How a $100 Bet Saved Our Relationship

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From The New York Times, I’m Anna Martin.

Today we have a story about how our closest relationships can slowly grow apart. It starts with little moments where you say the wrong thing or you’re not listening closely, and this distance creeps in. And then one day you’re sitting across from them at dinner and they feel so far away, and you’re thinking, how did we get here?

Mark Jason Williams wrote an essay about his relationship with his mom, Betty. Mark was very sick as a kid. He went through painful medical procedures and long hospital stays, and his mom was there for all of it. They became inseparable. But as Mark got older, that distance crept in until finally he couldn’t take it anymore. So he did something about it that raised the stakes of their relationship. This is “Modern Love.”

Mark Jason Williams, welcome to “Modern Love.”

Thank you. It’s an honor and a privilege to be here.

So you wrote an essay about your relationship with your mom. Can you read the beginning for me?

Sure thing.

Why aren’t you eating? My mother said to me. Her Yonkers accent blared into that hush Chinese restaurant. My mom is a 77-year-old Italian-American hairdresser who believes that almost all problems can be solved with a pile of spaghetti and meatballs. To her, my lack of appetite was a warning flare.

“I’m fine,” I said. “My sesame chicken just has an odd pepper flavor.”

She flagged down our waiter. She said, “My son can’t have spices because of his leukemia.”

Though I have survived cancer as a young boy, I now risk dying of embarrassment. I’m 40, so I’m used to my mother’s overprotectiveness. From an early age, I understood that, as her youngest child of four and the only one to endure a life-threatening condition, she and I would always be bound by love and fear.

Love and fear. That’s such an intense combination. When you were diagnosed with cancer, what do you remember about that? How old were you?

I was five.

Super young.

I remember the smell of rubbing alcohol and I remember the squeaky footsteps on linoleum. I remember being obsessed with superheroes and there was this superhero, Iceman. And I thought if I stood next to the cold air of the hospital coming in, I can turn into Iceman and break myself out of this hospital.

Oh.

I remember being curled into a ball and having a needle jammed into my spine for these spinal taps, which to this day are the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. And I remember my mom was the one who was there. She would pretzel herself in this chair every night. That’s where she was.

She was with you?

Yeah.

What are some ways that she tried to make the hospital feel a little more like home?

I complained about the sheets being too stiff and itchy. That’s all I needed to say before she had someone go home and get my sheets and my pillow from home.

Was that allowed?

Listen, with Hurricane Betty it was going to be allowed whether —

And Betty is your mom?

Yeah. She was my mom but also she was my advocate. She was my friend. She was my confidant. I mean, it really was my mom and me as a two-person cancer squad.

A two-person cancer squad.

Yeah.

Did that two person cancer squad, did it continue after your treatment ended?

She — in her opinion, yes. I was becoming a teenager and didn’t want to be glued to the hip with mommy.

I can understand that.

Yeah.

Tell me, as you became a teenager, how did you start to think about that period of your life in the hospital?

The older I got, the more I wanted to put it behind me. In my mind, if we talked about it she would get upset. And I didn’t have the mental capacity to see her upset anymore. I was tired. She had done so much to protect me, and I felt this immense need to pay her back.

Like you owed her something?

I did. I felt like I owed her a lot. And I felt like bringing up my feelings to her was either going to make her sad, and that would make me feel guilty, or stir up a lot of emotions in me that I didn’t quite want to deal with anymore.

Would your mom bring up your cancer to you in your teenage years?

She would. Frequently.

Wow. Why do you think she was doing that?

In retrospect, I think she was doing it because it’s something that bonded us. And I was trying to run off in my own direction, and bringing up my cancer was reeling me back in. Because when I was 13, 14, 15, it’s like, what else did we have in common?

Yeah. Do you recall a specific moment where she did that?

I remember vividly one of my younger cousins had a cold and my mom would just say, “Oh, well when Mark had cancer —”

Oh.

Like she would bring it up unprompted in virtually any —

Wow.

— any situation.

So wait. My kid has a cold when mark had cancer. From cold to cancer.

Right. She would bring it up to total strangers.

And that went on for decades, right? Like in the part of your essay that you read at the Chinese restaurant with the pepper chicken, you’re 40 years old and she’s telling the waiter about your cancer. But if your mom told people about your cancer all the time, what was different about this time?

In that moment, I thought, OK, if anything ever goes wrong in my life, is it going to be because of my cancer? I knew and understood that she was being the protective Italian mom. I didn’t want it. If something is spicy, it’s just spicy. It had nothing to do with my childhood sickness, and I felt annoyed and I felt it was very embarrassing and I felt like she had not been respectful of my privacy.

I needed to figure out a way to break the cycle that I had endured since I was a kid and didn’t want to endure anymore. And I thought, she’s not responding to me telling her how I feel. She’s not responding to me throwing an adult temper tantrum and asking her to stop bringing up my cancer. So what if I went about it more playfully? I knew that she loved her weekly trips to the casino, and I knew that she loved slot machines and fun and games.

Uh-huh.

And so I thought, well, what if we make it a fun bet? Maybe that’ll work. So we bet each other $100 and the terms were she couldn’t talk about my childhood cancer and I wouldn’t bring up being gay or flirt with guys in front of her.

