“Oh come on, she’s already seen everything!”
This wasn’t my first Spike Lee joint.
Even though I kind of hoped we’d get turned away and be forced to see a more age-appropriate movie, I admired the way Mom wouldn’t accept things that didn’t make sense to her. It didn’t matter that she was married to a judge; she saw rules as an optional set of guidelines. And although her public pushback would sometimes embarrass me, it also seeded a sense of pride. I grew up knowing it was okay to challenge the status quo, to do things differently.
As usual, Mom wore the attendant down and we got into the movie. I recall it being a bit of a snooze. I guess an artful examination of jazz, sex, and salvation wasn’t really my thing back then.
* * *
—
MY INTERESTS VEERED more toward puzzles. I loved riddles and logic games. My teachers thought I might even become a mathematician. But if there was one game that defined me, it was chess. (One of the best parts about going to Cherrywood was that playing chess counted as math.) I started competing in tournaments when I was ten, and would regularly spend my weekends in hotel conference rooms playing with nerdy boys. I was consistently ranked fourth in Ontario in my age group.
What I liked most about chess was that chance had nothing to do with it. No need for lucky cards or dice or troll dolls. It was up to me to use everything in my arsenal—logic, calculation, memory, even psychology. Mom would remark on how I never got flustered when I was down. “You don’t give up. You become even more focused,” she’d say with great admiration. I learned to rely on my strategic-thinking skills on and off the board, believing I could think my way out of any problem. In our family, if I argued my case well enough, I could get whatever I wanted. I remember saying to my parents, “If you guys can have coffee in the morning for your caffeine, I can have a Coke.” For some reason, that one worked. “You’re going to make a fine lawyer one day” was a familiar refrain.
When we were young, Josh and I had different interests and led pretty separate lives. It would be years before we started to connect as friends and not just siblings. Back then he spent most of his time in his room writing Leonard Cohen–esque songs. I may have felt like an outsider, but Josh truly was one. He wasn’t into school or sports or anything else most boys his age were into. He was always working away on an intricate Plasticine city he’d created named Chronic. He spent years painstakingly constructing it, even using a pin to poke windows into the miniature skyscrapers and mapping out each distinct neighbourhood on graph paper.
Mom spent most of her time at home reading. I can still picture her sitting in the living room by the fireplace, a book in one hand and a pink Nat Sherman Fantasia in the other. She wouldn’t even inhale—the thin, pastel-coloured cigarettes with gold filters were just props in her one-woman performance of “I am a Parisian.” She’d put on one of her French records—Serge Gainsbourg or Edith Piaf—and escape into her French fantasy world. I can still hear Georges Moustaki singing “Ma Liberté.” She played that one a lot.
At thirteen Josh moved into the basement and Mom moved into his bedroom. “A woman must have a room of her own,” she explained, citing Virginia Woolf. She’d close the door and tap away on the keyboard of her hulking IBM computer. She became a member of a writers’ organization called Sisters in Crime and even published a few short stories over the years—murder mysteries that usually involved the death of a lawyer or judge. I suppose she was letting off some steam.
* * *
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I WAS TEN when Mom and Teddy split up, after years of bickering (mostly about who was “right”). They were caught in a power struggle. Mom would complain that Teddy didn’t do enough housework. Teddy would complain that Mom woke him up in the middle of the night too many times, angrily reading him passages from Ms. magazine. I don’t think either of them were remarkably mature, but I think the bigger truth was that Mom felt trapped, that she was losing herself in the marriage. She needed time and space to become the person she wanted to be. I know they felt guilty about getting a divorce. That year, I got a Game Boy for Hanukkah.
Mom moved into a bachelor pad she’d inherited from a fellow divorcé. It had one tiny spare room, which became my room, but I mostly chose to stay with Teddy and Josh. The house offered me stability and consistency that was hard to find elsewhere.
