2025 Update: Dina

0:06Pushkin.

0:11Kalilah Holt, welcome to the studio. Thanks. Today's Encore presentation is an episode called Dina. Spoiler alert, you know who Dina is? Your mom. She's my mother. Yeah. That's right. Even I have a mother, Kalilah Holt. Mm-hmm. You know when you, like, call me, like, what is it you call me, a motherless cuss? I've never called you that. When you get upset. No, this episode is about my mother. What do you remember about the production? I remember it, and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn. No, please. But I remember it being like an emotional one for you to work on. Like there was a lot you had to delve into.

0:44Yeah, that's true. My wife, Emily, was like, you know, you're doing all these episodes about other people and intimate moments from their lives. You have to have a little skin in the game. And yeah, it was kind of scary. But I came out the other end stronger and jollier and balder than ever. And if our listeners come out the other end of this episode, they'll get to hear an update from Dina herself on her birthday. That's right. Yeah, I talked to my mother to catch up with her on her various projects. So let's get ready to listen voraciously. I'm ready. But before we do, let's hear a word from our sponsors.

1:26Thanks, sponsors.

1:31This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

2:14This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. There's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things. It can be applied for right in the wallet app on iPhone, and approval can happen in minutes. So it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, putting it back in my wallet, or oops, maybe I use cash, where's the ATM? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future, there's no going back. With Apple Card, purchases earn daily cash up to 3 % with no points to track and no waiting for rewards.

2:59It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85 % of merchants in the U.S. And the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch. To explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval, savings is available to AppleCard owners, subject to eligibility.

3:46Savings in AppleCard by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, member FDIC, terms and more at AppleCard.com. Let's talk about something everyone has an opinion on, healthcare. We all know it should work better than it does. Optum believes that too, and they're trying to improve it. They're helping healthcare teams and pharmacy services work together, like bringing primary care and prescription drugs straight to your home so you can stay on top of your health. Optum's also building technology that connects the whole healthcare system so it can better take care of the whole person, you. Optum is making healthcare work as one for everyone.

4:24See what Optum's up to at Optum.com.

4:32Yeah, hello. Why, hello. Now, what kind of greeting is that? You've got your radio voice on. Could you elaborate on what you mean by that? I know in the first second if I'm being recorded or not. How could you tell? Based on your inflections. Well, I always talk like this, Jackie. Back to you. The way you're speaking with me now is never the way you would normally speak. Okay, wait. Hang on a second. I'm just talking normal. You're not talking normal. This is your radio voice. Hey, what's going on? It's still not. It's still not. It's still not. Hey. No. Hey, Jackie. Sorry again. Jackie? No, you wouldn't say my name like that.

5:07How's it going? Too much energy. Hi. I can tell. Anyway, it can't be a radio voice because I do a podcast. It's a podcast voice. All right, and welcome to the show.

5:24From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Dina.

5:44Hello, hello. Okay. So we just got to Montreal. Oui, oui. What's that? Isn't that how you say yes in French? Yeah, but you just say it once. You just say oui. Oui. My folks are about to meet us, pick us up at the airport to take us back to their place where we will be staying for the next five days. Five days. Five days in my childhood home and the childhood bed I've not slept in in decades. My wife Emily and I are here for Passover to sup upon the bread of affliction. Growing up, though, it was everything of affliction. Candy corn of affliction, road trips of affliction, bedtime stories of affliction.

6:36I moved out when I was 19, but from age 1 to 18, what I remember most is the vague feeling of worry permeating the household. Worry that manifested as yelling. Yelling through closed doors. Yelling across the kitchen table. My father yelling into a junk drawer, desperately trying to find a working pen. my mother yelling into a clogged toilet, desperately trying to make it go down. But more often than not, the yelling wasn't over anything at all. We were just a naturally loud, anxious family, a race of nervous giants shrunk into the bodies of little Jews.