So she couldn’t talk about your sickness and you wouldn’t talk about men.

Yes.

Were you out to your mother?

Yes.

OK.

But she hadn’t quite made sense of it.

What do you mean by that?

She didn’t seem comfortable if I talked about my sexuality. She sort gave this forced smile and turned her head ever so slightly so that she wasn’t facing me, and her head shook a little bit.

Did you feel judged?

I didn’t feel judged, no. I just felt like this was a side of me that she needed time to fully understand. Her baby who had fought for his life, who had had all these obstacles, now had another one, and she didn’t know how to protect me.

OK. So your mom is not comfortable talking about being gay and you are not comfortable with her constantly bringing up your cancer. So this bet is $100, basically on who can hold out, on who cannot bring up these things that are really important to each of you?

Correct.

And you’re kind of silencing each other?

Yeah. My goal was to stop making each other uncomfortable.

When you proposed this bet, what did your mom do? Did Betty’s eyes light up because she’s a gambling woman? How did she react?

She was like, sure, let’s do it.

Wow.

There was absolutely no hesitation.

Interesting. Were you surprised by that?

Yes.

Why?

I thought it was going to be an immense challenge for her not to bring up my cancer and she was just saying, sure, to shut me up in that restaurant and that she was immediately going to lose.

And was it hard for her? Could you sense how difficult it was for her to not bring up your cancer?

Yes.

Really?

You know in a cartoon where a character is really quiet and they have the smoke coming out of their ears? That’s what it looked like to me.

Do you remember a specific instance where you could see her almost bring it up and then not?

Yeah. We were at a family party and my uncle told everyone he had prostate cancer.

I mean, this is where your mom would jump right in.

She, like a shark, would have jumped in and talked all about it. She did not.

Wow. Was it hard for you to keep up your end of the bargain?

No. Until I met Michael.

OK, until you met Michael.

Yeah.

Tell me about Michael.

I had never been in love before meeting him. But I knew after two months I liked him more than I had liked any other person.

Did you want to tell your mom about him?

Yes.

I mean, you were so determined to win this bet to not bring up boys and your love life. So how did you finally tell her?

So my mom and I were at Costco and as she’s dumping pounds and pounds of like frozen waffles into my cart at Costco, I saw two guys just shopping, ordinary stuff. And I realized that perfect scenario would have been Michael with us and going shopping with us at Costco on a routine Sunday morning because the small parts of life, to me, are the most important. And that would have been a moment where the two of them, I feel like, would have gotten along very well. And I just blurted it out because I couldn’t contain it anymore.

What did you say?

I said, there is this guy named Michael and he has a really cute poodle and he’s a public health professor and I really like him and I want you to meet him.

What did she say back?

She kind of gave me an OK. You know? OK. And she’s like, OK, you know, where’s my $100? She did bring it up. And she said, I’ve not seen you this happy.

What was your response? What did you do?

I had this giant smile on my face and I just wanted to give her a hug because I understood that it was the beginning of getting back to that two-person squad that we hadn’t had in so long. And I had cut her out of that part of my life because I didn’t think that she could handle it, but I never gave her — I never really gave her the chance. And in the few months where we had the bet, I had also deprived her of talking about something that was really important to her. It was an unfair ask.

Why was it unfair to stop her from talking about your cancer?

Because she is someone who likes to process her feelings through hours and hours of conversation, and I didn’t recognize that she still needed to talk about it. After all these years she hadn’t healed from it. She was —

She hadn’t healed from it?

She hadn’t healed from it. And me asking her not to bring up my childhood sickness was taking away something that she relied on to continue to heal from it.

It was her story too.

Yes, it was definitely her story as well.

Does it feel like the squad’s back together?

I do feel like we’re a squad again. I do feel like there’s no need to censor our feelings or hide something that’s important in our life anymore. And I think a lot of that actually has to do with Michael, because I feel like given my history as a sick kid, she always felt like I needed to be taken care of. One of her fears was, if it’s not going to be her, who is it going to be?

Tell me about the first time Michael met Betty.

So the first time Michael and Betty met was at Michael’s apartment. Michael was very nervous because he wanted to make Italian food but he was a little bit frightened that he wouldn’t pass the Betty Italian food test.

It’s a little nerve wracking.

You know? So he told Betty when she arrived that he was making chicken francese but would like her help and input in the kitchen.

What did Betty say?

She beelined to that kitchen and immediately started talking about how she makes it in her own recipes, and do this with the egg and sauce it this way, and Michael was a total sport about it.

When you looked into that kitchen and you saw your mom and your boyfriend, how did that feel?

It felt like a wound had just been closed. It was the most comforting image in my life because there was no more hiding anything. If I could have bottled that moment and just looked at it over and over, I probably would have.

Betty sounds like a real character.

She is.

She sounds like someone I actually kind of have to talk to.

I think you do.

It’s really important. What if we called her right now?

I think that’s an excellent idea.

Modern Love is produced by Julia Botero, Christina Djossa, Elyssa Dudley and Hans Buetow. It’s edited by Sara Sarasohn. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. This episode was mixed by Sophia Lanman. Our show was recorded by Maddy Masiello. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gallogly. Special thanks to Anna Diamond at Audm. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love projects. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.