When I did stay with Mom, it was just us. She was now living on only her teacher’s salary, but we’d still go out to restaurants in the neighbourhood. At home we did ear-candling treatments for each other and played a card game that featured feminist writers like Louisa May Alcott, Phillis Wheatley, and Emily Dickinson (Gertrude Stein was the wild card). While I’d be focused on collecting sets of four, Mom would tell me about her literary heroines: “Little Women is really the story of Louisa and her family. Louisa was Jo…” Often we’d just talk. More than anything else, talking was our thing. To this day there’s no one in the world I’ve ever had an easier time talking to.
What I liked most about Mom’s new place was that we didn’t have to keep kosher. For breakfast I’d often heat up a can of Chunky clam chowder, although most mornings Mom would go out to the corner and bring me back McDonald’s Hotcakes. She’d plop the golden Styrofoam container down on the kitchen table and sing “Mommy made breakfast!”
Meanwhile, back at the house, Teddy was struggling to get dinner on the table. Pizza Pizza was basically on speed dial; they even began sending us a present for every hundred pizzas we ordered. (Once we received two gifts in one year: a Pizza Pizza–branded telephone and, bizarrely, a pair of faux pearl earrings.)
Like Mom, Teddy had never had great role modelling for how to be an emotionally available parent. He was the youngest in his family—his brother and sister were ten and fifteen years older, respectively—and by the time he came along, his folks were done with parenting. When Teddy was four, his mother told him to run across the street to the neighbourhood school. “Tell them you’re five,” she instructed. He’d known neglect well.
To most people’s surprise, the divorce wasn’t initially that distressing for me. It only really started to hit me once my parents began dating. Just as I was entering adolescence, the two of them began behaving like full-blown teenagers. Mom fell madly in love with a man who was about to move to Albany to be the director of the New York State Museum. She took a sabbatical to study holistic ways of teaching and began a long-distance relationship with him, regularly leaving town for weeks at a time. Meanwhile Teddy began frequenting Jewish singles events, and suddenly there wasn’t time for mini golf or bowling with me anymore. He’d leave me at home with Josh, who by then had become a bit of a wild sixteen-year-old.
When the opportunity presented itself, Josh would throw big parties; teenagers from different high schools across the city would turn up at our house. Josh would tell me I could come to his party as long as I didn’t rat him out. He didn’t have much of a choice—I lived there—but I agreed to his terms anyway. It was an opportunity to make a few bucks. While the Cure and R.E.M. blasted from the stereo, I’d covertly move around the house siphoning bottles of booze and pinching half-smoked cigarettes from unsuspecting teenagers, selling them on the sly to partygoers in other rooms. “Watch out for Josh’s little sister!” they’d warn one another (by then I’d let my hair grow out so that people would stop calling me a boy). Teddy would inevitably come home to the debris and destruction left by a hundred teenagers, his bottles of Russian vodka refilled with water.
Teddy felt as though he was losing control and decided to start implementing rules. He tried to make Josh adhere to a curfew. He attempted to get me to call him “Dad.” He tried his hardest to domesticate us, but it was too late—we’d already been raised by wolves.
I missed Mom like crazy when she was out of town. It was hard being without her at the house. Teddy, Josh, and I were fighting all the time. I would often call her crying, pleading with her to c
ome home. She’d listen to me and lovingly calm me down, but she wasn’t about to get in the car and drive back. She explained to me how important it was for her to have a full life of her own. “I’m not just a mother,” she would tell me. “I need passionate love too.”
As gross as it was to hear her say that, I understood that Mom had her own needs. I tried my best to respect her wishes, but there were times when I needed her to be there for me and she wasn’t. It was Teddy who had to get me kitted out when I got my first period. He ran out to the drugstore and then presented me with a basket of Love’s Baby Soft products and a box of inch-thick pads. I was horrified. It would’ve been embarrassing enough for any thirteen-year-old girl to have to deal with this kind of thing with her dad, but it was particularly uncomfortable for me, considering I felt like a boy and didn’t even want to acknowledge my bodily changes in the first place. It was also Teddy who had to take me bra shopping for the first time. The two of us couldn’t have been a more reluctant duo as we set out for the mall together in search of the undergarment that would not be named. When the saleswoman asked me what I was looking for, I couldn’t even say the word. “I need something to wear under my baseball jersey,” I mumbled.
