Mor Maman: "They wanted me to lose weight, they hid snacks from me"
Although she was crowned Miss Israel and represented the country internationally, in her childhood Mor Maman experienced a completely different reality. In a very personal interview, she returned to the moment she first felt desired and shared the complex trauma she went through following her mother's condition.
Mor Maman's life has known quite a few ups and downs. She went through two divorces, started businesses that succeeded for a moment but were then seized and closed, and also dealt with a severe family trauma after her mother fell and lost her memory. In a personal conversation with Rafi Reshef, the former beauty queen returned to the shaking moments alongside her mother, told about the beginning of her path in the modeling world, and addressed the drastic weight loss in her youth.
As a child, Maman was not the queen of the class. One day she decided to make a drastic change in her appearance, and within just two months she shed 20 kilograms.
"The weight loss was very fast," she said. "When I want something, I go straight to the goal. It was during the summer vacation, I arrived at the beginning of the school year as if from a movie. It was like magic."
Is it related to the fact that the parents were not in the country at that time? "Throughout the years, my parents really wanted me to lose weight, they brought dietitians and hid snacks. Maybe the fact that the decision was in my hands is something that helped me let go." This is not a dialogue that a 13-year-old girl conducts with herself. It started even earlier. "I knew I wanted to be something bigger than what life currently offers me. That I want to arrive at school and have them say that I am the most beautiful and best, and that everyone would want to be my friends."
And after two months you arrived at school. New, like in the movies when someone enters and all the high schoolers look at her at the gate. "There it opened up for me, I started modeling and suddenly everyone wanted to be my friends, boys courted me, everything changed."
About a year later, Maman experienced a shock in her life when her mother fell in the gym and lost her memory. Today, the mother remembers only experiences she had from the age of 40, and Maman still finds it difficult to process the situation.
"When I try to remember the time with mom, everything is blurry," she shared. "The most significant personality in my life is mom. She is supposed to be the most stable and safe ground — and suddenly she is not with you and does not remember you. This is what brought me today to be someone who, no matter what she goes through, shakes it off and continues on. I still don't remember that my mother doesn't remember, it's something that hasn't been absorbed by me yet."
Despite the repression, is there one moment that is etched in memory? "I remember that I came with friends from school and offered mom that I would prepare a sweet potato for her. She said to me: 'What is that?' and my friends laughed a lot. I was embarrassed, I said to myself: 'How do I explain now that my mother doesn't even know what a sweet potato is?' Before the accident, she was very hugging and loving, and suddenly I was afraid to approach because this is a new character, this is not the same mother." Experiencing rejection from mom is a thing that is hard to deal with. "It's not just the rejection, it's that she doesn't remember who I am, and doesn't know what I want from her. I have to make her love me."
