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Today is the 20th anniversary of my mother's death, and I'd like to tell you some things about her, because I miss her terribly and I think it's profoundly unfair that most of you never get to know her.
She left home young & taught herself to cook by asking the Italian & Portuguese women who shopped at the grocery store where she worked about the things they were buying, things she'd never seen before, artichokes & eggplants & hard spicy sausages. She was a wonderful cook.
She was unabashedly loud and feminist, didn't shave her legs or armpits, never wore high heels, grew her own medicine in her garden, paid the neighbourhood kids five cents a tadpole to populate the pond she dug herself.
I can still picture her waist-deep in that hole, sweating and grinning. (I inherited her grin -- all teeth.)
She gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves when I hit puberty. She gave me a Blessing Way—a ceremony welcoming me into womanhood—when I had my first period (I still have the clay goddess she made me, marked in reddish brown glaze with the thumb prints of all the women there).
She loved us, my father and my brother and me, fiercely and completely, and she was also deeply dedicated to her friendships with other women, friendships built around mutual networks of care, the exchange of food and clothes and childcare.
She believed in the value of women, the strength of women, the world-building magic of women. Her friends were mad and disabled and poor and racialized, musicians and poets and healers.
In the final years of her life she was also disabled, and taught me how to ask permission before touching someone’s wheelchair, how to hold my arm still and strong to support someone who is in pain.
During the final years of her life, she adopted the pseudonym “the ferocious one-breasted woman.” She would rip up the signs people put on their lawns warning about pesticides, writing notes about the links between pesticides and cancer and signing them with her new moniker.
My mother was abrasive. She was loud. She loved people with all of her heart and her body and her voice. She screamed and cried and fought because the world was always worth that energy, because what she believed in was always worth defending.
And throughout all that fighting, and all that suffering, she maintained a great well of tenderness within her. I am still learning the lessons in radical care that my mother taught me. I carry her lessons with me, always.
