July Sixteenth, Nineteen Twenty Two

Today was my Mom's birthday. Though I feel a little sad, it's not an overwhelming feeling.  She died at 89 and never expected to live past 50.  She suffered fourteen or more pneumonias, ten as a child, and recovered from tuberculosis when she was five years old.  Her four year old sister Alice, died of TB on my mother's 5th birthday. Her aged grandfather died while nursing her through TB.  She had a difficult childhood and that is the understatement of the century; it was Dickensian.  She was a private person, often ashamed of her past, yet proud of her tenacity. She lived in a boarding school from the age of 6 to the age of 12; the court placed her there during a custody battle ensuing from her parents unpleasant divorce. The school awarded her their highest honor inthe early 1960s, captioned with "For achieving the most against all odds." She graciously accepted it, but was mortified to recall her roots and face her tenuous beginnings in a public forum.

She hated death and dependency.  She enrolled in medical school in the late forties, extremely unusual for a woman in those days, to assure financial independence and I think to give her the upper hand in her own healthcare.  Skilled in surgery and neurology, she chose psychiatry because the death rate was so much lower.  In the dark days of mid-century medicine she told me the death rate of most neurological cases was over ninety percent; as a psychiatrist she had more control.  My Mom also became an analyst studying all the various forms; no simple Freudian she.   Her practice was primarily focused on children and she cared a great deal about them.  I was proud of her work and her teaching, she was a full professor of Psychiatry, even training one of my current physicians.

Mom was generous with our education and tried to give us the stability to grow into successful adults.  She chose to stay in a place she did not like for the sake of our root systems. Our education cost her the chance to move back to her beloved New York City and the opportunity to travel, though she did finally return to NYU in her seventies to do psychiatric research. Fiercely independent, part of her life-long quest was to assure that her own medical care would be good, and not paid for by us; she got that accomplished too.

Not all of our relationship was candy and flowers.  She had very mixed feelings about me; I reminded her of her mother which made her blood run cold. After dementia took hold she always thought I was her Mom, who was also an artist.  She said I looked like her mother, but clearly,  I  look like my mother.

The photos were taken by my dear friend Nancy.  She came with us to Greece in 1978 and took wonderful pictures of my Mom.  They got to know one another on that trip and that was a good thing, since I love them both. These images are the woman I admired; happy, intellectual, a fierce reader, she typically read the newspaper and a book a night, after a full day at work.  Add a blue glass goblet of iced coffee and a Kool cigarette and that's the Mom I spent my time with, much of it quite amazing.