As a professional living and working in Manhattan, I—and I alone (as I fit into the have-yet-to-find-my-bashert contingent)—pay for all my monthly basics: rent, utilities, phone, cable, renter’s insurance, co-pays, Trader Joe’s shops, and even the occasional manicure, 8-week French class or Alexis Bittar bangle. The living ain’t easy, but I get by and I’m grateful.

I’m also grateful for the fact that my mother (and, OK, my father too) continues to occasionally “help me out.” In other words, spoil me. Still. At 35.

Maybe it has something to do with my singledom. Or maybe it’s the lack of grandchildren, or the fact that I just last year resigned from my cushion-y full-time job as an editor to pursue a career as a freelance writer. But to be honest, I can’t quite offer a justifiable reason for the occasional generosity beyond unconditional, smothering love (with a side of pity).

Does it sometimes feel funny to accept a $50 bill for a cab that’s likely to cost $8? Yes. Is there a lingering guilt festering inside when she hands over a coupon and her Gap card for new PJs and underwear? Very much so. Do I long for the day when I can finally take her to dinner in the West Village without worrying I might be charged an overdraft fee? You betcha. Yet, I’m still all “thank-you-very-much-I-love-you-longtime.”

And I’m not the only one, either. This month sees the publication of The Jewish Daughter Diaries, edited by journalist Rachel Ament, in which 27 writers share tales of their mothers’ undeniable love—including Buzzfeed’s Lauren Yapalater, who confesses that her mother continued to bag her lunch well into her 20s.

Inspired by this phenomenon, I’ve put together a list of the top five “gifts” my mom’s given me this past year, followed by her spiel as to why:

1. Holy Moly (AKA Trip to Israel)

I’m a city girl, and after a few months living in London last year and some time in Paris, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, I wanted to see Berlin, too. But funds were dwindling, so I propositioned a few friends to come with to help cut costs. None were free. Then I spoke to Mom, whose arm I could practically see waving from across the Atlantic as if to say, “Me! Me! Me!” Except, she didn’t want to go to Germany…

The Spiel: “When you called from London you sounded kind of down about being alone and not sure where to go. I remembered the time you called from Singapore or Hong Kong or somewhere when you were in Asia and I couldn’t meet you. This time, I could, but I didn’t like the options you suggested. I knew paying for it would lure you, so I suggested Israel. For selfish reasons, yes—because oh my god it had been so long since I’d been—but also because I wanted to travel with you!”

2. Woman With an Audi (AKA Moving Help)

After returning from the six-month stint abroad, during which I rented out my West Village studio and stuffed a small storage space in Chelsea with excess handbags, toiletries and more, I just couldn’t swallow paying a man with a van to help move a few things. But I also couldn’t do it myself—no car. So my 62-year-old mother, in all her Athleta-clad glory, volunteered to schlep boxes and bags down from the dank space and back up five flights of stairs. Twice. In summer. On 80-degree plus days.

The Spiel: “I physically can. It’s quality time. You needed the help and your father would never do it. Plus, you’re single, you don’t have a man to do it with you.”

3. Mumford & Mom (AKA Concert Tickets)

I love Mumford & Sons, and while I was tempted to see them play at a newish venue in Queens, I wasn’t tempted by the $90-something price tag—especially since I had just seen them in Amsterdam and my safety savings for the aforementioned career change and travels were depleting fast. Then, in swept Mom…

The Spiel: “It was a great venue. I wanted to see them, too. Also, it was your birthday! Though, in retrospect I realize I was just about the oldest person there and I learned that new music is better listened to on Sirius Radio.”

4. Mac Attack (AKA New  Computer)

My six-year-old iBook was outdated and out of memory. Plus, it was too damn heavy to carry around from coffee shop to library to coffee shop in my new career as non-nine-to-fiver. Could I have financed a new Macbook Air and then declared that bad boy like I did my first Mac 10 years ago? Probably. But…

The Spiel: “I knew you needed it. You didn’t have any money and you helped us with the business website, so I too, could declare it as an expense!”

5. Happy Feet (AKA Sneakers)

The idea of spending over $100 on shoes with boring arch support that I might-hopefully-maybe wear in my new pursuit as a sometimes-runner seemed silly. Sparkly Kate Spade peep-toes are way more my style, despite the fact that they won’t get me very far without blisters or a prescription for a new knee. While on the Upper East Side visiting a museum one day, we passed a Super Runners Shop and…

The Spiel: “I knew you wouldn’t spend the money. They were good for your feet and I still feel guilty for putting your legs in bars as a child to straighten out your pigeon toes. You have terribly flat fleet and I’ve always felt bad. Because of them you shouldn’t be buying the shoes you do.”

So thanks and Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Johnny Walker Black on the rocks—your treat?

