The Monkey and His Mother

by Jessica Kremen

My mother is always suspicious of panhandlers. She used to pull me closer whenever we'd encounter a begging homeless person on the subway and drop her eyes, focusing on the stray paper and chewing-gum medallions--blackened with soot of the city--that decorated the floor. She and my father frequently describe seeing a homeless man who begs in our neighborhood (claiming to have AIDS, and afflicted with a multitude of painful-looking sores) walking down a street near our house, dapper in a dark business suit, his face free of the blemishes that had covered his skin on other occasions. My father, also a self-professed cynic, believes in an inherent selfishness that motivates most human actions. "The tribal impulse is very strong," he says with a wry smile, as he gestures toward a newspaper article about nationalistic conflict. "People look out for their own interests." When I asked him about his experiences living through the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam war, I found that his involvement with each was limited--he vocalized support for the ideals of the former, and by 1969, disdain for the strategic incompetence represented by the latter--as he was occupied by his studies, and the desire to begin his career. My parents' cynicism spares no one. I remember my father's delight upon reading the book review for Christopher Hitchens's criticism of Mother Theresa, Missionary Position, Theory and Practice, in 1995. In the book, Hitchens cites Mother Theresa's apparently numerous, and highly self-interested exhibitions of decidedly unsaintly behavior. He describes her enormous--and entirely unaudited--wealth (Hitchens estimates one $50 million bank account to be only a "small portion" of her fortune) which she consciously kept outside of India--where she did most of her work--because the Indian government requires disclosure of foreign missionary funds. According to Hitchens, Mother Theresa received money from some dubious donors, including Savings and Loan swindler Charles Keating. Even despite her hefty fortune, the book asserts, Mother Theresa's treatment of the terminally ill was primitive and often completely ineffective. My father seized upon this exposition as a triumph of what he'd always known: no person should be considered angelic--most of us are equal parts good and evil, and, like most living creatures, we will all act on our own behalves most of the time. Neither I--a third-rate Mother Theresa at best--nor my sister was safe from the slings and arrows of my parents' pessimistic world-view. A childhood spent obsessively consuming books cultivated in my sister a love of and talent for critical and creative writing. To my parents, my sister's early interest in literature and composition was thrilling: it earned copious praise from grade-school English teachers, won an essay contest here and there, and made excellent fodder for discussion over Sunday morning bagels and lox. But by the time my sister was on the cusp of college graduation--the acrid stench of the 'real world' wafting through her comparative literature professors' paper-strewn offices and the high-ceilinged halls of Wesleyan's formidable library--my parents had become uneasy about the potential career applications of a bachelor's degree in English. My sister's yearning for a writing career seemed totally unreasonable to my parents: she was angling for disappointment--and equally bad--financial ruin, and would surely return to school later on, the teeming inkwell of her youthful ambition completely dry. They were not shy about making their anxiety known to my sister. My mother purchased (and conspicuously placed on our coffee table) US News and World Report's list of the country's '100 best graduate schools.' When my sister moved back home after graduation, the tension between her and my parents was thicker than the manuscripts she had begun editing for a small New York publishing company. My sister's low level, usually temporary jobs with various small journals and publishers threw my mother into pessimistic overdrive. Phrases like financial security, employment with benefits, and job stability mingled with the crunch of crusty French bread during dinner table arguments between my father and sister, and drove her to avoid almost every family meal until she found an apartment with a friend in Brooklyn, six months later. My own career prospects were called into question early on. I started doing volunteer work at Planned Parenthood in ninth grade, and by eleventh grade, had a steady, six-to-twelve-hour a week, unpaid internship with NARAL, a non-profit lobbyist group. I would return home, faded from hours of writing simultaneously obsequious and compelling letters to Senators and constituents, and subway-battered by careless elbows and itinerant umbrellas, with the desire for nothing more than some warm food and a relief from the aggressively fluorescent lights of school and office. But my mother would wake me with her disapproving clucks when I started to doze on the couch, The