An Imperfect Pair

We were an imperfect pair, my mother and I.  Things weren’t too bad until I turned 13, and then, literally the same day, I despised her.  She claimed that if she said “black” I said “white” just to oppose her.  It didn’t feel like that to me.  I thought she was wrong, wrong, wrong—about everything:  dragging the family from New York to Sydney when I was a delicate 12; her taste in overblown opera singers whose screeching shocked me and my siblings awake on the weekends; her crazy insistence on us being Jews; her long skirts with slits up her right calf that embarrassed me in front of my friends’ mothers who wore sleek slacks and button-up sweaters; those thin cigarillos she smoked; and her chaotic moods swerving between gaiety and wrath.  I tiptoed around her buried minefields like a crazy person myself.

Much, much later, I realized that she was not completely wrong.  Even though she had discarded her and my father’s Judaism early on in their marriage in favor of Quakerism, we were Jewish.  The horror of the concentration camps had only been revealed a few years before my birth.  My grandparents on both sides were Jews through and through.  The fact that my mother dangled a Christmas tree in front of my mortified Kiev-born Orthodox Jewish grandfather’s nose, was her attempt at embracing the American culture and giving her children some fun—not necessarily a denial of her Judaism.  Her Quakerism was more about embracing left wing politics in a way that was acceptable for New York Jews, many of whom turned up at Quaker meetings. 

Many decades later, after she’d been widowed in her early 50s, she over-compensated by embracing Orthodox Judaism.  Despite that Florida photo that I waved in her face of the four of us clutching Easter baskets that we had colored the night before, she proclaimed “you always knew you were Jewish!”  Yes, and no.  I pretended, just like she had, that being Jewish wasn’t central. 

When our family immigrated to Sydney, the blond and red headed Aussies asked me why I was so dark.  “I’m Russian,” I proclaimed. For some reason that sounded more exotic and less offensive to me.  Maybe reading ‘Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich’ was not the best choice for a 12-year-old.  I may have internalized all of that hate. 

We actually joined the Quakers in Australia, not a synagogue.  Gazing at the Eucalyptus trees and greenery in Katoomba, New South Wales, through the huge glass windows of the Quaker meeting hall, I think it felt as peaceful to her as it did to me.

Later, while earning my BA at the University of New South Wales, I worked 3 nights a week as a waitress to help pay for living expenses.  At the Maharani Restaurant in Sydney, one of the restaurants in which I worked, I wore a sari and pretended to be half Kashmiri and half Caucasian. Customers were convinced.

Anything but the truth. Which was that I was ashamed of being Jewish.

By that time my parents were onto their next great adventure . . . making aliya to Israel.  My 2 brothers and older sister stayed behind with me.  Only my baby sister, who had no choice, went along. 

My mother was right to have worried about my fascination with the hippy bearded biker R from New Zealand who I was seeing before my parents left Australia.  My mother screeched at me that R was “not of my class.”  I was derailed by the mean tone of her voice and the fact that she even thought class was relevant.  But later, much later, I realized she was worried that her dark-eyed, dark haired, naïve daughter would be taken advantage of.  The first time I slept with R, while still a virgin, I got pregnant.  The very first time.  Damn bad luck.  I was 21, clueless, troubled, insecure, and then, suddenly, pregnant.  I didn’t love R, I didn’t even really like him, but nevertheless, R was the first man I ever knew in the biblical sense.  I remember he was quite beautiful looking.  Over six feet, broad shoulders, blond hair and blue eyes.  He didn’t delve into the nuances of language.  He didn’t dissect every human interaction to figure out what had transpired.  He just was.  Plus, he rode a motorcycle and could fix things.  So different from my dark-haired intellectual Jewish brothers who were sensitive, intelligent and incompetent around the house, as was my father.  To R’s credit, he offered to marry me, but I was so horrified by being pregnant my first year in Uni, where I was pretending to be a cool intellectual, non-sexual being, that I burst into tears and proceeded to ask the nice Jewish doctor (the one my mother secretly hoped I would marry but who was hankering after my shiksa girlfriend) to arrange for an abortion for me.  In those days in Australia that was not an easy feat.  I never told my mother but years later she claimed that she knew. 

Later, long after my parents and baby sister had settled in Israel—I went to visit them again.  I had already been several times, but this time I was married, with a stable job, though still struggling to forgive her, a shameful thing to admit.  One would have thought my advanced age would have brought some wisdom, but apparently, not yet. 

It would be her 80^th birthday and so I stressed about what to bring her.  I wanted it to be something wonderful that she would treasure.  I asked my older sister, who also lived in Israel by then (and that is another whole story), for recommendations.  She told me that our mother collected dolls.  I searched far and wide, and finally found an amazing doll in a little store in Montrose, California.  She was dressed in a white full length skirt and tiny pink lace top.  She had long dark curls, brown eyes, thick lashes and a lovely porcelain smile.  I carefully wrapped her in bubble wrap and then gold tinted paper. I nestled her under many layers of clothing in my suitcase.  When I went to see my mother, who by that time was living in a tiny apartment in Jerusalem with her third husband (the other two, including my father, having died), she unwrapped the doll, pulled it out by its brunette curls, stared at it for a nanosecond and then pushed it down on a shelf in the spare bedroom, upside down.  “Enough with the dolls,” she said.  “I have too many.”  My heart stopped.  And then the blood rushed to my face.  But, as was my typical reaction to extreme anger, I said nothing. 

Now I think it was symbolic, like she was discarding me.  No matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough.  My baby brother later said, “She never had any filters.  She always said the first thing that came into her head.” She was incapable of understanding how it would affect the other person, in this case her needy middle child.  A true narcissist.  Maybe that is why I became a social worker—to mitigate the damage.

