How 20 years passes, Mom

I tend to post monthly but in the spirit of my late, spectacular goddess of a mother and on the first Mother’s Day I am back in The Palisades post fires, I wanted to take a moment to remember her legacy, even though a day doesn’t pass where I don’t remember her fondly and with a full heart.

If the fires taught me anything, it was we are truly here for a blink of an eye and what we take for granted to always be there can be decimated and destroyed in a matter of hours. The only currency we have as human beings is the power of our imaginations to forge memories. It becomes a choice whether we want said memories to be of the blessed and optimistic kind or if we are going to pivot into all things neagative: judgment, anger, and bitterness. At this point in my life, which was challenging as much as it’s been blessed, I choose the former simply because if I don’t, then the legacy of my beloved Mariam dies with her body taken too soon. I’d prefer to keep her spirit alive through living her example.

There is so much for me to be grateful for when it comes to my mother, starting with exposure to everything she deemed important. My older brother and I had a treasure trove of books growing up. We saw movies, many my father shot on his Bell and Howell camera. He then made our antics a dedicated, weekly movie night as though he was Fellini. We were introduced to sports early on and so much of a gift was that, my brother was ranked 8th in Men’s Open tennis until his late 30s and I can still pound a tennis ball skillfully in middle age. We went to museums, exhibits and on memorable holidays. We learned of other cultures through different languages and my mother held education as the most important worldly pursuit.

She was strict in my teen years as I was rebellious and popular enough to be invited for endless parties and flowing libations when I wasn’t old enough for any of it. She could have given me a little credit: I was always the designated driver (even without a license, Gloria was mature enough to know I should drive her Bronco when she was drunk….and I simply had no desire to partake; I valued my brain and feared it might explode if my thoughts were chemically induced…) Around my late teens, I discovered the most extraordinary aspect of my mother: she was a human being with an enormous heart and the most unusual ability to excel at magical thinking. She was in awe of her father’s Scottish family who left Edinburgh for Long Beach and Naples in the 1920s and she decided she wanted to be just like them, only in a beach enclave of her choosing. It was a long journey…

As a teenager, she made her marriage and move to London conditional on a flat on Abbey Road as this was the late 1960s and The Beatles’ warbling coloured (British spelling to which she subscribed sometimes: I thought my name was FIRDOUSI until I found my birth cewrtificate at 17) her world. My older brother was born and returned to that Abbey Road flat. I was born in Toronto, a commonwealth country she compromised on as my father was obstinate and British educated as a physician. He didn’t want more schooling and wasn’t impressed by the myth of America as she was. He wanted to practice medicine in areas of the planet that recognized his Queen and country medical degree. She had a beautiful Toronto home and took endless trips to Los Angeles until they were able to move stateside. She had a home in Orange County when he found his medical calling in Las Vegas, but her heart was always in the Palisades and she finally followed her heart to the beach. The Queen of magical thinking, it was she who insured UCLA for me, but when I was on track to attend law school, she encouraged me to throw caution to the wind, carpe diem, and apply to film school when the chances were slim to none I would get in. I was 22 when the average applicant was 30, a school so prestigious that, at the time of my application, there were a mere 22 spots for 1200 applicants. I thought my mother was mad thinking I deserved or could achieve this academic feat…without her encouragement, it would have been damn near impossible. UCLA Film marked some of my happiest years and this year, my UCLA professor will celebrate my birthday as she so kindly did hosting a party at her home when I turned 26.

Oddly enough, my friends not only adored Mariam, but befriended her outside of their relationship with me. Many a girlfriend would relate when she was having relationship problems that she called my mom and she said…whatever words of wisdom my mother offered. Another friend in my 20s, a billionaire’s son who struggled to figure out which one of his endless girlfriends was in it for the right reasons, often would ring up late on a Saturday evening post date to see if my mother and I were available for him to come to chat to discuss the perils of his love life. He often stayed into the early hours of Sunday, trying to decipher how to put my mother’s advice into practice. He shared a story with me how shopping one random day at Saks in Beverly Hills for bathing suits with his girlfriend, Narmeen, he was holding both her purse and a bikini offering when my mother ran into him with a “really?”

Oddly, sometimes I feel my mother is still very much around when it comes to the choices I’m making and the friendships I’m forging. When I lost everything in the fires, I was baffled that one of her books was still in my father’s house UNOPENED two decades after she departed stage right. I don’t know if I was more surprised by the fact that nobody had thought to peruse through the Cartier coffee table book as it was me post fires who opened it to find my mother had kept documents that she cherished and I needed for validation and direction post decimation. There were watercolors done in kindergarten by my younger brother as well as a painting of flowers from 1976 my father had attempted. Letters from my school for making the dean’s list were folded with my older brother’s birth certificate and one of his high school report cards. For all I lost and assumed I had taken when I grew up, she had saved remnants that I needed more than anything. My dear friend Janna can hear my mother’s voice in her thoughts, a God given ability few possess. And the youthful Heather, who embodies a similar energy and smile, helped me sort through my mother’s records from the 1970s. She was very attracted to one particular cover, which I wanted her to have as strangely it was the only one my mother signed her name across which was not her habit.

My mother valued romantic, sincere love and didn’t want me to get married until I found a man whose heart matched mine. When I brought a beautiful boy around who attended film school at USC, she thought he was the right/write man for me, even though he was clearly suffering from addiction issues as per the benders that always superseded our weekend plans. My mother offered that all we needed to do was send him to triple A. I countered, for his automotive needs? And she was sharp as a whip and came back with, Triple A, AA, don’t be an ass you know what I meant. And anyway it’s not heroin…Which was particularly funny because in trying to end things with him I said I had to stop this as he had become heroin to me and he shot back in full sincerity, No Firdos, you’re the heroine of my love story…

Romantic love, alas… This was an arduous journey because my mother had such high expectations and scared me of consequences of not making the right decision: divorce, shared custody, financial ruin to name a few cautionary tales we witnessed. I just wanted my happy ending and I was hungry to settle to fit in as my best friends were making compromises in order to have children, mortgages, and a standing in society. I was a handsomely paid single screenwriter who was often forced to defend the good fortune of the position I held at a production company that had no equal in the early 2000s and only three other executives.

And now I sit, twenty years after her grueling death, and I smile. Holding to my truth has never been easy, but I know so clearly what my mother would want for me. I still very much believe in love and have been blessed to experience so much of it, my cup runneth over. I know she would be pleased I was back in The Palisades and I was completely committed to the rebuilding of the town she cherished and gifted to me. You don’t run, you lean in was her principle. You stick to truth, non judgment, and a pure heart in all dealings and if I don’t stay the course, the memory of Mariam Wharton-Ali will dim. And why would I want to lose my guiding light at this stage of the game?

And the future is just too bright….

Mariam Wharton-Ali 1949-2006