On Saturday night, B, who is now 7, told me that I’m the worst person in the world. It was the first time he’d said such a thing. A milestone.

You’re the worst person in the world! he yelled from behind his bedroom door, because I told him that he couldn’t invite his friend over for a playdate at 7 pm.

OK, I said.

You’re the worst person in the UNIVERSE! he said.

I’m glad that he’s accommodating the possibility of life beyond Earth, I thought. It would be terrible if I was the worst person in the world and then it turned out that somewhere in another galaxy there was a worse person.

I didn’t say that out loud, however. Despite being the worst person in the world, I do have some self-control. I held on to it to share it here.

‘Be a fun mom’ is what I wrote down on an index card on New Year’s Day, when someone demanded resolutions. And that ambition is why I found myself, two weeks ago, skiing down a mountain behind B, yelling things like, Turn left! and Turn right! and Try not to let your skis cross in the front!

As if I know how to ski. Which I don’t.

He’d done the bunny slope a few times, with confidence, and then looked at the real mountain and said: I want to go up there! and I said, Yes, OK, we can do that!

Such was my commitment to the fun mom bit that it wasn’t until an hour or so after we arrived at the bottom of the mountain that I thought: The last time I did that was more than twenty years ago. And then I thought: That probably wasn’t a very good idea.

I grew up in a place with easy access to skiing, but with parents who were not skiing people. I did other things on winter weekends, like sitting still and reading a book. I did attempt cross-country skiing on a trying compulsory school camping trip to the Adirondacks in seventh grade, when the instructor became so annoyed by my inability to get up a hill she just skied off, abandoning me. You bet I’ll always remember her.

In my last, relaxing semester of university (‘Jean’s victory lap’, my dad called it) I decided to go skiing on Mont Tremblant with some friends. The friends were serious skiers, and Tremblant is a serious mountain, and on the second run down I took a wrong turn and fell, hitting my head. No, I was not wearing a helmet. It was the early 2000s. Olden times. A moment of blackness, and then I opened my eyes to the sight of a nice ski patrol man offering to bring me down the hill on a medical sled, but I was too embarrassed (he was too French, and too handsome) and so I skied the rest of the way down, crying. I had a concussion. And that was it, my skiing career, until I decided to be a fun mom.

What is a fun mom? I don’t know. I’m grasping. I consider myself good at being an un-fun one, which means that I have clear ideas about things like bedtime, and not having playdates at 7 pm. This is a natural progression from when I was a quite serious-minded child, one who grew into a teenager who was often hired by neighbors to babysit their kids. The parents loved me, but more than once the kids told them not to employ me again, because I didn’t let them stay up late or jump on the furniture. This rejection made me feel bad, made me think I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. But being a mother is different from being a reluctant fifteen-year-old babysitter. I’m glad to know that now. Understanding my kids is sometimes an exercise in understanding that I can be a different kind of person, not just my classic self.

B is a child that needs to move. He is not inclined to just sit still and just read a book. Back when he was really small, in the desperate, housebound early days of Covid, I read lists of ‘heavy work’ activities, wrapped him up in a blanket and rolled him around on the floor of our little living room in Brooklyn. Now, I think, What would a fun mom do? and I take him skiing.

Do I like skiing? Maybe. I might like it because I enjoy what we’re doing, even when I’m very scared and my knees hurt. And I might like it because seeing my son enjoy what we’re doing is enough to overcome the fear and the knees. I felt so happy watching him on the final stretch of that first long slide, the way he swooped down towards the end of the trail before crashing one last time in front of the ski lodge.

I want to take another lesson, he said, when I caught up. He was beaming. That kid loves to ski.

He said: I want to learn how to fall over less!

That’s a moment I’ll hold on to next time he tells me that I’m the worst person in the universe. Because that may be true, in some moments, in his world. But at least, in others, I am fun.

JHE

I marked the three-year anniversary of my mastectomy by doing lunges in the gym. This was not voluntary. The workouts at the gym are prescribed: I show up on the days when I can scrape myself out of bed at 5 am, and I follow the directions. (Usually around 5:50 I think, Ugh, I don’t want to go to the gym, but it’s too late.)

I would never volunteer to do a lunge, because while I’m pretty good at keeping up with most of the prescribed workouts, some element of the three-years’-old injury to my chest — damaged nerves, I’d guess — means that pulling myself out of a lunge is still a disproportionately tremendous and humbling undertaking. It’s a reminder that I’m not in my original body — though, to be fair, none of us are.

I’m teaching an evening class on writing memoir right now, and it’s magnificent. Not because of me, to be clear, but because of the students in the class, who are thoughtful and open and ambitious. It’s great to sit in a room with people and talk about how we tell stories about ourselves.