I have a cousin who recently lost her mother, who was a dramatic presence in her daughter’s life.  My cousin is struggling with the enormity of that loss.  When my mother died, I struggled with what to feel in her absence which had stretched for decades and decades.  She chose to move us away from all we knew in America to Australia.  She then talked my father into moving to Israel with my six year old baby sister, leaving the rest of us behind.  Of course, one could argue that we were grown up.  My baby brother was 19, I was 21.  My older brother was 23.  My sister was 24.  And they were exotic adventurers.  Friends were envious about how cool my parents were.  Left wing.  Quaker-Jews.  World-wide traveler’s.  But it was a shock for me to not have my parents in my life.  Those were the days when you sent telegrams to people in other countries because the telephone was too expensive.  You communicated by letter, which would take about six weeks for delivery and then another six weeks for a response.  My mother did not keep in touch. 

My father was to die shortly after, when I was 24.  My mother was not there when I ran out of money as a student, or when my heart was broken, or when I was awarded my Bachelor’s degree, or my two Masters degrees, or for my marriage to my black American atheist husband. “Not that he’s black grieves me,” she wrote in one of her many devastating letters, “but that he is not Jewish.”  I was angry at her for the first 20 years of my marriage.  Eventually, after her 3^rd husband talked her into meeting my husband on a rare trip to America, my husband, a more highly evolved being than I was, embraced her.  It took me another few years but eventually I saw that she had done her best to love me, to love all of us.  She was wildly imperfect.  Just like me.

When my older sister called me 5 years ago, I was in my office, where I raise money for a local community college.  She told me that our mother was in the hospital in Jerusalem with sepsis from a burst appendix and the doctors did not give her long.  I asked her to tell our mother that I loved her.  “Tell her yourself,” my sister said.  “I’m putting the phone to her ear.”  I stood there at the window of my office in Los Angeles, watching students rush to class.  My door was closed.  “Mommy,” I said.  “I love you.  You can go peacefully now.  Jody and Robin and Elfie (her sons, and baby daughter) love you, too.  We all love you.”  I felt I had to represent the whole family, half of whom lived in Australia.  She hadn’t seen us for many years.  I thought I heard an intake of breath.  I couldn’t be sure. 

My mother died shortly after that.  When I told the people at the college that my mother had died and I was going to take a few days off, I felt like a fraud.  They sent me this elaborate flower arrangement with a fake bird in it.  I did not feel like a daughter who had lost her mother.  I felt like a complex algorithm.  Mother-crazy= Daughter-fractured.  Mother-absent=Daughter-fractured.  Mother-unorthodox=Daughter-Interesting.  Yes, everything I have become in my life was a reaction to her.  I struggled against her judgements and became a more open person.  I fought with her religious pronouncements and became an agnostic.  I struggled with her craziness and became a social worker.  I struggled with her motherhood and had no children.  I struggled with her three marriages and had one marriage that has lasted 32 years. So far.

Now she visits me in my dreams.  She still wears those flowered skirts with slits up her calves.  She is voluptuous, with long dark brown hair.  She still smokes those thin cigars.  And she is always happy, laughing and ready for an adventure.  I don’t even remember how imperfect she is in my dreams.  That is her gift to me.  Her frequent visits.  Her humor and joy.  Not the tantrums or depression.  Not the narcissistic jabs.  Death has made her whole.  Maybe mine will do the same for me.

Subterfuge

June 2018

Starting in a subterfuge way.  Don’t want to upset, scare or anger the snakes and ladders of life.  When one’s bright engaged spouse of 33 years begins to lose his memory.  Don’t panic.  Be Zen.  He is not contained in the details.  His sense of time floats.  Yesterday and today and tomorrow are interchangeable.  A continuous flow backwards and forwards.  What day is it?  Where does this go?  What is my grandchild’s name?  Where did I leave my credit card?

But he knows you.  He holds you.  He loves you.  He remembers you.  Until when?  What do any of us know?  Can we measure, predict, control anything?  Do we know if our son will die legless from diabetes on the streets of San Francisco, or in a random car crash at 30 years old?  Or if our lovely gentle daughter will commit suicide? Or be slaughtered with an automatic weapon at school in an American mass shooting? 

How do you withstand the sorrow?  How do you move the spouse who protects you into the spouse whom you must protect? 

Subterfuge.

Who can you talk to?  If you have cancer, your friends get that cancer look in their eyes.  Pity.  Fear.  Distance.  It may not be worth the conversation.  Except for those few who know how to ask the right questions, offer the right help when even you don’t know how to measure what is right.  And when your spouse loses his memory you don’t tell many people.  You are a lioness with a cub.  Fierce.  Protective.  But your cub is your husband.  How can that be?  Cubs are not husbands.  But yes, this husband is your cub.  But no, he is your protector.  He was always your protector.  One of the reasons you were attracted to him.  He was a survivor.  A Korean Vet.  A Black American Male who made White People Laugh and Love Him.  Not Fear Him.  Not be threatened by him.  He made it in a white man’s world, not an easy feat.  He was smart and educated and well-travelled and artistic—but also a computer geek who could fix anything.  A Renaissance man, in fact.

Falsehoods between Blacks and Whites.  Between men and women.  Are men really stronger?  Physically, mostly yes.  Emotionally, mostly no.  Even, physically not always.  My brothers, for example.  Sensitive wimps.  Lovely wimps.  Talented wimps.  But wimps, nevertheless.  I know some Black wimps too.  My husband is not one of them.  His brother, my brother-in-law, a 200-pound black man (definitely not a wimp), does not believe that women are delicate. That I am delicate.  He sees me handling things. He does not question whether I can.  He comes from a black family with five powerful women, my sisters-in-law, who handled things. Raising children as single parents.  Earning degrees.  Working.  Owning homes.  All with their senses of humor intact.