7:24Man, when I move out of here, I'd say in my teens, I'm going to live like Sting. Peace and quiet. Meditation, tea, and tantric sex. And now, after years of oolong rooibos and lemon rooibos, I'm home again for my first trip back with Emily and our five-month-old son, Augie. Day one. There they are. My parents' Toyota pulls up to the airport pickup and passes us. Try to catch their eye. They don't see us. Here. We're right here. My mother jumps out. My voice. She runs back towards us, pointing at Augie's ears. His ears are exposed. Hi. Hi, Emily. His ears are exposed. My boys' old face ain't going to shut me.

8:19Both my mother and father wear their woolen caps pull down well past their ears. In younger, stronger days, they might have stretched those caps right down over their feet. But they're old now. My mother, Dina, 72, and my father, Buzz, 83. I want to drive slow, not too fast. I want to go carefully here, okay? Okay? I'm sure you understand. While Buzz is high-strung, Dina's intensity is capable of raising the emotional temperature of any space she occupies. In elevators, walk-in pantries, and Toyotas, her powers are especially acute. I have like a funny feeling in my throat, like, it's like really emotional.

9:04It's like a dream, you know, it's like a dream. Yeah. It's like such a weird feeling. I think the weird, elusive feeling my mother is trying to describe is happiness. It's just wonderful to see him. I hope he's going to be warm enough. Did you bring him a little something?

9:30Home sweet home. Be it ever so hard. Walking through the door, I'm a 12-year-old again. home from school and looking forward to zoning out with Petticoat Junction. I'm a 16-year-old, rushing to the bathroom to gargle out the smell of cigarettes. I'm a 48-year-old, a grown-ass man with a grown-ass ass. Parenting a newborn leaves a person with no time for squats, so don't judge, Alex. So nice in here. Wait, wait. I can't believe it. You're welcome. Normally the house, a modest, semi-detached bungalow, has a certain storage unit bomb shelter vibe. Walls of toilet paper, a cold room full of canned fruit cocktail, needle points of biblical scenes and Torea doors, all leaned up against the walls for fear of pounding in a nail and regretting it forever.

10:24But today, the place looks positively sparse. Johnny, just don't open a closet or a drawer. Everything will tumble on your head. Because when we heard you guys are coming, I threw everything into the closets and hid them. My mother grabs Augie and heads upstairs for a diaper change. Emily and I trail behind. I want him to be fresh and clean. Oh, he's so sweet. You're so sweet, my angel. Where the frig is the bag? The friggin' bag contains the friggin' diapers that my mother bought for our visit. It turns out it's on her lap. I kept the bill because I wasn't sure if you want me to return them or not.

11:07Would you be able to return used diapers? Yeah. You know me. I could return anything. I could return anything. You know that, Johnny. I do know that. Returning stuff is what my mother lives for. She sees it as a staring contest, a game of chess, but with yelling. I remember once going along with her as she returned a shirt she'd bought for my father, two years earlier. It's missing a sleeve, she told the cashier. Holding up the article of clothing, the cashier turned it around and around. It's not supposed to have sleeves, the cashier finally said. It's a poncho. A poncho? my mother repeated, as though it were a foreign word.

11:55which, in her defense, I suppose it sort of is. I don't care what it is. It's factory defective, and my husband can't wear it.

12:09Whenever she'd get this way, I'd adopt a stance meant to convey filial loyalty peppered with a touch of what Vietnam vets call the thousand-yard stare. I've stood next to my mother through countless exchanges, arguments, spectacles, and stinks. But this is the first time I've stood by her side as she diapers my son. Oh, look how much pee-pee he has. Oh, you made a lot of pee-pee, eh, baby? See, that's how I knew you were sick when you were a baby, Johnny. You weren't pee-ping. What was wrong with me? As a kid, it was easy to be embarrassed by my mother. One time, a popular boy named Jordy showed up at our house.

