My mom is a typical Jewish mother.  She called today to go over the details of Victoria’s baby shower.  We were talking about round tables vs. rectangular when she said, “Victoria’s religiosity is going to seep into you and you’re gonna become Catholic, I just know it.”

I said, “WHAT?”

She said, “I read your blog.  You said you were jealous of the rosaries.”

“Well I am, in a way.  They relax her.”

“Andrea, listen, I have it too, it’s called Law & Order.  When I get stressed I just turn on the TV.  We all have it.  It’s hypnosis of the masses.” 

I said, “Yea, that works, but I don’t like TV.”

“See, you’re not like most people.”

“Don’t most people turn to religion?  If I’m not like most people, you have nothing to worry about.” 

“Andrea, I don’t want Tasha to be Catholic.  I don’t want Mateo to be Catholic either, but I guess I don’t have a choice.”

I said, “Don’t worry Mom, we’re all Jews, even Victoria.  We’re Jews for Mary.”

This post and others like it can also be read on Offsprung.com.  

My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy has gotten tons of reviews and all have been flattering, except two.  This review appeared on Amazon.  I met this guy last weekend at a gay and lesbian book fair.  Scott Pomfret is clearly brilliant and so you gotta read his book:  Since My Last Confession.     

Misery Can Be Fun!, October 1, 2008   By  Scott D. Pomfret - See all my reviews    A sure testament to a writer’s talent is her ability to draw and hold a reader for whom the subject matter is congenitally unfamiliar. Andrea Askowitz has lots of talent: her comic tale of the hormonal trainwreck that was her Left Coast pregnancy without a partner kept me – a homosexual, non-Jewish man from the East Coast with no intention of raising children — in stitches from start to finish. Never has schadenfreude been so sweet.  After breaking up with her girlfriend of five years, Askowitz decides to try pregnancy alone. She goes to the sperm bank, sifts through donors, falls in love with her OB/GYN, becomes deeply depressed, disses her brother, obsesses over everything that could go wrong, self-diagnoses non-existent cancer, gets “fat,” learns what “doula” and a thousand other strange words mean, and ultimately gives birth to a child. Some of the fun along the way is certainly born of her self-absorption and misery and malcontentedness, but Askowitz is looking for witness as much as laughs. She imagines a party in which she invites her closest friends, insists they wear black and listen to her recite her top ten complaints about her life. “Thank you for coming,” she writes. “Do not have fun.”  Askowitz writes in a manner so immediate that the emotional surges, flashes of envy and of fury, and instant judgments as to people’s worth are visceral. I didn’t like those people Askowitz didn’t like, and for those who complained about Askowitz’s uncensored mouth, I stood by her in saying, Get used to it! I even winced when her nether parts ripped from stem to stern during birth.  A selection of some of Askowitz’s choice humor:  * Days before Askowitz gives birth, “Nurse Jones … shoves her fingers into my vagina like she’s digging for a pickle at the bottom of the jar. I say, `That hurts!’ and she looks at me like, Girl, this is nothing. If you can’t handle this, you’re in big trouble [when the baby comes].  * Askowitz keels over on the sidewalk with pregnancy-induced dry heaves. A neighbor passes. Explaining why she did not stop, the neighbor says, “I thought you were praying.”  * When her would-be sperm donor proves to be shooting blanks, Askowitz bemoans her fate: “I was a lesbian with male fertility problems.”  * Askowitzs friend says, “think of your body not as the athlete’s body it used to be, but as a life creator.” Askowitz’s reaction: “I take that to mean I’m fat.”  The sheer crankiness of at least eight of her nine months pregnancy proves a perfect foil to the almost speechless (well, not quite, this is Askowitz after all: she does get in a few gripes about the grape-sized hemorrhoids that result from her child’s birth) awe with which Askowitz regards the miracle of her newborn child. “I have a crush like no other I’ve ever experienced. It’s one-sided, pure and egoless. … ” Hell, after reading this memoir, I was ready to go get knocked up myself.

I was reading in bed two nights ago, on the start of the Jewish New Year.  Victoria was curled up next to me and and I thought she was trying to sleep, but her hands were clutched at her chest and moving.  

The stock market closed 777 points that day and Victoria’s clients had been calling, in a panic.  Victoria told me earlier that she felt as insecure about the world’s future as she felt after 9/11.  

This is not a good time to be a financial advisor.  ”Are you okay?”

“Scared,” she said.   

I saw that she was holding a rosary.  Her eyes looked sad and even deeper-set than normal. She looked exhausted and so Catholic, like she could play a perfect Mother Mary in the school pageant.   

