Mum’s in a cult A memoir of childhood
When she comes back: a memoir
Ronit Plank’s memoir may make its readers very angry, as it did me. It is the story of Plank’s parents — she does not give them their names — who separate and divorce. It is particularly the story of a mother who could not commit to behaving like an adult.
Hence this searing account of how Ronit felt as she grew up. Her father shouldered the role of lone parent most of the time. By and large, he made a reasonable fist of it, despite being short of money. But his children felt insecure because they did not know why their mother had left, or whether she would return.
Ronit is now a mother herself and, incredibly, has close relationships with both her parents (she invites them to Shabbat dinner together) and claims to have begun to “understand”.
Throughout this story, unsatisfactory family relationships form the tune. Although grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all appear at Ronit’s batmitzvah, it becomes clear that her father’s childhood was no picnic either. And Ronit’s mother, the really irresponsible one, had received no affection, no tenderness, from her own mother.
So there is plenty of rationalisation of what happened to make it easier to “understand” why Ronit’s mother followed the dubious cult guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh when Ronit was six and her sister was three. She didn’t know who she was. She had experienced precious little love herself; divorced parents; unsatisfactory mothering, and so on. Yet these parents had seen proper parenting of a kind, kibbutz style, since they lived on Kibbutz Lahav in those early years.
Ronit is a sabra. At the kibbutz, she had felt secure. Those parents were not children. A first-time mother at 24 was old enough to know, even if she hadn’t experienced them herself, that love, certainty and security are what children need. And that is why, with all Ronit’s “understanding” in these fascinating pages, I ended up feeling so angry with her mother.
It’s no good being a proper grandparent now. She damaged her own children by following her own wishes, her own needs, her own destiny. Ronit’s father didn’t get it all perfectly right. But he put them first. Stepmother Judy emerges as some kind of saint. But their mother, immersed in her own need for selfdiscovery, fell in with a cult, and followed a dangerous reprobate who preached sex as a way to reach spiritual realisation, and who regarded children as an encumbrance.
That selfishness, however understandable, is hard to forgive. I felt for Ronit as I read this memoir. I felt for her father, who was doing his best. But her mother is and was no fool, so Ronit’s sense of resolution does not convince. Ronit lost much of her childhood. That is irreplaceable. Ronit’s mother has to live with the fact that she chose self-fulfilment over duty, and that her love for her children was inadequate.
Ronit’s “understanding” may make her feel better about herself and about the past. But, for this outsider at least, “understanding” is in short supply, and my impatience with her mother’s gullibility and selfishness is overwhelming.