This is the only photograph of my mother and I that I have, the only photograph that exists of me as a child, it hangs on the wall in my study, I look at it almost every day and wonder at the magic and mystery and heartbreak and hard lessons of life.  This photo tells me that my mother and I loved one another, and that the little boy in that photography was happy and at peace, that was the person he was meant to be. That has been important to me, many times. Last night, dancing with Maria at the Blues Dance at the Hubbard Hall Opera House, one of the singers dedicated the song the band was playing to all of the beautiful women of the world, and I thought of my mother, her birth name was Eva, everyone called her Eve.

Silently, I dedicated our dance to her, and wished one more time that I had gone to see her and talk to her before she died, I had not talked to her for years.

She grew up in a poor immigrant neighborhood of Providence, R.I., in a Yiddish-speaking house, the principal of her school called her mother and begged that Eva, who he said was the brightest student he had ever seen in his school, apply to college. No, said my grandmother, she had no need of college, she would marry and have children. Eva got a job as the principal’s secretary and met my father, who was running an orphanage across the street. They got married, she had those children, she stepped into the life my grandmother chose for her, and my mother was never happy again. It was not the life she wanted. She told me again and again the story of the principal, she never stopped wondering what her life might have been like had her mother listened. She told me that I was brilliant, creative, gifted, she told me I could be anything I wanted, and that she loved me more than anything else on the earth.

She loved me too much, as it happened, and in too many of the wrong ways. She became angry, needy, vengeful. She  tried to break out of her life and her unhappy marriage again and again – she ran a classy gift shop, she managed an art gallery, she was hostess at a hip vegetarian restaurant. But she could never stick with those things, those were always interrupted or cut short, she blamed my father, but I think in those times she was really thwarted by the suffocating notions of how she and other women were expected to live.

She drove her husband and her children nearly mad in so many different ways. She fought with my father, loudly and bitterly, every day of her life. She raged in fury at him, day after day.  There were never two people more poorly suited to one another, and they could never accept that find other ways to live, they could only rage and storm at one another while their children cowered and fled their house.

The hard lessons of life are often learned later, the young are not supposed to be wise, only creative and daring. I am still not wise, but wiser. I understand my remarkable mother much better now. She was a victim of her times, a prisoner of the way the world treated women, of the boxes they were stuffed into, of the boundaries of their lives that were, and in some ways, still are defined by men. She always blamed my father for her unrequited life, she always blamed men for her broken heart, her stifled self, the creative spark inside of her that never got to live or be free.

There was a lot of mental illness in my mother’s family, severe depression and anxiety, it was never recognized or discussed, but it was always there, always in the air. I think she suffered terribly from it. When I begged her doctor, a man, to consider some medication for her, he laughed at me and said, “oh, your mother is a tough girl, she can handle things.” I had no idea what this kind of illness was or how to see it, it was all over my family, I always fought it without every knowing what it was. Until I learned.

“Why didn’t I leave?,” she would ask me, “why could I never break out, or get away?” It was the wrong question to ask a little boy, it was frightening and disturbing to hear her fury at my father, but she had nowhere else to turn, she turned to me,  the one she loved, her final hope, I think. She had entered into a loveless marriage and in keeping with the times, she stuck with it, she never really felt she had a choice.

My mother never quit on life, to the end she was fighting to find herself, to find love, to free the creative spirit trapped inside of her, it only broke out now and again, and it was always a beautiful thing to see. it was the only time I saw her happy.  I could not fill the holes in her life, I could not be for her what she needed. My mother was creative in every part of her life that she could be creative in: clothes, cooking, shopping for antiques, spotting classy things, making money stretch, encouraging me every day to write and tell my stories, all through our awful troubles with one another. Whenever I wrote anything – a newspaper story, a book, a poem, she was the first person to call me up and tell me how wonderful it was, how gifted I was, how proud she was of me. I see now that she put all of her hopes and dreams for herself onto me.

At the end, I could not bear to see her or be with her, it simply was too painful for me to see what had become of her and to struggle with her demands on me, and I do  not say that in anger or pride. I kept her away from my daughter, from my family, I felt I had to protect them from what my sister and I had endured. Maybe I was right. I have stopped beating myself up about it, mostly. When I think of my mother, I look at the photograph she left for me before she died, she made sure it would find it’s way to me. She sent it without any comment, but then, there was no need of any comment.

I look at the photograph, and I tell her that I love her. You can’t change the past, you can only have a more meaningful present. When Maria and I fell in love, we drove to the cemetery where my mother was buried – it was the first time I had seen the tombstone, I did not go to the funeral  – and I got out and introduced Maria to her, and I told her that I was happy and has found love, and I thanked her for all of the encouragement she had given me, I told her I know she did her best, she did not have the tools or support to deal with her life. Her oldest friend told me my mother belonged in another time, the world changed too late for her.

I am happy to tell you, I told her in that crowded old Jewish cemetery,  that I did become a writer, I have made a living doing creative work my whole life, just as you hoped, you are very much a part of that, I told her, I thank you and love you for it. I told her I loved her and that I had learned from her and her life to make sure to encourage the woman I loved, to make sure she got to live her life, not to regret it. I will never be the man who held my wife back, who kept her from her life.

That, I said, was such a powerful lesson, and I am grateful to have learned it. I dedicate this day to you, mother, you should have gone to college, you should have held out for a man who got you and appreciated you,  you are one of the beautiful women.  I wish you could have lived the life you were meant to live, just as you fought so hard and in your own way for the boy in the photograph to live his.