Who Wants to Be a Mama’s Boy?

My Jewish mother and I bonded over our love of game shows. When I got the chance to become a “Millionaire,” it nearly drove us apart for good.

Illustrations by Will Dinski

“Walk straighter!” Mom shouted, ending our pleasant sunlit stroll. “Get your hand out of your hair,” she snapped, reacting to my habit. “Where is your hair?” she asked, poking the top of my forehead. And that was just Thanksgiving. I’d recently graduated from arts school at NYU and took a teaching job straight off Craigslist’s suckers section. So I was dangerously close to having to move back to Staten Island – to the old Disney bed sheets, pet allergies, and, of course, my mother. My whole life she had been critical, but, newly single, she was getting even better at it. I started hearing her in my dreams. One time I woke up punching the laptop screen beside me, cracking it into a spider-web. My sister’s Mom-rule of “never alone in a room” suddenly sounded like enlightenment itself. As a gay Jewish son, though, I grew up close with Mom, twice over. We shared European vacations and anxieties, traded gossip and guilt trips, went to musicals and extremes. We a…