The other week my mother and I had a big fight.
Not just a little disagreement, a difference of opinions.
Oh no. This was a big, old fashioned mother-daughter screaming match of epic proportions.

You see, my mother and I live about 1,000 kms away from each other. I live in Sydney and she lives in Melbourne. I travel to Melbourne quite regularly for work, which on the one hand is really nice. I get to see my family and spend time with my closest friends. On the other hand, I stay with my mother when I am in Melbourne and that means I automatically become a 6 year old girl again.


No longer am I the 33 year old independent woman I know myself to be most of the time.
In my mother's house I regress. Partly it's my own fault. Of that, I am certain.

So what was the fight about?

Well, it was about lots of things, some of which I won't write about because they are too personal and I am not into airing my dirty laundry in public. But I will share some of it with you.

My mother called me an extremist.

She accused me of putting up barriers and pushing my family away from me.

To put this in context, what she was referring to was my (and I will freely admit it) somewhat consistent or perhaps persistent mention of the word "Israel".

"It's Israel this and Israel that! Your whole bloody life is Jewish and Israel and you aren't even there yet. It's like you are already living there and you are distancing yourself from us, you are pushing us away. You are turning into an extremist."

Now, if you didn't know me, and there is every chance that you are a total stranger that has happened to come across my blog by sheer randomness, then well, I suppose it would be hard to make sense of the things my mother said to me.

You could likely have read that and thought, "Gee this girl sounds pretty unfeeling and self-centred."

You could also have read that and thought, "Gee that mother sounds pretty tough on her daughter."

Well, like any story - there are always two sides and I am old enough now that I have learned that I am not always right (although I would dearly love to think I am!)

My mother has a point.

It's true that I envelop myself in "all things Israeli". I listen to Israeli music and Israeli radio on the internet. I keep abreast of all the news in Israel and try when I have time to read things in Hebrew to keep my reading up to scratch (my reading comprehension sucks by the way, my spoken Hebrew is pretty decent). When I see Israeli food brands in the supermarket I sigh a sigh of nostalgia for a place I am thousands of miles away from and I will pay the obscene mark-up in price for a packet of Osem soup just because it satisfies some tiny missing piece in me, it fills this huge hole just a teeny weeny bit.

It's easier to live a fantasy than reality isn't it? Come on, we've all done it.

I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. As you'd expect, it was not the most Jewish of environments or upbringings. I have a Jewish mother and a lapsed Anglican, now staunchly atheist father. I had zero religious education. We "did" Christmas. I say "did" in inverted commas because what constituted Christmas for us as a family were some nice presents, a Christmas tree (but my mother drew the line at putting a star on top - like that made it ok??) and we sat down, just my parents, my brother and I for a turkey and trimmings dinner.

What's the one thing I remember about Christmas? My mother having the worst day of her year. The awful fights my parents would have at the dinner table (usually my mother berating my father for having spent too much money on presents) and my brother and I, trying to remain cheerful with our brightly coloured party hats extracted from cheap Christmas crackers with groan-inducing inane jokes.

There was one religion in Hong Kong. Greed.
I grew up in a society where money was revered like a god. I had no sense of who I was or where I came from. I had no extended family in Hong Kong - no grandparents, no cousins. Just my immediate family. From a very early age I remember wanting to desperately understand what my heritage was. I thought about my mother's parents in Melbourne. My Polish grandparents with their thick Yiddish accents that I loved, and yet felt so removed from. My relatives in Australia represented a whole world that I wanted more than anything to be a part of, to feel connected to, to understand.

I remember that as a young girl, the one Jewish thing I owned was a book about the Jewish holidays. It had lovely bright illustrations in it and I devoured that book like you couldn't possibly imagine. I wanted to understand what it was to "be Jewish" to feel like you were part of a larger equation.

I am all grown up now. I own lots of "Jewish" things. I have lots of "Jewish" books in my home. I went to Israel for the first time almost 3 years ago and what happened to me there changed my life.

I found home.

I found a place where for the first time in my life I could be me. Where people didn't question my non-Jewish sounding surname, or the fact that I hadn't gone to a Jewish school and they didn't give a shit that I was learning at 30 what most Jewish kids learn at 3.

There is a quote in Philip Roth's seminal Jewish novel, Portnoy's Complaint that couldn't possibly sum up my experience in Israel for the first time better:

“What was incredible and strange to me…what gave my entire sojourn the air of the preposterous was one simple but wholly implausible fact: I am in a Jewish country. In this country, everybody is Jewish.”

So, to get back to the argument my mother and I had. Yes, she was right - I do talk about Israel too much, and I am sure it hurts her because my one-track mind only succeeds in reminding her on a daily basis that in too few months I will be returning there, this time (G-d willing) for good.

But in my defence (and it is my blog, so I am fully entitled to defend myself!) I think I have worked out why it is I persist in making Israel such a huge part of my life here in Australia, on the other side of the world from Israel.

It's my barrier, my wall, my protection. Maybe if I start to live my Israeli life here, then by the time I actually get there the adjustment won't hit me like a ton of bricks. I might be subconsciously pushing my family away now because in a few months my mother won't be an hour's flight away from me to have that huge argument.
But I am not stupid. I do possess a pretty large degree of self-awareness. I know that I can push my family away all I like now. The fact is, when I am in Israel and after the initial thrill wears away, I will miss my family and my friends and I expect that there will be times I will suffer enormous homesickness and loneliness.
But, however warped it sounds, that is a price I am prepared to pay.

Some days I feel like I am hurtling towards my fate at a rate I cannot even quantify. Sometimes I don't even feel like it is in my control anymore. I set the ball rolling initially and now it has gathered enough momentum that it is a force unto itself.

Call me crazy, call me an extremist. But at the end of the day, I am just a girl who is trying to find her way home.