Temporality is one thing we’ve discussed: how the way in which we shape a narrative in the immediate aftermath of an event is different from the story we tell a week later, or a year later, or half a decade later, and so on. We change our minds. I wrote most of BREASTS in the immediate aftermath of my surgery, when I was on my medical leave from work. I was on drugs and my skin was necrotic. I was in such a rage! I’m glad the book captures that, but it’s also so painful, I never want to read it again.

My friend Alison Hall wrote about the first anniversary of her mastectomy recently in a way that made me reconsider how I tell the story of mine. She described it as ‘one of the best days of my life.’ That was interesting, provocative to me and my thinking around what happened. I couldn’t have recognized it three years ago, but now, with the passage of time, I can see that there’s some truth in that for me, too. I still think of my surgery as barbaric — I don’t believe that will ebb with time — but it also cured me of cancer. That was great. Both things are true.

I think many people who have had cancer feel that it draws a line in their lives that marks before and after. For me, because of my genetic syndrome, it meant that the narrative frame shifted from ‘when will I get cancer?’ to ‘when will I get cancer next?’

Occasions like this, marking the lengthening of since, sometimes make me feel like I’ve gotten away with something, three years of freedom. Other times, they make me feel like my body is ticking towards the next one. Sometimes, I don’t think about it at all. I just do my lunges.

JHE

I’m thinking a lot about immigration. In particular, about the immigrants who were the beginning of my American family, our American life. I’ve been thinking about how little I know of how they arrived, why they left, where they left from, what their lives were like when they got here. Maybe I don’t know what happened to my ancestors because it was bad and they didn’t speak about it. Maybe I don’t know it because I was the third generation born here, on my father’s side, and the stories had softened and blurred.

These members of my family left Europe during the pogroms of the late 1800s, when thousands of Jewish people fled eastern Europe for places that seemed safer. They became refugees when a right-wing movement blamed them for various political, economic and social problems, and drove them out of their homes via terror, violence, and murder.

Doing a little bit of research, I recently learned from some documents that one of my great-grandmothers arrived in America as a child with her parents, but not her younger brother, because he died en route. That’s what it says on the papers recording their arrival: ‘En route’.

I also learned that six more siblings were born, once they settled in New York. And then two of them, sisters, died in childhood, within a few months of each other. This was in the first decade of the twentieth century. I haven’t found a record of what happened. How do you lose two young children within a few months? Maybe from a disease for which there is now a vaccine.

I was close with my grandpa, talked to him a lot about his family, about the past, but this detail, these three dead children, he never mentioned. I don’t know if he knew about them, if his mother ever told him. I have a photograph of her with her two sisters who lived to adulthood, in their teens or early twenties. They look relaxed, so happy to be together, which isn’t something you see a lot in photos of that era. They made it through.

I have a few photos of their parents, too, my great-great grandparents, the parents of those lost children, Tobias and Bertha. (Some of the later records call them Thurber and Bessie, English names they presumably chose to assimilate. Thurber!) They don’t look cheerful. I am struck in particular by a photo of Bertha, a woman who was born in Minsk, in 1866. The photo was taken towards the end of her life, and the hardness of it seems written on her body and her face. She endured so much.

The family name is distinctive, quite rare, perhaps because other people who carried it didn’t leave Europe and did not survive. I’ve been able to identify many descendants of Bertha. Some I know, of course. Many more, I don’t. There are a lot of us in the world, doing our thing, because of that woman’s endurance.

Yesterday, for example, I got up in the morning, went to the gym, attempted this exercise where you sort of walk up the wall upside down (unsuccessful), went home, felt irritated that we’d run out of the components of my preferred breakfast, ate a less-preferred breakfast, sent some emails, typed in some spreadsheets, taught my son how to cross-stitch, ate dinner, put my daughter to bed, read a novel. I went to sleep at 9:30 because I was tired from getting up too early to go to the gym. And all of that, my day of extreme comfort and luxury, was possible because a young family emigrated when they decided that it was not a good idea to stay in the place they called home, and some of them survived.

There are dozens of us, people who are alive in the world because of them. All kinds of folks. Artists and scientists, physicians and lawyers, nurses and musicians, teachers and writers, mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, siblings and friends and neighbors. Extraordinary and ordinary people. Optimists, pessimists. Kind, unkind. Happy, unhappy. Whatever, everything. It’s kind of a miracle that any of us were born.

And yet some of us, these people who got the opportunity to be, are choosing to align themselves with fascists. Celebrating the terrorization of other people who came to America in the hopes that it would be safer for them, for their descendants. Some of these people whose existence is as miraculous as mine are now happy to see people driven out of their homes, right here in America, by terror, violence, and murder, by a right-wing movement that blames them for various political, economic, and social problems. Here we are.

JHE