12:52I wasn't home, but my mother answered the door, with her hair on fire. My hair's on fire, she screamed. The next day in school, Jordy showed the whole class how she screamed it. He wiggled his fingers in the air, looking as though he was about to fall to his knees. That night, I asked my mother what had happened. It was the barbecue, she said. Your father wasn't home, and I was so in the mood for barbecued lamb chops. It seems that while examining the chops for signs of spoilage, she'd leaned her hair-sprayed bouffant too close to the grill. While this explained the fire atop her head, it did not explain why she answered the door while nursing a fire atop her head.

13:38Growing up, this kind of stuff happened all the time, so I was always on high alert for humiliating emergencies. Being back home again, I feel the old muscle memory kick back in. What's that smell? Something's burning. Did you turn on the heater? Did you touch the heat? No. It turns out that one of the ragdolls my mother had been hoarding somehow landed onto one of the old lamps she'd been hoarding and had begun to burn. I could have had a fire because I was so careless. The day plays out as a series of minor disasters averted. In the morning, my mother loses her cell phone. We find it in the night table.

14:20In the afternoon, a screw to my father's glasses falls out. We replace it with a twist tie. At dinner, a waiter charges my mother for a potato she claims she didn't order. But after ten minutes of Camp David-style negotiations, it's dropped from the bill. Before bed, my father can't find his passport. Why do you need a passport, I ask. You always need a passport, he says. We find it in the night table. In the past, having someone witness all of this would have made me feel anxious. But now, having Emily here makes me feel like I have an ally. Turning to her in the midst of some crisis is like looking directly into the TV camera and winking at the audience.

15:09Good night, Aki. Day two. Good night, Aki. After we put Augie to sleep, Emily and I lie in bed. I ask for her thoughts and reflections on the trip so far.

15:28No comment. Oh, come on. Come on. No comment. How could she resist? Look at how my mother acts with Augie, I say, trying to get Emily going. I saw her put a pocket mirror under his nose while he was sleeping to see if he was still breathing. After every spoonful she feeds him, she asks if he's choking. You realize, though, that you say all that about Augie now, too. Like, just a tiny little cough, and you are doing it. Is he breathing? Can he sit like that? Can he touch that thing? Can he eat that? Can he do that? Is he supposed to be doing that? What's wrong? What's wrong? What's wrong? What's he doing?

16:06What's he doing? Is he choking? What's wrong? You do a lot of that kind of thing. I concede to Emily that maybe I do just a little of that kind of thing, but I wasn't even in the parking lot of the ballpark of Idina Goldstein.

16:24You, one day you dropped, you dropped Augie off, and you called me right afterward because you were so worried. Do you remember this? I do remember this. It was Augie's first week of daycare. He shares a babysitter with two little sisters. But on that particular morning, when the babysitter opened the door, she was alone. She told me the girls were napping in another room. You called me and said she was there alone. She said they were in bed. I don't know, maybe she killed the whole family, and now she's going to kill Auggie. And you weren't joking. Like, you knew it was a crazy thought, but you needed me to tell you she didn't kill their family.

17:11She's not going to kill Auggie. I did not need you to tell me that. You're misremembering. You were freaked out. You were freaked out. I thought I was very stoic. You called me and said, I think the nanny is going to murder our child and that she murdered the whole family that we do daycare with. I don't consider that stoic. All right, I mean, I'm just imaginative. That's one way to look at it. Yet another way to look at it is that I'm also crazy, just like my mom. Well, set my hair on fire and open the front door.

17:55In the days after Augie was born, I couldn't stop thinking terrible thoughts, things I couldn't speak, not even to Emily. With this new overwhelming love for my son came new overwhelming fears. For his safety, his heartbreaks to come. For his old age, his loneliness. So I started seeing a therapist. I explained how worry was the lingua franca of my childhood. I wasn't allowed a paper route because it was a good way to get abducted. No barefootin' because of rusty nails. And I didn't even learn to swim until junior high. because water, that's where people go to drown. Worry and fear were how my mother communicated love, I said to my therapist with a shrug.

