nobody had to know about it.
It was my mother whose politics were represented by the
abortion theme: she supported legal birth control and legal
abortion long before these were respectable beliefs. I had
learned these prowoman political positions from her, and I
think of her every time I fight for a woman’s reproductive
rights or write a check to the National Abortion Rights
Action League or Planned Parenthood. Our arguments for the
abortion right now might be more politically sophisticated,
but my mother had the heart and politics of a pioneer - only
I didn’t understand that. These were the reproductive politics
I grew up with, and so I did not know that she had taught me
what I presumed was fair and right.
Eventually she would tel me that the worst mistake she had
made in raising me was in teaching me how to read; she had a
mordant sense of humor that she rarely exercised. The public
library in the newly hatched suburb of Delaware Township,
later to become Cherry Hill, was in the police station or next
door to it; and my mother found herself writing notes giving
me permission to take out Lolita or
she did write those notes each and every time I wanted to read
a book that was forbidden for children. Or I think it’s to her
credit. I don’t know why later she would not let me see the
film A
two are teenaged lovers and Sandra gets pregnant) when I had
already read the book. We had a screaming match that lasted
several days. She won, of course. It was the sheer exercise of
parental authority that gave her the victory, and I despised her
for not being able to win the argument on the merits. She’d
blow up at my curiosity or precociousness, and it seemed to
come out of nowhere to me. What she hated wasn’t what I
read or the movies I saw but what I started writing, because
sixth grade was the beginning of writing my own poems.
They’d be small and imitative, but they were piss-perfect,
in-your-face acts of rebellion. The adults could keep lying, but
I wouldn’t. My mother’s real failure was in telling me not to
lie. I had a literalist sense of the meaning of the admonition.
I was a “kike” and would continue to be one: never once have
I sung “Silent Night” nor will I. I recognized that there were
a lot of ways of lying, and pretending that Christmas and Easter
were secular holidays was a big lie, not a small one. Whether
the issue was segregation or abortion, I, the sixth-grader, was
going to deal with it, and my vehicle was going to be truth:
not a global, self-deluded truth, not a truth that only I knew
and that I wanted other people to follow, but the truth that
came from not lying. Like “do no harm, ” not lying is a big one,