Sara Lieberman is a writer and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, The New York Post, Cosmo UK, Hemispheres, and Fodor’s. She’s also the founder of News Girl About Towns, a blog featuring musings on self-discovery while discovering the world. She allows herself a cup of black coffee on Yom Kippur and implores you to try the babka from Breads Bakery.

Image: Sara and her mom in Jerusalem (supplied by the author)

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“My mom is the only one who gets excited if I tell her I got my bangs trimmed or if I bought a new kind of frozen food at Trader Joe’s,” Rachel Ament jokes, via email. That’s the thing about moms: they love us when we’re grocery shopping or even when we’re editing an essay anthology about them.

Ament, 30, is the editor of the new essay anthology Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much By Our Moms, which features essays from Jewish women of all ages about their beloved mothers and grandmothers, including—but not limited to—actress Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory; Jena Friedman, producer of The Daily Show; Iliza Shlesinger, winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and Anna Breslaw, Cosmopolitan‘s Sex and Relationships editor.

Ament—whose essay “Seth Cohen is the One For You,” about an evening at the infamous Matzoh Ball at her mother’s behest, appears in the anthology—began working on Jewish Daughter Diaries in 2012 in the hours away from her day job as a Social Media Writer for Capital One. “The hours varied. Maybe an hour or so a night. It just depended on what stage I was at in the process,” she said. “During the final editing process this [past] summer, I probably spent about three or more hours a day on it.”

But what makes someone decide to assemble a collection of essays about Jewish moms? Well, said Ament, the key was realizing how similar the experiences of Jewish daughters were: “Whenever my Jewish friends tell me stories about their moms, the stories are always so funny and endearing and relatable. I see my mom in their moms. I thought that there was this great universality about Jewish moms that Jewish women could embrace and bond over, instead of ignore.” My own feelings were the same when reading Jewish Daughter Diaries—whether I was on the subway or at the gym, I was cupping my hands over my eyes and laughing, thanking the universe, thinking, “It’s not just me!”

To wit: in the introduction Ament recounts an all-too-familiar phone call with her mother, who doesn’t identify the reason she’s calling, but instead twists winds her way through the conversation with a variety of cockamamie suggestions (“Did you tell Blossom you used to look just like her when you were a kid?”), yells to her father in the another room (“Mark, get on the phone!”) and asks absurd questions about the future (“How do you think you will respond to my death? A loud hysterical reaction or a quiet detachment?”), never getting to the actual point of the call.

I’ve had similar phone conversations with my own mother, who will inevitably call while I’m buried to my ears in work:

“Do you have time to talk?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m really busy. Can I please call you later?”

“So how are you, how is your day?”

“What can I do for you, ma?”

“Daddy wants to know if you heard from that editor. Oh! And I went to Bloomingdale’s with Aunt Addie today and we found this wild plum lipstick at Clinique we thought you would love so we got it for you. We had lunch at that stir fry place again. What’s it called? Stir Crazy? You know the food there isn’t what it used to be. Maybe they need new woks. You know, they had the best deal on woks at Ikea the other day. Do you want me to get you one? I’ll send it to you in the mail with that bread knife you left here…”

And so on.

But as the reader soon learns, the point is that a Jewish mom doesn’t need a reason to call. She’s your mother, and whether you like it or not, she’s allowed to call you as many times per day as she likes and say absolutely anything or, as it so happens, nothing at all. To her, that’s what love looks like.

Ament draws on this idea throughout the anthology to tie the essays together. In “You Should Be Playing Tennis,” Jena Friedman calls her mother for a chocolate chip cookie recipe—and receives a diatribe about the life mistakes she’s making, interspersed with baking instructions (“Off hand, I don’t know the exact proportions but I bet you can find it online… I’ve actually become quite an internet junkie now that I have so much alone time since neither you nor your sister ever come home to visit me.”) Gaby Dunn’s “Home for the Apocalypse,” recounts the numerous mom-safety emails she’s received over the years (“Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a murderer? You didn’t? That’s because none of these myths are true, but all of these tips have been heralded as life-saving advice by my mother.”) The message is that Jewish moms schmear on the guilt and forward the emails and make directionless phone calls because they miss you and they want you to be safe.

“No matter how much our cultural and political landscape shifts,” said Ament, “mothers still want the same thing for their kids. They will still want them to be happy and find love and success. The difference between Jewish and helicopter moms is in the associations. We think of a helicopter mom as someone who is constantly over our shoulder, buzzing around us, policing and controlling us. There is more warmth and love attached to our idea of a Jewish mom. A Jewish mom is softer. She just wants to feed us.”

The Yiddishe Mameh, the Jewish Daughter Diaries reveals, is not easily tamed, and her daughter is all the better for it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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