I must have made a funny face because she held up her rosary.  ”Does this scare you?”    

 I didn’t want to make her feel bad—she was so stressed—and I wanted to be a little open minded.  I don’t pray.  Don’t even know if I believe in God and frankly, before Victoria, I thought people who believed were not so smart.  So I thought carefully about her question.  

I felt a lot of things.  I even felt jealous, as I have in the past when I’ve seen Victoria pray.  

One time a friend called with scary news.  She needed brain surgery.  I got off the phone and even though it was midnight, I folded my laundry and then with a single baby wipe, cleaned the corners of our room where dog hair had gathered.  Then I remade the bed.

Victoria kneeled down, put her hands to her chest and closed her eyes.  Years ago, I would have laughed to see someone, especially someone I loved, in prayer position.  But I admired her.  She looked calm.  And at least she had something to do.  

This time she had rosaries. “Yes, those scare me,” I said.  

“I’m just doing a mantra,” she said.  She showed me how she fingered every bead.  She said, “You start here…” and she said the prayer in Spanish.  ”Look at how beautiful the colors are.”  

She LOVED them.    

When she got to the middle—a silver penny with Mary carved into it—she said, “I don’t remember what you say here.”   

I said, “What kind of Catholic are you?”  

She told me that young people don’t do rosaries anymore.  She never formally learned what to say.  She learned it watching the old women.  

She said it quiets and calms her mind so she can sleep.  

“That’s cool,” I said.  And again, I felt admiration and a little bit jealous.

This post is also published on Offsprung.com, where I write as Mama La Gringa.

 I said, “Hey, why don’t we get Tuffi to do our baptism?” 

“She’s not Catholic,” Victoria said.

I said, “I know, but I think of her as totally priestly.”   

Tuffi, formerly known as Stephanie, but renamed Tuffi by Tashi when Tashi was just learning to speak, is one of Tashi’s God-moms.  Tuffi presided over Tashi’s baby-naming and seemed like a total priest to me.  

  

Victoria said, “Someone Jewish can’t do a baptism.”

I said, “Why not?  It’s not like we can get a priest to do it.”

Victoria said, “Why not?”   

READ THE REST AT JEWCY.COM.  I’m guest blogging there all week! 
 

Victoria wants to Baptize.  

I understand.  It’s for her mom.  

Normally I would say, “Fuck the family, do what you feel.”  But in this case, I understand, which makes me feel very understanding.  

It’s like this:  Victoria already feels like the freak of her family.  She’s the LESBIAN.  She’s also the only one who moved to America.  The rest of her big, close family lives in Venezuela.

 So now that she’s pregnant, she wants to do it right in their eyes.  And she wants her son to belong.   

Okay. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I’m having a sort of bipolar reaction.  On the one hand, I don’t believe in it, of course, because I’m a Jew, so I’m thinking what’s the big deal?  I’m even thinking Tashi and I will get sprinkled too.  Why not?  A little water on the forehead never drowned anyone. And I don’t want half my family to be baptized and the other half to be floating around somewhere, unprotected. 

On the other hand, the water really scares me.  The father, son and holy ghost scare me too.  That shit’s scary.  I don’t believe in them, of course, I’m a Jew (I already said that), but just in case there’s some power there, I’m freaked out.  

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and I thought, this is my chance to talk to a like-minded priest.  I made an appointment with Father Steven, a priest in the Castro, and as soon as we said hello, he said, “So you’re thinking about becoming Catholic?”

I said, “Oh, no, no.”  And I explained that I was thinking about becoming baptized because I didn’t want half my family baptized and the other half not baptized and that I wanted to understand what the whole thing was about before I by accident went Catholic.

 He was very nice.  I don’t know if he’d ever had a lesbian Jew come in for a baptism, but he didn’t act weird at all.  He just said that no priest would perform the ritual unless I was going to commit to Catholicism.  He said the ceremony wasn’t magic.   

I was bummed, because that’s how I was sort of thinking about it.  I thought that if there was some magical protection to be had, it didn’t really matter to me who’s God was providing it, my daughter and I could use it, why not?   

Father Steven did say that someone else could perform the ritual and that it would still be valid.  So in the end, I left feeling pretty hopeful, like we can create our own version of baptism if we want to, and if you think about it, how different is baptism from a mikvah?  I wish though that I had asked what he meant by valid because now I don’t know if La Suegra (that’s mother-in-law in Spanish) will go for it if someone not wearing the black robe and collar drips the water.