I am no longer delicate.  I once was.  Truly delicate.  110 pounds.  Clueless.  An emotional twining fork.  An immigrant.  The middle child of a narcissistic mother.  Think minefields.  Think introvert.  Think paper-thin. And now a new term I just learned: Highly Sensitive Person.  Really.  There are articles about us.  Google it if you don’t believe me.  In the old days you were just an emotional wreck.  Now, well, there is a body of knowledge behind you.  A body of knowledge that normalizes you.

Nevertheless, I survived adolescent and young adulthood.  Sans safety net.  Arriving in America, alone, with only a backpack.  No job.  No money.  No family backing.  Because, Jewish though we were, we were poor and strewn across 3 continents.  But what I got instead was:  Grit.  Determination.  Education.  The myth of the rich, cutthroat Jews.  The myth of the ignorant, primitive Blacks.  Stereotypes.  They catch us in their vice. 

My husband.  My hero.  He has it too—grit, determination, education and a great love of people.  And uncanny sensitivity.  That may be the American Indian part of him.  He is like a tuning fork, too, even more than I ever was.  He still reads people.  He may not know their name, but he knows their essence.

And now, facing as I do, the unraveling of my strongman, I see that I am stronger than I ever thought possible.  When I find plates and silverware, or computer cords in strange places.  Or the water in our Lab’s bucket, running, running, running down the hill because my beloved has forgotten to shut it off.  Or the knife in the spoon drawer.  Or the spoon, hanging on the wall.  Or the eiderdown neatly tucked under the mattress cover.  Or the computer network cable cord disconnected from something crucial.   

But he is still himself.  Funny.  Smart. Ironic.  So, he forgets what day it is or what I just said to him or where he was headed?  So he forgets.  His soul is deep.  His heart is wide.  His arms are loving.  He still reads The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the LA Times every morning.  Maybe not every article, but who does?

But still, there is a loss.  Who can I talk to about that?  One of my friends never brings it up.  And so, neither do I.  You, my beloved readers, are the ones who will hold these truths.  You are the ones who will see me through this.  

  

Things to understand.  He is so Zen.  Even though he asks me many times a day what day it is, the answer never perturbs him.  He takes it all in his stride.  Oh, it’s Sunday.  I didn’t know that.  Leaving the hose on in the dog’s bucket, water running down the hill.  I didn’t know I did that.  Confusing the days, the weeks, the years.  Forgetting his great nieces and nephews and great grandkids names and who, truly, they belong to.  Some are the survivors of his divorce from his first wife whom he still loves, and so do I.  She, and his 3 surviving kids, live in another city.  They were angry and out of touch for years.  It is better now.  Together, we mourned the death of his only son, for whom my sister planted a tree in Israel, where she lives.  That meant a lot to all of them.  We spent a Thanksgiving together.  We were part of his eldest daughter’s wedding.  His daughters came and spent time with us.  Now, we are family.

He still celebrates watching the Lakers.  He loves to watch tennis, too, which he used to play every single day for years and years.  He celebrates having breakfast with me, his wife.  He celebrates my creativity and our home on the hill.  He celebrates looking out of our front window.  He celebrates being an American.  A good American, one who believes in the Constitution and how immigrants have built this great country.  How children should never, ever be torn from their parents.  He celebrates every second of his life, really.   Seconds that I often miss.  He celebrates how good life has been to him.  And how good it still is.

I try not to be anxious about all the stops and curves and potholes ahead.

Maybe these shifts—memory loss, losing capacity, slowing down, death—that we stress about—well, maybe these are the things that bring us closer to the stars and earth and the water from which we come.  The things that help us embrace the end of our corporeal lives.  That help us to move to the next plane of whatever it may be.  Dust.  Reintegration with the earth.  Heaven.  What if those who lose their memories are the true gods?  And us fighting to make them more like us is what causes such distress?  If we just accepted it, they would not suffer.  They are sensitive to our shifts and turns and dead ends. 

I refuse to use the names that are given. Dementia.  Alzheimer’s.   So concrete.  Vise-like.  Suffocating.  It misses the point and causes distress. I believe that they are closer to the divine. Where present and past have no demarcations.  Where song and art and happiness reign supreme.  Where, what one remembers one has, is what one is grateful for.

I am grateful for him.  He is deep.  He is joyous.  He is forgiving.  He is funny.  He connects equally to the restaurant server and the busboy and the homeless man on the street.  I, on the other hand, am too private.  Too introverted.  I sometimes struggle to maintain my sense of joy.  I worry tremendously about too many things. I am too cognizant of past, present and future.  And time.  And days.  And demarcations.  And structure.  Lately, I am trying to shake all of that with charcoal drawing and painting and writing.  Although one needs to know the demarcations and structure before one can let go and let the joy and passion shine through. But there is no doubt.  It is those who can let go who are the true artists. 

I lie awake at night and try to let go. 

Sometimes it works. 

In defense of men

It is very PC right now to rail against men.  And I know that there have been many egregious acts against many innocent women by many not-so-innocent men.  I am not in defense of those men—they deserve everything the ‘me-too’ movement can throw their way.  But I feel compelled to speak out in the defense of those other men—the majority, I would argue.

My mother was unable to be my supporter, my defender, my mentor for many reasons which require a complex memoir which I hope I have the skills to execute one day.  Suffice it to say, that although she was a beautiful, passionate, creative woman, she found it difficult, if not impossible, to put herself in her children’s, or anyone else’s shoes.  It was always, always about what she was feeling, what she wanted, what she needed.  And so, I needed to find solace elsewhere.  It was often older women.  But sometimes, it was men.  Mostly older, too.  Maybe it was because my own father died at 56.  Prodigiously young, these days.  Although, at the time, I thought he was quite old and didn’t realize the severity of his sentence until I passed 56.

