I was raised by a negative woman. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like her. I fought her tendency all my life. But of course I imbibed some of it. I was her oldest child and only daughter.

I see as I type an image of a literal negative woman. A dark delineation in bright surroundings. The image is not inaccurate.

Some of her negativism was cultural. She was born and spent most of her youth in Brooklyn. She was the last baby of a beloved compliant observant Jewish mother. Her post-school pre-maternal jobs were in Manhattan in the garment industry. “What?!? You don’t like the blintzes?” is her way of asking if you want seconds.

But it’s more than that. My friend Debbie is 60ish and Jewish and a doctor, a NY-to-CA immigrant thirty years ago and a sweetheart of a person, and she expresses herself similarly. We recently dined together in a local trattoria. She knows the owners – she delivered their grandchildren – and she’s a favored guest, which is one of the reasons we go there. We ordered a shared salad and stuffed mushrooms and baked rigatoni. When Tony brought us the mushrooms and pasta before the first course, did Debbie say “Gee, Tony, we asked for a salad too. Did that request make it to the kitchen?” or something like that? Noooo. She blurted “What?!? We get no salad?”

But Mom went beyond normal east-coast Jewish dialect. Mom was not just a fixer: she was an improver. Many of the people are fixers – rational and well-connected in medical and wholesale communities, they skip responses of sympathy and support in favor of offering a referral to some specialist who can repair whatever they deem needs mending. Improvers are a superset of fixers, in that all improvers are fixers but not all fixers are improvers. Fixers want to solve a problem. Improvers are into make-overs.

Mom was task-oriented and extremely impatient. She didn’t need to work after she married Dad, but she should have. She loved her buyer job and it got her out of the house every day. But working wouldn’t have been appropriate in the 1950s. Mom stayed home. With me.

She did what she could to keep busy. She washed towels daily. She ironed underwear. She learned recipes. She tried butchering and experimented with exotic cuisines. But she just couldn’t stay home. Every day she hauled me around to stores and to visit her friends. We bought things we didn’t need because the discounted price was irresistible. Then we found ways to use what we bought. We were forever redoing arrangements around the house. Mom talked to me regularly about how she would make over women and girls we saw in the malls. “That one really needs a haircut.” and “Can you imagine how much better she’d look if she didn’t choose separates that cut her in half like that?” or “Oh my God. I’d love to get my hands on that floozy. I’d start with scrubbing off all of that makeup. See how low class she looks?”

She also tried to improve me. She gave me home permanents to make my already wavy hair curlier. She put me on diets before I knew I was fat. Hanging around Mom, all I ever heard was what was wrong with whomever/whatever we examined.

It was contagious of course. Impossible not to catch. Especially once Dad started traveling for work.

This was forty years before nine eleven. TSA wasn’t even a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye. Dad made short flights around the west coast, and we met his plane every time he came home. That meant driving to the airport (hearing Mom make improvement suggestions on the road), parking, and coming all the way to the gate. We were always early. My younger brothers frolicked around the immediate area, but I was expected to sit next to Mom. She taught me to people-watch there. That would have been fun if she did it the way Dad did, on those infrequent occasions when he studied folks. He’d make up crazy stories about the faces and postures we saw. I loved that. But Mom was always up to her old comfortable tricks: pointing out who was fat, who was shoddy, who made bad clothing selections, and how she’d do it differently.

I didn’t like how she only noticed what was wrong. I tried to see things differently. I attempted to follow her advice that if I had nothing nice to say, it was better to say nothing at all. But she never followed that. And it was boring to be silent, tiresome to be smarmy.

I tried to modulate my ability to assemble negative judgments. As a teenager in the late 1960s it wasn’t hip to be down. My goal was to lighten up. I wasn’t very good at it though.

I married in my early 20s. I knew he was a hippie but I had no idea how incompatible our attitudes were. When we walked into a place we hadn’t been before, my husband zeroed in on what was good about it, and tried to partake of that. I was immediately struck with how the place could be made better.

We didn’t make it. Our ship of marriage foundered on the rocky shoals of familiar difference. My husband was attracted to me because he found me exotic, but the snappy negative comments that first amused him came to be tiresome, and he started suspecting that I harbored critical judgments of him too, and he modified his behavior to try to keep me happy, which accomplished the opposite.

He wasn’t alone in estrangement. His traits of joy and carefree attitude, his cowboy confidence that appealed to me so strongly when we first got together, faded and twisted over time. They seemed to be replaced by procrastination, and reactivity, and dullness.

We were amicable about our divorce. We stayed friendly for the kids if not for anything else (we differed in opinion about this too). But I heard the occasional grumbles from him about how depressing the last year had been, about how he was made to feel guilty all the time. I kind of get that now.

I guess my father was right. He warned me that marriage is a tough road. He said that there’s nothing more challenging in the emotional realm than trying to make a life with a stranger. And the more different the stranger’s background, he said, the more of a challenge it is. He didn’t object to me marrying out of our religion, but he commented that we each came from different family attitudes, and that the older one gets the more one reverts to those old attitudes, so a couple was piling on extra work when they tried to unite disparate childhoods.

But I didn’t heed him. I loved my father then and would now if he were alive, but I judged him to be old, and male, and not really hip to what I wanted.

I became a divorcee. I worked at reducing my negative comments. I probably should have worn a bag over my head – according to my kids’ complaints, my facial expressions broadcast my displeasure and disagreement no matter what words or tone I used.

I also became a single mom. Between my newly solo state and my mother’s advancing age (lack of other things to do), I had to endure her help more than I wanted. As Mom’s future shortened, her perspective narrowed. She grew more self-referential. She was still a dark shape amid the world, but she became petulant, fussy, smaller. She was still negative but she started snarling. She griped a lot.

She was a drag. I complained about her to my best friend. Often. A best friend is a complaint repository, and Annie was where I parked my irritation. She’d had her head filled with my marital dissatisfaction, just like I’d collected her relationship problems (stuck in love for decades with a depressive who never met her needs or even attended those social functions for which she, anyone, needed a companion). Annie had of course met my mother, but most of what she knew about Mom she heard from me. That’s the way I knew her mother too, and I never approved of Angela (too narcissistic, really). As my kids grew (and Mom was correct when she said “little kids, little problems – big kids, big problems”), it was Annie to whom I turned to second my ideas or divert me from them. She’s the one who coached me when I worried about where my teenage daughter was. She was my counselor, much more than the therapists, about my impulsive son. After my daughter married and moved away, it was into Annie’s ear that I poured all my disapproval about my son-in-law.

Annie and I took a little vacation together recently. We went away for a week, shared a big room and every meal, had lots of time to talk. Characters we discussed included my now-late mother, my taciturn ex-husband, my daughter’s crass mate. I was struck with the enmity Annie seemed to have for all three. It was so vehement that I found myself defending them, qualifying the disapproval, uttering “yeah, but…”

That’s when I realized that of course Annie hated them. She had never experienced their positive qualities, because all I ever talked about to her was what bothered me about them.

Of course. It wouldn’t have been an interesting or useful conversation for me to be mentioning how energetic Mom was about accomplishing tasks, how her fix-it attitude sometimes helped others. Who wants to hear a married woman describe what she likes about her man (except her man)? It would have been Pollyanna-ish and not believable if I’d praised Larry’s laid-back attitude (even though I have to admit he’s helped my girl worry less, and see things more optimistically).

I learned on that little trip that Annie thinks I’m a negative person. She loves me, but she encourages me to, as she says, nurture and express my gentle side. She even advised me to “Shine on the shit, and let yourself shine instead.”

I still have work to do.