* * *
—
IT WAS DURING those three and a half years while Mom lived part-time in Albany that her journey of self-discovery really took off. The northeastern United States is a hotbed of spiritual retreat centres. Mom began frequenting New Age havens like Kripalu, Omega Center, Zen Mountain Monastery, Insight Meditation Society, and Elat Chayyim, a Jewish renewal retreat in the Catskills. (There, she told me, they’d sit in a circle, with their index fingers touching their thumbs, and chant “Shal-Ommm, Shal-Ommm.”) She often slept in dorm rooms and chopped vegetables alongside college students in exchange for what would otherwise be a thousand-dollar yoga vacation. Mom didn’t need a large income in order to have a large life.
Her retreats gave her time and space to work out her issues. She still had a lot of childhood resentment, even though by then she was getting along well enough with her mother. She was proud that she’d taught her mother to treat her more respectfully. “It’s important to set boundaries,” Mom told me. Before her father died, he’d apologized to her in his Polish-Jewish accent for having not acknowledged her feelings enough. I know that meant a lot to her. But still, Mom was desperate to free herself from her family patterns. She would write unsent letters to her parents as well as responses from the perspective of her ideal mother or father.
I was happy that Mom was working out her shit, but sometimes I felt like I had to compete with her inner child. My heart would break every time she drove off in her cappuccino-coloured Honda with its ONE NUCLEAR BOMB CAN RUIN YOUR WHOLE DAY bumper sticker. I spent a lot of time crying on my own, until one day I decided I wouldn’t cry anymore. I’m not sure if it was due to my natural temperament, my gender identity, or my parents not being fully attuned to my emotional world, but I resolved to toughen up and be a little man. Throughout junior high, I kept a busy schedule with sports and chess. I was on all my school’s sports teams, including the boys’ hockey team, and played competitive hockey, soccer, and softball on the side. I was the city’s school chess champion two years running.
It was also in junior high that I experimented with being a girl, albeit only part-time. I was invited to friends’ Bar and Bat Mitzvahs almost every weekend and could no longer get away with wearing pants to shul. When Saturday rolled around, I’d trade in my jeans and T-shirts for pantyhose and a dress. My friend Jane helped me pick out girl party attire at the mall and taught me about shaving my legs. My friend Sarah gave me a nudge when she’d catch me manspreading in a skirt in synagogue. Being a girl didn’t come naturally to me, but I passed well enough. Boys liked me, and I even had crushes on them. Though, looking back, I think my attraction was probably more about me wanting to be one of them (or because at that age they looked like cute little baby dykes, with their short hair and smooth cheeks, like little Justin Biebers).
Meanwhile, Josh was deeply unhappy with his life. He was disinterested in school, and he and Teddy were at each other’s throats. So one time when Mom was heading off to New York state, she brought Josh along and dropped him off at a Sufi commune near Albany. Josh stayed at the Abode of the Message for several months doing a work exchange. He couldn’t have been happier to move out, to start a life of his own.
Mom brought me along with her to Albany a couple of times, too. On our last trip there she took me hiking in the Adirondacks. We climbed a steep, rocky trail up Crane Mountain, scrambling our way to the summit. We both felt a great sense of accomplishment as we looked out over the forest-covered mountains below. Mom was proud that she’d taken me, at thirteen, hiking up a three-thousand-plus-foot mountain. “When I was thirteen my mother took me discount shopping for our bonding time,” she told me. On the way down we came to a large pristine pond where we decided to take a break, sitting next to each other on a giant boulder in the shade. Mom pulled out a watercolour set along with some paper. Together, both painting quietly, we stared out at the glistening water and tall beech trees in the distance. It was a serene moment we would often look back on fondly.