One of my many older men G was tall, dark and handsome.  In his defense, he did not pursue me.  I pursued him.  Maybe he reminded me of my father, who was then living, but in another country with my mother and baby sister.  I missed him tremendously. 

G handled the unequal balance between us with great care.  I, 21, lonely, awkward and unaware of my intelligence and creativity; he, 32, a doctor with well-earned confidence.  He never cut corners with me.  He encouraged me to travel and pursue my education and explore my American roots, my country of birth in which I had not lived since I was twelve.  But he also did very practical things for me.  He played me LPs (yes, we had those back then) of B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Billie Holiday.   They made me long to go back to America.  A country that produced music like that was a country I wanted to know more about.  He helped me out with money when my scholarship and waitressing money didn’t stretch far enough.  He told me I was very sensitive, intelligent and how much he enjoyed my observations on Australian life.  I saw things the way a foreigner did, noting customs and unique ways of doing things that others took for granted.  I was destined to have an interesting life, he said. 

I didn’t believe it for a minute.  I knew I would be stuck in Australia for the rest of my life, and that if he knew the crazy thoughts that ran around and around in my head, he would not be saying these things.  Of course, now that I have realized that crazy thoughts are par for the course for human beings, and that after living and working in four continents, and having relationships with men in each of those, I see that Australia would have been a great choice, but too late because I am no longer eligible to immigrate back.  He was very fond of me, I think, but didn’t love me the way I loved him.  I only learned many years later that he was struggling with his own sexuality at the time.  Bisexuality was little known in the 1970s, let alone homosexuality.  Neither was something you admitted to your girlfriend, let alone anyone else.  It was, after all, an unnatural crime in those days, or worse, a mental illness, as my gay brother now reminds me.  But still, G was generous and mostly honest.  But more than that, he listened to me, heard me, understood me and pushed me to do things that frankly terrified me.  He saw the fledgling beauty of my heart and my soul at a time when I was struggling with my fears and intense insecurities about who I really was.  I compared myself to other women my age who seemed so self-assured and settled, with their long-term boyfriends, their cars, their dogs, their world-wide adventures, the seeming solidity of their perfect families, with mothers who baked them their favorite pies and hand-wove blankets to keep them warm at University, and fathers with many connections, who backed them up with money before they ran out.  I, on the other had was floating, dangerously isolated and depressed, before I met G.

 After I reluctantly left G, upon his insistence, to visit my family in Israel whom I hadn’t seen for a long four years, I thought my life of adventure had begun. I see now that those 12 years in Australia were also part of the grand adventure that was my life.  I lived on a kibbutz in northern Israel for a few months, then went to England, fully expecting to go back to Australia and to him.  But no, he said.  I am not your answer.  You need to keep going.  Keep exploring.  Find out who you are.  I was so upset at the time.  Why couldn’t he just love me the way I loved him?  Why couldn’t didn’t he beg me to come home, the way they did in the movies and great novels?  

But he didn’t ask me to come back, and so I got a job in London, and later enrolled at the London School of Economics to get my Master’s Degree.  I went to America for a summer vacation, fell in love and wanted to move there after my degree.  He helped pay for my plane fare to start a new life there, even though we were living in two different countries and there was no benefit to him.  He knew that America would be a good match for me, and knowing how poor I was, with no family support, he sent me the money that enabled me to return to America, the country of my birth.  He was one of the truly good men.

And then there is my husband, with whom I have been with these past 38 years.  He has always celebrated my successes.  He was never threatened by my creativity or my rise on the career ladder.  He was proud of each accomplishment and cheered me on.  He shared his strength with me without boundaries and made me stronger.  He never cheated on me, nor I on him.  He still thinks I am the best of the best.  But the truth is, he helped make it so.  And I, with his support and love, helped make him the best he could be. We are a team.

And then there are the men with whom I work.  I think it helps to not work in the political arena or the entertainment industry, where men who lust for power gravitate, and the unequal power they obtain somehow gives them permission to act like jerks.  Or worse, like predators.  Are those kind of men attracted to those high power jobs or do those high power jobs create those kind of men? Probably a bit of both.  I know for sure that some women are attracted to men of power, (maybe those who feel powerless) so much so that they throw themselves at those men, and maybe those men then think that they have such a highly sexual power that no woman can resist even when there are women who say “no”.  They can’t even fathom the ‘no’ because they are so enamored by the heights they have achieved.  They become enamored by the myth of themselves.  Because deep down, they feel like tiny cockroaches who have somehow fooled the world.

Some of the good men, thrown by this “Me Too” age, are worried if they have perhaps done wrong things, too, without even realizing it.  They are collegial and generous, and nervous about what is okay, wondering if they have inadvertently crossed a line.  But it is not a fine line, I explain to them.  A colleague who sometimes flirts, or smiles, or hugs, is not the same as a colleague who creeps up behind you and grabs your breasts.  Or says crude things to you. Or locks his office door to trap you.  Or shows you porn on his computer.  Or rapes you in his car.  That is not a fine line.

I have always worked in social services and education—community colleges in particular—where those who are drawn to power do not linger.  Yes, of course I’ve had the ‘me too’ experiences.  When I was 13 there was the man in the park who waved a hose at me, which I suddenly realized was not a hose, but was his unmentionable body part.  I ran home crying and my mother, in one of her nobler moments, comforted me.  She must have had many of her own ‘me too’s,’ although we never discussed it.  And there was my first boss who chased me around the kiosk where I worked for him.  I was 16, and he was old—maybe 30 or 40 or 50—and was trying to grab parts of my teenage body.
  