18:41But love is love. The important thing is that we feel it. But my therapist's response troubled me. She said that love was the transcendence of fear, that you might even say fear was the opposite of love. Sitting at my childhood desk with Augie's toys scattered at my feet, My therapist's words returned to me. If I was becoming my mother, would Augie someday become me, someone weighed down by fear and worry? Was our genetic line nothing more than an inglorious chain of Russian dolls? Should my therapist save the notes from our sessions so I can send Augie to her at a discounted rate? I didn't want my son becoming me, and there were only two people who could help me understand how I became me, One, who charged New York therapy rates that might leave me bankrupted before I'm cured.

19:33And the other, my mother. Day three. As a child, I felt trapped and embarrassed by my mother. As an adult, I came to be amused by her. It's only as a freshly minted father visiting home for the first time that I'm beginning to see that I am her. How much do you pay for apples? $79 a pound, but if I'm desperate, I have to. This is what we normally talk about. Where to get the best price on paper plates, where to get the best price on honeydew melon. Dina, what do you pay for a bottle of water? I get like$0.24 for$1.88. Bottle of water. Coke's$0.24 for$6.49. What do you pay for a loaf of bread? But after dinner, after Augie's gone to sleep, My mom and I sit down at the kitchen table to have a different conversation.

20:30Emily's reading in bed, and my father's watching TV in the basement. It's just us. Hello, hello. Go ahead and talk. Here I am. Why do you say here I am? Well, where should I say there I am? Tonight I want to talk about the fear, that thing my family lives inside, like a snowsuit with a broken zipper that can no more be removed than our own flesh. I want to talk about the nameless thing that binds all Goldsteins, that ignites us, propels us, and ultimately paralyzes us. Well, I think about this stuff now because, you know, I have a son, and I think... B 'orah Hashem, B 'orah Hashem. But I think...

21:15He's so beautiful, and I saw those blue eyes, like a canal, My mother's not talking crazy talk. She's talking Yiddish. Yeah, what does that mean?

21:31The bad eye, the evil eye, the belief that merely saying something positive is enough to invite evil forces to snuff the good thing out. So even bringing up a normal son-to-mom question about good parenting is enough to attract the eye. On the day of my bar mitzvah, my mother carefully sewed a red ribbon into my underwear. In this way, she reasoned, should the evil eye turn its gaze upon me, I'd be protected by my underwear. Why do you think you do that evil eye stuff? It's not only me. It's the Moroccans. No, but you say it's cuckoo. I know it's cuckoo, but I can't help it. But then that's a superstition.

22:16I don't know. Everybody does it. I've never met anybody who puts red ribbons in their underwear. I'm saying I personally have never met anyone who does that. So you can't say everybody puts red ribbons in their underwear. But what is it supposed to be warding off? The evil eye. But what is the evil eye? I don't know. This is how conversations with Dina often go. They derail, hit dead ends. So when I ask her, why was our home the way it was, I expect more of the same. But instead, my mother grows quiet.

23:00I worry. Yeah, I do too. I do too. I was afraid of this, afraid of that. I was irrational. I wasn't thinking right. and I have a chance to redo my little bit, not with you, but with Augie. She stops talking and stares into her lap. For a while, we just sit there. I look upon this as a second chance. I want to correct my mistakes, Johnny. I want to redeem myself. That's it. My mother doesn't usually talk this way. If something's causing her grief, she returns it to the store, sends it back to the kitchen. And so, talk of second chances and redemption, the words sound weird coming out of her mouth, and I don't know how to respond.

23:53Where's all this coming from, I ask? Are you thinking of something specific? It's too painful. I don't want to. Maybe if you talk about it, you won't have to anymore. No, I don't want to talk about it. I can't. I don't think it could be anything that bad I can't, I can't talk about it Don't press me, please Well, I don't want to force you I don't want to make you feel bad I'm ashamed of myself Let's change the subject And with that the conversation ends I'd gone to my mother for answers about my childhood but instead she's left me with questions I didn't even know I had What had happened that was so bad She couldn't even talk about it.

24:37What was she so afraid to tell me? After the break, I find out.