A Few Thoughts Post-Mother’s Day:

We could mark days like Mother’s Day taking a cue from the “Everything Everywhere All At Once” movie where the “mother” and “daughter” play at least three different roles: (1) one role is traditional and biological—and somewhat homophobic; (2) another is how the roles get reversed, a lesson we learn when the “mother” gets older, and we need to take care of her; and (3) another represents the cosmic opposites of “meaning” and “no meaning” that illustrate how Gaia (Γαῖα) is the ancestral mother of all life, death and new creation.

Isn’t it funny that the Chinese mother’s name is so American and banal (Evelyn) and her lesbian daughter (who also stands for the nihilistic part of the dance of opposites) is named JOY.

So while I am not a daughter, I am a male who, like all men, must come to terms with the debt he owes to the women of his life, if the male is destined to be less toxic than he needs to be, and more joyful.

Let’s start with my own mother. She could be extremely stereotypical. She could epitomize the Jewish mother who gives too much and worries too much and who, if she has a gay son, makes him too much into a friend. There is the other role, which she called her “witchery,” that she knew exactly what was going on in  the larger zeitgeist in some sixth sense. The neurotic Jewish mother was oddly enough fairly conservative in her world views. But the Old Wise Woman was extremely to the left, even in those days.

Penny was the first person in our large extended family that grew appalled at the Vietnam War. During anti-war marches down the illustrious Grand Concourse on which we lived, she would join the hippies. She argued vociferously with her own parents about how the war was unjust in Yiddish. She joined the school board and she voted Democratic and cried when Eugene McCarthy lost.

The first (stereotypical) mother did not prefer me being gay, but the second one would say how proud she was and speak in a loud voice in front of her friends at the Assisted Living Nursing Home that she thought that “one of the reasons your father was so hard on you was, I believe, he was a closeted gay.” That was the first time in my entire life I asked her to “stash still.”

I also don’t remember the word “abortion” being used the year after my Bar Mitzvah, the year of Roe V Wade, but she never wavered in the fundamental value that men had no right to tell a woman what to do what was going in her body.

As she gets older, I can see how easily she seems to be slipping ever-so-gently into the aspect of her that is Gaia. When I called her for Mother’s Day, she said she had had a few bad days when her phone didn’t work and she couldn’t call me. But when my brother came to fix her phone, she is all better now, and joyful beyond measure to hear my voice. She could care less about the flowers I sent in a flurry of guilt that I had not yet sent any money (which she doesn’t spend anyway because she lives in an Assisted Living Home). All she cared about was to say hello for a few cherished moments.

After I hung up, I had occasion to think about some other “mothers,” in a more symbolic sense.

My cousin Michele just had a birthday in which she turned 70, and she is not just a mother but a grandmother. Yet, so ever-youthful. When I was a shy kid growing up in the Bronx, Michele became a kind of mentor-sister-friend. She was 7 years older than me. She introduced me to the world of books when she worked at Random House and to the Bach piano. We went to Manhattan, and to the theatre. She was the first person in my life to whom I came out. I remember how she, like my mother, rebelled against the Vietnam War. She, with the person who would become her husband, was a quintessential hippie. I sometimes think that when God split a person off from the integrated whole, she and I came from the same piece, one so-called masculine, the other so-called feminine. She is a lawyer who fights for the rights of children. She is a hero to many and a person of great humor and boundless joy.

Joy and I

Speaking of Joy, I should mention my former boss for the last thirty years, Dr. Joy Turek, who was the director of the Master of Arts Program in Clinical Psychology at Antioch. She is also heterosexual. It was her idea to answer the terrible problem facing LGBTQ clients, which is that they didn’t have therapist trained in how to treat them. “We should start an LGBT Specialization,” she said to me in the early 2000s, after the American Psychological Association came out with Guidelines for how clinicians should treat their queer clients with a different lens and aptitude. “And you should run it,” she averred. I know it is a bit controversial to say that she and I “birthed” that LGBT Specialization, the first of the kind in the country (and still the only) into a major success story, also birthing Colors LGBTQ Youth Clinic. Joy is one of the unsung heroes of the LGBTQ wellness movement and she is very little attached to too much these days regarding “credit,” but she deserves it.

It’s also worth mentioning my brother’s wife, Leslie. I probably talk more to her than I do to my brother, and I love my brother almost more than anyone on the face of the earth, because she reminds me so much of these Jewish women whose hearts are a million years old and with whom I feel a sublime connection. Leslie helped save my mother’s life when Penny had the stroke on Thanksgiving Day about 8 years ago, when Leslie called and realized that somewhat wasn’t right when my mother didn’t pick up. Leslie then  found for us The Bristal Assisted Living Home in Lynbrook nearby where she and Daniel and there angel-hearted daughter Hannah live and watch over Penny.

And then there is the late-Sandra Golvin, the lesbian-centered psychologist who helped me and Joy frame how to run the LGBT Specialization. Sandra, along with myself, Robin Podolsky and Luis Alfaro, performed together Queer Rites in Franklin Furnace in 1994 and she also herself became a psychotherapist. You can find her last talk on You Tube. The successful partner in a law-firm turned performance artist, She was funny, wise, Sapphic, Jewish, intellectual, and a healer of the planet. I often imagine her in her Gaia throne watching over what we are doing, saying to us, the children of a terribly early society, "Of All The Places I Could Be, I Just Want To Be Here With You."

She is the voice of patience, guidance, acceptance and presence. We need that voice now more than ever.

I could hear her telling the movie’s writers to write this: “You Are Not Unlovable. There Is Always Something To Love. Even In A Stupid, Stupid Universe Where We Have Hot Dogs For Fingers, We Get Very Good With Our Feet.”

Thank you for the reminder.

-Dr.Doug