And there was l’etranger in France who grabbed me outside la toilette in la pension and was going to do me great harm, I am sure, but for my full-throated, uninhibited shriek which sent him scurrying back down the dark stairwell. 

And there was the one man, the anomaly I pray, in the Jewish social services community, and God I am so wanting to say his name, but for the fact that I never complained and never reported him and now he is dead and who knows what innocent family he’s left behind.  I was applying for a job and he was the top man then.  Basically, he said I was not right for the job, but perfect for his mistress.  He didn’t say it exactly like that.  He took me out for lunch first, after the job interview, which we both agreed was not the right match for me.  He told me his wife was an invalid.  He told me he had a vacation home on an island.  He told me that he wanted me to come there to spend time with him because I was such an intelligent and interesting woman. And beautiful.  I was shocked at the time, but also flattered that he thought I was so interesting and intelligent.  And beautiful.  That is the main tool of predators:  the insecurity of very young women.  I told him I already had a boyfriend (my husband to be) and he said, ‘so what?’  That is when I knew I was in seriously dangerous territory.  I left that lunch and didn’t say a word to anyone about that highly respected leader in the Jewish community. It kept me off edge for years, not knowing when I would see him at business meetings, but when I did, I pretended nothing, nothing had ever happened.  The man who won all sorts of awards and accolades.  There are probably buildings named after him.  And family members who think of him as a hero.  Now I wish I had said something.  Although who knows who would have believed me.  I was a little nothing social worker.  He was a big Jewish leader.  It’s too late.  Sometimes, it is just too late.

But wait.  This is in defense of men.  Here is the main thing.  It is not a fine line.  Between decent men and the egregious ones.  The decent man would never, ever grab your body parts from behind, and then chase you around the perimeters of your desk.  The decent man would never suggest you become his mistress immediately following a job interview, when he is married and you are at least 30 years his junior.  The decent man would not wait outside a toilet in a darkened hallway in France, or any other country, and wait until the light goes out to grab you. 

A decent man would help you become the best person you could possibly be, with his total support.  A decent man, while he may be sometimes baffled by you and wonder about your internal roller coaster and how different you are from him, and how he can never predict how you are going to react to anything, basically respects you and wants to be part of your team.

Most men, I posit, are basically decent.  And I love every one of those men.  As for the others.  Let them eat cake.  They deserve the ‘me-too’ movement.

Marching Against Fear

I knew the same evening that the Washington Women’s March was announced that I would be going, not to Washington but in LA.  I was done pulling the covers over my head following Trump’s disingenuous victory.  I needed to focus on how to be active and not depressed for the next few (please God make them very few) years. 
 

I kept flashing back to Nazi Germany and all those Jews and others who said nothing this bad could ever happen here because ‘we are a civilized, educated country’.  Jewish fathers told their trusting wives and children that the world was watching and no one would let the kind of atrocities that were being whispered about in the tunnels of life happen in their beloved Germany.  During my teenage years and into my adulthood I wondered if I would have been one of those trusting Jews. 

At twelve, incapable of understanding such atrocities, I devoured The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich.  

I have carried it around in my heart these past 6 decades.  Now that Trump is President, I know, on the deepest level that a lot of bad can happen.  I, unlike Trump, have studied history. 

As I thought about going to the LA Women’s March, my mind wandered through dark alleys.  There could be a mass shooting.  A stampede.  A Ku Klux Klan countermarch.  Arrests.  Mayhem.  Even death.   But I deliberately countered it with other thoughts.  So what?  Even if good people were crushed to death, I wanted to be among them.  I wanted to be willing to die for this cause, to make my voice heard, to take a stand like those resisters—Christians, Atheists and Jews—did during WWII.  Otherwise I would be one of those silent ones.  One of those cowards.  One of the train drivers who drove the children to the ovens. 

Unprotestingly.  Silent.  Or the doctors, also silent during Dr. Mengele’s atrocities.  I have despised them all these decades even while understanding the fear that prevented them from speaking up.  Will I speak up in 2017?

Here’s the thing:  I am claustrophobic.  I avoid crowds.  Once, years ago, I went on a demonstration to support Dukakis in LA.  It felt pretty good until the doors in the hangar slammed shut.  Suddenly I was trapped with thousands and thousands of people.  While everyone was listening to his speech, I was trying not to pass out.  Trying not to scream and pound on the hanger doors.  Trying not to tear my hair out in huge chunks.  I stayed then, and Dukakis lost.  But now, even if my protest doesn’t move the needle, my fear of a Trump Presidency must trump everything.  I need to be able to say that I was one of the ones who stood up and was counted.  Please, let it be etched on my tombstone.

When my friend S. said she would be organizing a female posse/pussy from her home in North Hollywood to go on the Women’s March, I jumped on it.  S. is tremendously capable and organized.  She is not subject to panic attacks, or at least I don’t think she is.  I would feel safe with her.  So, instead of going from my home, much closer to the march, I drove backwards to North Hollywood, parked on S’s street and met up with 6 women, most of whom I did not know.  To say S. was organized is a beautiful understatement.  There were muffins and bagels and tangerines and apples and water and coffee and printed directions to Pershing Square and City Hall, and two wonderful men who provided shuttle service to the train station and back again. 
 
See, here’s the thing about Los Angelinos.  Public transportation is still a mystery.  It exists, but most of us don’t know how, where or when.  For example, who knew there was such a thing as a TAP card?  But S. knew and e-mailed us directions on how to purchase them way before the March so we wouldn’t have to wait in lines.  Who knew that my local Ralphs sold them for two dollars?  Such a bargain!  All seven of S’s posse/pussies arrived at S’s house with fully loaded TAP cards.

