, I was ashamed of my mother spilling the brothel-beans to the entire world with an interview on front page news – a secret I tried to keep from Munich’s high society every single day.
When I left, she was evicted and forced to live where she worked: the black Cancerous Lung of a brothel filled with smoke. Despite my freeing transformation, I visited her whenever I was in Munich. She may have been anything but conventional, crazy and embarrassing, but she was my unconventional, crazy and embarrassing mother. Every time I rang the doorbell and the gates swung open, motherly tears of love welcomed me. She wrapped me into her arms like I was a presumed dead soldier returning home, always with a Nuttenstängel pinched between her index and middle finger like she was holding onto dear life. I was consumed with shame every time I entered because the four walls made one thing uncomfortably clear: the walls I built around myself were nothing but a sham. I hid behind a mask from the high society I grew up in, while my mother paraded her true colors with radiating pride which I would have admired had I not been drowning in humiliation. The Cancerous Lung became the permanent setting of our mother-daughter dates. Every day and night in summer or winter, and even the holiest of nights if you’re a Christian was spent in the red light. “Merry Christmas, my darling girl!” the women would exclaim as they pressed my head against their unsupported bosoms. Just like the shabby apartment was far from a Roman temple, they didn’t resemble Miss Universe with silk skin and pearl teeth. They hardly resembled regular human women, rather crooked, nightmarish drawings of female bodies by a 5-year-old.
In contrast to how today’s millennials seek the unison of mind & body in the yoga shalas of the world, these women tried to keep their souls and bodies separate like ex-partners who can no longer bare to be in the same room together. Estranged from their physical existence, they treated their body parts like Lego blocks made in China. Although sometimes admittedly revolted by their toothless faces, I admired their humanity. Regardless of how plastic they identified; they were more real than most. They all had a story to tell, an almost relatable reason for their “choice” of profession like children and siblings to feed in their war-stricken home countries. These women gave me life advice, while my mother gave me lingerie (yes, she provided me with sex clothes. Our boundaries were as airtight as crotchless lace panties) and fashion jewelry meant for the girls. As they inhaled cigarette smoke like oxygen, they shared their client’s most bizarre fetishes with me (one requested a hamster to be placed into his anus). The brothel was not a confessional. There was no hooker-punter confidentiality. However, story time was as far as my interaction with clients went. I never saw them (phew!) because in the Cancerous Lung, I was a child... and children are to be protected by their mothers.
Needless to say, shame was my constant companion. Until everything changed: In 2016 her death collided with my life like a car crash. In the innocent eyes of children mothers are omnipotent and indestructible like Gods. In February 2016, my own infantile naivety was bombed to smithereens like Dresden in World War II. The feminist pimp, the sum of contradictions that was my mother, passed away in the blink of an eye. Ironically, I feared her death around every corner growing up like cancer cells colonizing my own body but was blind to the very real threat which lurked between her fingers 24/7 for the 25 years of my life. Neither abusive men nor financial ruin was her downfall, but those bitches (femmes fatales!) The Golden Girls, her Marlboro Lights. She passed away only four days after we found out about the tumor devouring her from the inside. The Cancerous Lung was sold and with it, her dreams evaporated like a cloud of smoke. This was the end and the beginning of my new computation of time. The grief that followed created distance, distance to her and our heaven-and-hell life together. This turned shame into acceptance, confidence even, and anger into empathy; a necessary transformation that empowered me to put pen to paper.
Today I still catch myself thinking of her more than usual when the holidays are around the corner. Especially when some idiot smokes outside of an overpriced Infatuation-listed eatery somewhere on the Lower East Side because fuck yeah! Other mothers may have smelled like cookies, but mine reeked of smoke. It was, and still is, the scent of love to my nostrils. Other mothers may have gotten haircuts, but mine got a Labia piercing at 62. I’ll never be able to repel judgmental glances and words of others like she could, but I can say with confidence: I am no longer ashamed that she did not fit into a single box. If I was, I couldn’t be writing this. She was a feminist. And ran a brothel. She identified equal to men. And chose men who beat her inferior. She had an angel’s face. And a devil’s tongue. She cancelled herself out.
Since her own cancerous lung collapsed to ash five years ago, I spent the Holy Nights in my father’s upscale apartment duplex in the absence of fatal passive smoke. While not coughing is pleasant, I find myself yearning for the gates of hell opening to the Cancerous Lung filled with toothless prostitutes to the sound of O Holy Night more often than not. I miss life in purgatory between heaven and hell. Turns out you can miss anything if it involves the woman that gave you life. Even if neither the woman nor the life she gave you was perfect, but a sum of contradictions.