Fault Lines

Like everything else.

My mother’s guilt over her family’s problems or discomfort was practically in her DNA. She and her two sisters were raised in a home saturated with  guilt. The reality of having survived the horrors of the Holocaust, of being kept alive when innocent babies and choshuve rabbanim and entire families were murdered, was something my grandmother could not make peace with.

Her daughters instinctively absorbed that survivor’s guilt and ran with it to the next level: It was their responsibility to fix, fix, fix, to make sure their parents never had one iota of anguish, to ensure that everything was wonderful, happy, hunky-dory, always and for everyone, and if it wasn’t… well, just ask my mother and she’ll tell you.

It was all her fault.

The guilt that plagued my mother (plagued? Why the past tense? It continues to this day!) when she couldn’t be everything for everyone and do everything people needed was — is — all-encompassing. How guilty she feels when she can’t host one family because another asked first! How guilty she felt when she missed a granddaughter’s birth because she was overseas at a grandson’s bar mitzvah.

As my mother’s daughter, I dutifully followed in my mother’s footsteps when setting up my own adult life. Credit card missing? My fault. Kid left without breakfast? My fault. When a friend had a crisis the week I had corona, how guilty I felt that I didn’t have her kids over!