My visions of the actual march were crowds upon crowds upon crowds trampling one another across downtown LA.  But I had not factored in getting to downtown.  North Hollywood Station was so crowded that the lines snaked around for blocks.  Once on the platform, there was no room to breathe.  No room to move.  No room to flee. 

Even though North Hollywood was the point of origin, the trains that stopped at the station were already fully loaded with passengers squashed up to the glass doors.  They had somehow figured out a way to stay on the train even though North Hollywood was the point of origin. Everyone waiting on the station was calm and good humored though, which I kept repeating to myself as we stood one foot from falling onto the tracks.  Two trains later, we were on.  I have no idea how.  Somehow, there we were, the seven of us in a fully packed train.  Standing, clutching, but still breathing.  Some people, from the packed platform full of happy, anxious, soon-to-be marchers, tried to squeeze on at each station as soon as the doors opened.  The more aggressive amongst us, already in, shouted ‘no more room, no more room.’  Little kids in the train were freaking out, overwhelmed by giant bodies crushing them. 

We managed to get a young woman to give up her seat to 2 kids and a parent, although I couldn’t help wondering why she hadn’t thought of it by herself.  As we approached Pershing Square, some twenty minutes later, I was stunned into suffocating silence, waiting for worse to come as we clawed our way above ground. 

But everything after that, i.e. the actual march, was not too bad, even though there were a reported 750,000 people coming and coming.  I got used to being there and started to like it.  It was HUGE.  Truly huge.  No alt-facts here. 

We skirted the outer rim of the crowd, all of us having read the post from another friend that one could avoid being stampeded that way.  There were moments of panic, like when someone yelled ‘watch out –abandoned back pack’ and I had visions of it exploding as we wended our slow way to City Hall. 

But nothing bad happened.  The porta-potties worked.  Everyone was polite.  There was more breathing room in downtown LA than on the trains, and it felt great to be standing amongst so many like-minded people. The signs people held were inventive and funny.  It was invigorating to be out of our cars, walking the streets of downtown, just like NY or San Francisco.  It made many of us realize how, when we get out of our cars, take public transportation, and unite for a common cause, we are a real city!

So, now what?  Time has passed.  A short time into Trump’s Administration, things seem to be getting crazier.  Conspiracy theories and paranoia abound.  Trump and his white alt-team seem to be deliberately creating chaos so that they can push through their extreme agenda with a punch drunk opposition who don’t know which way to turn.
 

I feel he’s not smart enough for such forethought, but then there are the Koch Brothers and Bannon and all the rest of his extreme dark cabinet.  Can we win the long haul?  My black husband, feels pretty dark about all this and wonders if he will be forced back to being a Negro again, something he thought he’d left behind 6 decades ago.  Is that how far the Trumpers will take us back? 

The students on the community college campus where I work are freaked out.  Many of them are refugees and recent immigrants.  They are the people who love this country with the devotion of survivors.  They believe in our freedom and democracy.  They believe that here, everyone has an equal chance to thrive.  They believe that the government will provide a safety net. Whenever there is a Pledge of Allegiance, their hands are clasped against their hearts with a zeal not seen in most Americans.  The Hispanic waiters at our favorite restaurant, legal and hard-working and bright and devoted to making a better life for themselves and their families, even they are talking about going back to Mexico.  Maybe that is the trump card.  Make things so intolerable here that most will leave.  Already, despite Trump’s pretend grown-up news conference, the ICE men are arresting mothers and fathers and children whose worst crime is a parking ticket or a public protest.  They are attempting to deport them without due process.  I pray my monthly donation to the ACLU will make a difference.

And they are scared—legal and illegal immigrants.  Good Americans.  Young and old.  They see Trump’s face scrunched in red-white hatred.  They read his nasty tweets.  They are alarmed at how he is alienating all of our friends.  (Who alienates the Aussies?) They remember where they came from.  The dictator who did whatever he wanted.  Who targeted people for their religious beliefs, like President Hassan Rouhano towards the Bahia in Iran? 

“ Since President Hassan Rouhani's inauguration, at least 212 Baha’is have been arrested, thousands have been blocked from access to higher education, and there have been at least 590 incidents of economic oppression, ranging from intimidation and threats against Baha’i-owned businesses to their closure by authorities. More than 20,000 pieces of anti-Baha’i propaganda have been disseminated in the Iranian media during President Rouhani's administration.” Current situation | Bahá’í International Community
https://www.bic.org/focus-areas/situation-iranian-bahais/current-situation#PBgytcu9msb98qm2.03

And what is so threatening about the Bahai religion?  “The fundamental principle . . . is that Religious truth is not absolute but relative, that Divine Revelation is a continuous and progressive process, that all the great religions of the world are divine in origin, that their basic principles are in complete harmony, that their aims and purposes are one and the same, that their teachings are but facets of one truth, that their functions are complementary, that they differ only in the non-essential aspects of their doctrines and that their missions represent successive stages in the spiritual evolution of human society.”
From the Bahá’í Writings

One student, a young talented photographer who speaks excellent English, told me that although she was top in academic standing in Iran, during her first semester of college in Iran she was called into the President’s office and told that she was no longer welcome because she was Bahai.  She was forced out simply because of her religion.  So, when she came to America as a refugee and enrolled in a community college here, she expected things to be better. Now, she is not so sure.  Under the Trump edict, she would not even have been allowed to come here in the first place. 

Put a human face on Trump's targets.  That’s what the incredible resistance group I recently joined says.  It’s easy to target all Muslims (Read: Jews. Read: Blacks.) But when you personalize who they are, it is, hopefully, a different story to those who have hearts and are not narcissistic billionaires. Wait a minute.  Isn’t that the entire White House team?