Scarlet Letter open but unread, a tent pitched on my weary chest. "Jessica," she'd say. "I think NARAL is beginning to interfere with your work." Work. Because it brought in no money, because it took place outside of my six-hour school day, because it occupied time normally devoted to homework, it was not work. It was an 'extracurricular activity,' relegated to the dusty college admissions folder that contained intramural soccer and the Model United Nations Club. To my parents--and many others around me during the college application process--my job was important as long as it got me a good recommendation, if it provided succulent bait for the college of my choice. I bristled at these slights, self-righteously confident in the Ivory-soap purity of my motives. I did what I did because of a single-minded desire to help people. The apparent hostility of my family toward my volunteer work grew more disturbing as I realized that despite the battles for survival on the subway, and the paperwork as dry and eternal as a desert, I was happiest doing something I perceived as useful, contributing, as I saw it, to the betterment of society. My parents I dismissed as jaded--their ideals withered and worn. Why, I wondered, was my unremitting altruism so difficult for others to digest? Selflessness had always been a virtue in my eyes, but my parents undermined the positive connotations of the term. In my household, it had taken on a meaning akin to naive: to be selfless was to be injuriously unconcerned with one's own needs, unaware of the limitations inevitably imposed by lack of time, money and opportunity. Many factors converged in my first few months of college that made my philanthropic ambitions more justifiable in my parents' eyes. When I returned to New York a month after September 11th (and about six weeks into my first semester at college), a middle-aged woman in the same subway car as I fell down. It was my first post-disaster New York experience; I was taking the subway home from Penn station. The other passengers' reaction was a display of humanity unprecedented in New York City. A man and a woman seated near the fallen immediately crouched next to her, at their own peril in the lurching, crowded car. When she stood up, and announced that she was fine, an entire row of people offered her their seats. "I'm fine, really," she said seven times before finally accepting a seat from a particularly insistent young black man, in a large jacket and backwards baseball cap. It occurred to me that if she had seen the same man in an empty train station two months earlier, her grip would have quickly tightened around her handbag, as she looked around for protection from this prospective criminal. I should attribute my parents' and my reconciliation on the subject of my future partially to the same tragedy. The September 11th disaster, made us--especially as New Yorkers--realize the importance of volunteers, aid workers, and the altruistic impulse. The destruction of the World Trade Center did not significantly undermine my parents' cynicism. It did kindle in them the desire to help remedy great and present suffering, the need to tackle the world's problems that I had always expressed. My parents' fears for me--if I planned to pursue a life of charity--finally made sense to me. Though September 11th didn't weaken my wish to do good, I experienced great frustration at the prospect of trying to cure, or even treat such momentous (and momentously pervasive) societal ills, and considered (briefly) that a life of aid work might be not nearly as fulfilling as I had previously believed. It might, as my parents had always told me, leave me feeling more helpless, less able to make a dent in some of the world's more egregious evils. The self-righteousness that had attended my goal to 'make a change' also became clear to me. In a way, my constant professions of outrage at the suffering of hungry children, or the oppression of women in other countries and our own had been selfish in their objectives. I truly believed what I said, but my viewpoints were couched in a way that was meant to bait my parents--it was not uncommon to here me say, "how could I buy a hundred dollar dress for my cousin's wedding when the Bangladeshi children who make these clothes are paid twenty cents an hour?" Never one to sneak out of the apartment, get drunk on a school night, or sleep around, I used my altruistic impulses as a sort of teenage rebellion: throwing them in my parents' faces, taunting my mother and father with the prospect of an existence spent in destitute, crime-ridden nations, caring for the terminally ill, thousands of miles from home. Especially significant to my parents' and my mutual understanding was the discovery, upon my arrival at college, of the tools to do exactly what I wanted to do. I found a concentration that allows me to study a developing region, with the eventual goal of doing aid in that region. The existence of such a program assuaged my parents' and my insecurities equally: for my mother and father it legitimized my