Everything I Know (I Learned From My Mother)

I wrote "Everything I Know (I Learned From My Mother)" after a terrible phone call with my mom. She wanted me to come home to California for Thanksgiving. I wanted to stay in New York. I felt crushingly guilty, but also certain I was in the right. Didn’t she understand everything I was working for? Besides, Christmas was only a month away. I’d be home then, and she would see that she had overreacted, and life would return to the usual mother-daughter standoff—with one more tally under my wins. On the eve of Thanksgiving, I found myself in a crowded grocery store in Greenpoint, pushing through aisles to gather ingredients for a scrappy little Friendsgiving. Suddenly, I felt utterly despondent. I wanted to book the next flight home, work be damned. I wanted to call my mom and tell her I was sorry, that I was wrong and selfish. Instead, I wrote a film about it. The opening title is from A Room of One’s Own: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.” I think a lot about my mother at my age. It reminds me that she is a person, that she existed independent of me for thirty years. At times I feel so misunderstood by her, but I also recognize that, in many ways, we are the same person. Fighting with her is difficult because I learned all my tactics from her. We argue the same way, dance around subjects. We never seem to say what we really mean. I flip through old photo albums. I see my mother at twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. I try to give her some grace. We're on the same team, after all.