Somehow or other this group invited me to join.  Courageous Resistance.  I was optimistic.  I felt I could do something.  I could be on the front lines.  But here’s the thing:  it revolves around hashtag this and hashtag that.  Getting on calls across the state, some of which I am having trouble accessing because of computer issues and work.  Not to mention being an introvert and hating to interact with strangers.  But, this is how one saves America from the narcissist, right?  The Narcissistic Right.  Although I read that a psychiatrist is denying that Trump is mentally ill—just a bad person.  Putting a mentally ill label on him is not fair to the mentally ill.  I like that theory.  Mentally ill are not necessarily rude or crass or ugly.  But he is.  So what does that make him?  Rude and crass and ugly. 

Is it deliberate chaos?  Are the Dark Money Koch Brothers behind it?  How carefully is it being orchestrated?  I am not a conspiracy person kind of gal.  But in this case, I think Trump has a kind of evil genius in diverting us from the real issues.  After the firing of Michael Flynn, Trump held a press conference in which his behavior was erratic, rude and crazy.  And every minute it changes.  First it was Hilary.  Now he is blaming Obama in his frantic, erratic and paranoid tweets.  Tomorrow it will be something else.  But what if he were just trying to divert us from the real issues that have to do with his tie in to the Russians and when and what he knew?  And even more damaging facts.?

His followers love that he is trying to destroy the government.  Wait until their towns have a crisis.  Or when their healthcare no longer exists.  Or when there is no social security. Or they can no longer breathe the air without a mask.  Or when they can’t trust their food from the store.  Or when their prescription drug prices are so high that they die before they can pay for them.  Let us hope there is time for them to realize the extent of that loss. 

Trump is an actor.  Not a great actor but a practiced one.  He can sound however it serves him to sound.  But the essence of who he is—Ugly!  My husband always says that America doesn’t do ugly people.  I pray he is right.  Because you can’t get much uglier.

 

 

 

An Imperfect Pair

We were an imperfect pair, my mother and I.  I got on with her up until I turned 13, then literally the same day, I despised her.  She claimed if she said “black” I said “white” just to oppose her.  It didn’t feel like that to me.  I thought she was wrong, wrong, wrong.  About everything.  Dragging the family from New York to Sydney when we were kids; her fondness for screechy opera records that she slapped on the turntable to scare me and my siblings awake; her insistence that we were Jews despite our long history with Quaker meetings; her long skirts with slits up her right calf that embarrassed me in front of my friends’ sleek-slacked, button-upped mums; her obsession with smoking a lady’s pipe; but mostly her chaotic moods that swerved between gaiety and wrath.  I tiptoed around her buried minefields like a crazy person myself.

Much, much later, I figured she couldn’t help the mood swings, and was possibly right about some things.  Growing up in Australia turned out to be a Big Adventure.  

Arriving at the Scheyville Migrant Centre in Australia. I am in the striped sweater next to my mother.

Although it felt like she’d discarded Judaism in favor of Quakerism, we were Jewish.  The horror of the concentration camps had only been revealed a few years before my birth.  My grandparents on both sides were Jews through and through.  The fact that my mother dangled a Christmas tree in front of my horrified Kiev-born, Orthodox Jewish grandfather’s nose was her attempt at embracing the American culture and giving her children some fun—not necessarily a denial of her Judaism.  In fact, after my father’s death many decades later, she embraced Orthodox Judaism in an ironic reversal or possibly, an apology to her father-in-law. 

Despite the photo of us clutching our Easter baskets that I waved in her face, she said, “you always knew you were Jewish.” 

 Well, yes and no.  I pretended, just like she had, that being Jewish wasn’t central.  When we first immigrated to Sydney, and the blond and red headed Aussies asked me why I was so dark, I claimed to be Russian.  Later, I said Kashmiri Indian and Italian.  Or Greek.  Or anything but the truth—that I was ashamed of being Jewish.

 

 

 

My mother was right to worry about my fascination with the bearded hippy biker R from New Zealand.  When she said he was “not of my class”, I was derailed by the fact that she thought class was even relevant.  But later, much later, I realized she was, quite rightly, worried about her dark-eyed, dark haired, naïve daughter.  The first time I slept with R, I got pregnant.  Dumb bad luck.  I was 21, clueless, troubled, insecure, a virgin, and then, suddenly, pregnant.  I didn’t love R. I didn’t even really like him, but nevertheless, he was the first man I knew in the biblical sense.  He was quite astonishing looking.  Over six feet, broad shoulders, shoulder-length blond hair and the clearest blue eyes when he wasn’t stoned.  He didn’t delve into the nuances of language.  He didn’t dissect every human interaction.  He just was.  Plus, he rode a motorcycle and could fix things.  So different from my dark-haired intellectual Jewish brothers who were sensitive, intelligent and incompetent around the house, as was my father. 

To R’s credit, he offered to marry me, but I burst into tears at his proposal, shaking my head enough times to set him free. I was horrified that my cool, intellectual, non-sexual cover was blown by becoming pregnant my first year at Uni.  I proceeded to ask the nice Jewish doctor (the one my mother secretly hoped I would marry but who was more interested in my goyisher girlfriend) to arrange for an abortion, which in those days in Australia was not an easy feat.  The only way you could get one was if your mental or physical health was at stake, and believe me when I tell you that I was teetering towards insanity.  I never told my mother, although she later claimed to have known. 