A couple of days later Mom broke up with her boyfriend. She’d felt increasingly torn between being with him and being with me in Toronto. I vividly remember seeing her break down in tears as we got in the car to drive home. She was always so conscious never to lean on me that she rarely showed any vulnerability around me at all. Years later, Mom would admit that although she’d wanted a great love, she was scared. “I had a strong feeling that if I married him, I would be happy for a year and miserable for the rest of my life.”
When I was fourteen, I decided to live with Mom full-time. Teddy had sold the house, and I felt displaced. By then Mom had moved into the Hemingway. She made a concerted effort to make me feel welcome. This time, she gave me the bigger room.
It was during this period, in the mid-90s, that Mom’s alternative lifestyle began to rub off on me. I went to yoga classes with her and wore a crystal aromatherapy necklace she’d given me as a gift. She took me on road trips to Buddhist monasteries and silent meditation retreats. In the car, we’d take turns listening to her folk music (Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, the Stone Poneys with Linda Ronstadt) and my Ani DiFranco, Tracy Chapman, and Indigo Girls tapes. We visited the Kushi Institute for Macrobiotics in Massachusetts, where we sipped twig tea and learned how to cut a carrot properly (from tip to stem) so as not to kill its life force. My teenage curiosity and idealism latched onto these alternative doctrines. I was drawn to the rules and guidance they provided.
But for Mom, soul searching was more than just a teenage phase. She was always trying out something new. Trance dancing, magnets, meridian tapping, past-life regression therapy, colour therapy, cranial sacral therapy, chakras, crystals, rolfing, reiki—she would embrace each fad with the same enthusiastic yet noncommittal curiosity every time. Her perspective was, Why not try everything? It doesn’t hurt, and it might lead to unexpected wisdom. And hey, if they kept her looking younger, all the better! She regularly did these Tibetan exercises called “The Fountain of Youth,” where she’d spin around with her arms outstretched. (Mom said that when she first saw “spinning” classes pop up in New York City, she mistakenly thought her exercises were taking off.) I saw the marvel in her New Age dalliances, but I definitely took them with a big grain of Himalayan salt.
For Mom, spirituality was like a buffet where she was free to pick and choose what she wanted—she could create her own narrative blend that suited her personality and her needs. It was all about knowing herself better, being able to laugh more about her frailties, and becoming as real as possible. As a feminist, she wanted to own her spirituality without giving herself over to dogmatic ideas or practices.
Mom was a badass Buddhist. Of course, she believed that rules were optional, even the ones the yogis wrote. Her Four Noble Truths
were coffee, wine, reading, and talking, or what Buddha might call “contraband.” When she was supposed to be staying silent on her meditation retreats, she’d leave me hushed, long-winded voicemail messages: “Hi darling, I’m not supposed to be talking, but I just wanted to let you know I’m okay. Um, it’s so weird to be speaking…” She would smuggle in novels and escape to nearby villages to get The New York Times and a cappuccino. When she did a work exchange at Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in the south of France, she led a group of fellow volunteers through the surrounding vineyards on a wine-tasting tour. “I was like the pied piper,” she told me. “They all followed!”
* * *
—
ON MY SEVENTEENTH birthday I set out on my own journey of self-discovery. My best friend Syd had lent me her copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Essentially a recipe for teenage anarchy, the book became our bible. The Good News? Rather than being confined to classroom walls, teens could reclaim their natural ability to teach themselves by following their own curiosity and having real-world experiences. I had seen the light! After reading a few more books on “unschooling,” I knew what I had to do.
That January, I finished my last exam of the semester and flew to San Francisco. There, Syd and I hung out with an older anarchist couple we’d met who took us around to protests with their giant papier-mâché puppets. Like Mom, I learned to live large on not much. We couch-surfed at intentional communities in Santa Cruz and Palo Alto and travelled up the west coast of the U.S. on a backpacker bus called the Green Tortoise. We hitchhiked across B.C., working on organic farms in return for accommodation and three wholesome meals a day. As a city kid, it blew my mind to see what broccoli looked like in its natural habitat.
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