ambitions, for me it realized them. A commitment to a future working in third-world nations was a sign that my interest in aid work had moved beyond a simple, selfish yearning to antagonize my parents--it was more significant than my friends' belly-button piercings and tiny tattoos, and more permanent. In settling with my parents, I began to see the truth underlying some of their perceptions of human nature. Never had my father discounted the presence of charitable impulses in people, he had simply highlighted the tendency of most to act with self-interested motives. In making this claim, my father was implicitly asserting the duality of man's character: he juxtaposed good and greed, defining his idea of inherent human selfishness as an absence of humane sympathy. Hitchens' denouncement of Mother Theresa emphasized the interplay between two universal notions-the aspiration to moral rectitude, and the desire for material success. It was a coup for my father because it declared the latter victorious. The prevalence of this dialogue between benevolence and avarice (though not the consistent dominance of self-interest) held truth for me. I saw it in the conflicting roles volunteer work assumed in my own life, the egocentric rebellion versus the meaningful, fulfilling commitment. I was finally equipped to savor the surge of pride I experienced each time someone complimented my commitment to reproductive rights, as opposed to abashedly shrugging off praise while angrily chastising my selfishness. Whether or not I admitted it to myself previously, I derive pleasure from praise: as my father always emphatically declared, I'm only human. Conversely, my new recipe for human nature--one part good to one part evil--blunted the blade of my parents' cynicism, and finally allowed me to see the good in them. Despite all his talk of the futility of compassion, my father leads a most charitable life. He chose to practice medicine in a clinic in one of the worst parts of Brooklyn, where, as the only psychiatrist, he sees the patients who are too poor for a private consultation, and too troubled for the clinic's workers. Though he also owns a private practice, and would attribute his work at the clinic to a need to 'just pay the bills,' I have seen pride play at the corners of his mouth when a former patient offers grateful praise for my father's doting kindness and infinite patience. It is true that my mother revels in her unmasking of a local homeless man's true identity, taking Nancy Drew-caliber pleasure in the subtle cunning of her detective work. But she never fails to give money to beggars with children. The sight of a destitute child softens her, and imbues her purposeful gaze with a profound, singular and completely genuine sympathy. She is equally touched by the intense devotion and self-sacrifice that characterize the parent-child interactions of animals. She once came into my room, teary-eyed and unusually affectionate, after watching a PBS special that documented the initial rejection, subsequent inclusion and eventual death of a young albino monkey into his extended simian family. Most moving to her was the reaction of the albino monkey's mother to her son's death: she carried the corpse in her arms for days, always agitated, alternately angry and anguished at the cruelty of her child's fate. And like the maternal monkey, my parents are devoted to few things more than their daughters. I have never questioned that they want what's best for my sister and me, and their willingness to sacrifice for us is unparalleled among history's most laudable altruists and nature's most dedicated primates. I cannot detail the veritably indulgent kindness with which my parents have treated me: all-night calculus study sessions with my mathematically minded father; late-night/early morning phone calls to my mother, who, without a grumble would wait on our corner with money for her empty-pocketed daughter's taxi to arrive; sickbed demands for specific products that sent my mother running thirty blocks out of her way to buy the special kind of iced tea that numbed my aching tonsils; and most of all, unsurpassed patience and compassion during all of my crises, from unrequited crushes to alarmingly high fevers to crippling fears about my future. My ideas about what is best for us has come into conflict with my parents' pessimistic world-view mainly because, as they see it, my ideals will hold me back, and inhibit my ability to operate successfully within my circumstances. Though I know they overstate the ruthlessness of the 'real world', I also know that they want nothing more than for me to thrive, to live a fulfilling, fruitful life. And just as my father once defined selfishness in the language of charity, our relationship has been a bubbling mixture of antagonism and affection, of rebellion and reconciliation. Perhaps I've inspired them to serve at church soup kitchens during the Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter holidays. Perhaps their abiding tenderness will show me how to succeed where Mother Theresa failed.