Later on, after my mother, father and baby sister had moved onto their next Big Adventure—Israel—I went for a visit.  It was my mother’s birthday, so I stressed about what to bring her.  I wanted it to be something she would treasure.  I consulted with my older sister—who also lived in Israel and had also become an Orthodox Jew—for advice.  She told me that my mother collected dolls, something I hadn’t known.  I searched far and wide and finally found an amazing doll in a little store in Montrose, California.  She was dressed in a white full formal dress and hat.  She had long dark-brown curls, brown eyes, thick lashes and a lovely porcelain smile.

 I carefully buried her in my suitcase under my softest sweaters.  When I went to visit my mother, who was living in a tiny apartment in Jerusalem with her third husband (the other two, including my father, having died of natural causes), I presented her with the doll now wrapped in powder-blue tissue paper with a bright red bow. She tore off the blue layers. Blue was her favorite color. It was mine, too.  She pulled the doll out by its brunette curls, stared at it for a nanosecond and then pushed it upside down on the shelf in the guest room. “Enough with the dolls,” she said.  “I have too many.”  I was furious at how easily she had discarded my gift—like she was discarding me.  No matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough. 

Later, my baby brother, always the wise one, said: “She had no filters.  She always said the first thing that came into her head.” She was incapable of understanding how her words or actions would affect another person, in this case her needy middle child.  She was a true narcissist.  Maybe that is why I became a social worker—to mitigate the damage.  (God save the world in the land of Trump.)

I have a cousin who lost her mother who was a dramatic presence in her daughter’s life.  My cousin struggles with the enormity of that loss.  When my mother died, I struggled with what to feel—beyond emptiness.  I still blamed her for moving us away from all we knew in America to immigrate to Australia.  I blamed her for talking my father, eight years later, to Israel.  They took my six-year-old baby sister with them, naturally.  Although the rest of us were grown up by then—my younger brother was 19, I was 21, my older brother was 23 and my sister 24—the shock of not having parents anymore was fierce.  Even more so, was the shock of losing my beloved baby sister. 

Me with my baby sister

I loved her so much and had pretended she was my baby, too.  The next time I saw her, she was 10 and then 12 and then 17.  Such huge gaps in the life of a child.  Those were the days when you sent telegrams.  The telephone and international travel was an expensive and rare act amongst the middle and lower classes. 

And because of the ongoing violence in the Mid-East about which I worried prodigiously, I imagined my parents’ death many times long before it happened.  My father was diagnosed with liver cancer, when I was 24 and doing my MSW at the London School of Economics. His actual death six months later was muted by the grief I had already suffered when they left Australia.  Neither parent was there when I ran out of money as a student, or when my heart was broken, or when I was awarded my Bachelor’s degree, or my first real job, or my two Masters degrees, or my marriage to my black American Indian Zen atheist husband.  

After my father died, I still had expectations that my mother would play a part in my life. Although I was not expecting her to attend my wedding in Los Angeles because she lived so far away, I assumed she would be happy for me.  I was not prepared for her letter:  “Not that he’s black grieves me, but that he is not Jewish.” And I was certainly not expecting that for years after my marriage, she would send mail only to my maiden name at my work address. That enraged me.  Eventually, her 3^rd husband, on their only trip together to America, talked her into meeting my husband for the first time at Canters Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles.  We had been married for over 20 years by then. 

My mother sat on my side of the table, lips pursed, hands fluttering around the fork and knife.  Her husband shook my husband’s hand warmly and sat next to him.  My mother wouldn’t look across the table at my husband, until, without warning, my husband stood up and walked over to our side of the table and embraced her.  Touching a woman, let alone hugging her was forbidden in Jewish Orthodoxy, of course.  Although she pretended shock, remember that she’d grown up in America as a left wing, communist leaning with Jewish rising Quaker.  She could see that my husband was intelligent and kind and had a sense of humor, and so warmed up to him over bagels and lox at Canters.  My younger brother recently told me that she must have seen how special he was.  I agreed with him.

When my older sister called me five years ago, I was in my office, where I raise money for a local community college.  My mother was in the hospital with sepsis from a burst appendix and the doctors did not give her long.  I asked my sister to tell my mother I loved her.  “Tell her yourself,” she said.  “I’m putting the phone to her ear.”  I stood there at the window of my office, watching the students rush to class. 

“Mommy,” I shouted.  “I love you.  You can go peacefully now.  J and R and E (her sons, and baby daughter) love you, too.  We all love you.”  I felt I had to represent the whole family, most of whom lived in Australia.  She hadn’t seen us for many, many years. 

I thought I heard an intake of breath.  I couldn’t be sure. 

She died shortly after that.  When I told the people at the college that my mother had died and I was going to take a few days off, I felt like a fraud. Nevertheless, my college colleagues sent me an elaborate flower arrangement with a fake bird on top.  But I did not feel like a daughter who had lost her mother.  I felt like a complex algorithm.  Mother + crazy = Daughter + fractured.  Mother + absent = Daughter + lonely.  Mother + unorthodox + Orthodox = Daughter + Interesting + confused.  

Now, I can see that she did her best to love me, to love all of us.  She was imperfect.  Just like me.

What I have become in my life was in reaction to her.  I rebelled against her judgements and with great struggle became a more open person.  I fought against her religious orthodoxy and became an agnostic with atheist rising.  I grappled with her craziness and became a social worker.  I negated her as a mother and had no children.  I was appalled at her three marriages and married once and forever.

Now my mother visits me in my dreams.  She still wears those flowered skirts with slits up her calves.  She is voluptuous, with long dark brown hair.  She still smokes that jeweled pipe.  And she is always happy, laughing and ready for an adventure.  I don’t see her imperfections in my dreams.  That is her gift to me.  Her frequent visits.  Her humor and joy.  Not the tantrums or depression.  Not the thoughtless comments.  Death has made her whole.

Maybe it will do the same for me.