Temecula, CA
I have been thinking about my mother a lot through this journey, ever since Cia Blake, one of my hosts in Placitas last month, snapped a candid photo of me that shows me with laughter. That’s because the instant I saw it, I was reminded of a photo of my mother in a similar pose.
Edith Plotnick Gerson Ravinsky, who died thirty-nine years ago tomorrow, would never have understood this journey I’m on, nor much of the life I have lived since her passing. She would have worried incessantly for my well-being, as mothers do, yet she would never have tried to persuade me to change course.
My mother was the first person I came out to, weeks before my twenty-first birthday. We had always been close, she had always known and welcomed my friends and, most important, I still lived at home and knew that any attempt to hide my activities would arouse suspicion and damage our relationship.
She said nothing in the moment after I broke the news then, calling on the “weak/absent father, dominant mother” school of gay origins, guiltily declared herself totally responsible for how I had turned out and strongly urged me to see the psychiatrist who had counseled her through my sister’s rebellious teen years.
By then, I had read enough horror stories about intolerant psychiatrists (this was 1975) that I wasn’t prepared to risk it. “If it’s an issue for you,” I replied from some unexpected well of courage, “then maybe you should go.”
To her credit, she did — whether once or multiple times, I never knew. Yet over time, she seemed to become more relaxed about my sexual orientation.
For all her constant apprehension about my safety and well-being, my mother always supported my choices, even those she didn’t understand...and there were an increasing number of those — from coming out as a gay man to being politically public about my homosexuality, and from quitting a secure job to freelance full-time to quitting Montreal for Toronto. As well, my non-religious spirituality would likely have baffled her.
Though she would have been concerned about me through every mile of this Yellow Brick Road journey — through every mile of all my Fool-ish leap-of-faith journeys — she would have cheered me on through each of those miles. Silently, she would have wished I had never embarked on any of them and, equally silently, she would have prayed that I would come to my senses and get the hell off the road. But she would never have shared those wishes and prayer with me.
For all her fears on my account, my mother was profoundly courageous. She had to be: She was a single working mom at a time when they were still rarities, forced by my father’s illness to be de facto head of the family for some years before he died. Growing up, I knew money was tight. At the same time, we never lacked for anything.
I don’t know how she did it, but she never lost her sense of humor. Whenever I post something honoring her birth (she would have been 102 in May) or her death, one cousin or another inevitably posts a comment, remembering how much she laughed and how infectious was her laughter.
The last thing I said to her, hours before she died in a Montreal hospital bed, was, “I just want you to know that you have been the best mother anyone ever could have and I love you very much.”
I don’t know whether she heard me. I hope she did, because although she might not have “gotten” this journey, it’s her legacy that has freed me to make it.
Preorder your signed copy of Hello, Yellow Brick Road! The Fool’s Journey Continues, my memoir of this journey (which will also include previously unpublished material). And read more inspiring stories about my mother in Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir.
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