I come from good people. My childhood home was always open. Friends, family, random strangers my father met on the street would drop in for dinner or stay overnight.
The pattern was always the same. My father would be warm, welcoming and curious about who the people were. He was dedicated to helping them, but my mother would make things happen. He had all the goodwill and kindness in the world, but she could operationalize it. Need a job? My mother would edit your resume and help you find one. Did you have immigration or visa issues? Somehow when she called Immigration Canada, the previously recalcitrant and opaque bureaucracy yielded to her reasoned arguments. She could always find you a doctor, a dentist, a reliable second hand car or a hairdresser.
My parents were often there for people who needed help or refuge. I remember giving up my bedroom more than once because someone needed to stay there. Most notably, there was the young couple who were being threatened by the woman’s ex-boyfriend.
Tony met my mother through a McGill School of Architecture program where foreign students were paired with a practicing architect in the Montreal area. My mother was one of the first female architects in Canada, and my parents took Tony and his fiancée Cecily, an engineering student, out for dinner. A true friendship blossomed. When Cecily’s ex-fiancé, Matthew, showed up and told her that if she married anyone but him, he would kill them both and commit suicide, Cecily and Tony came and hid out at my parents’ place.
Years later, when we reminisced about this strange time, organizing a secret wedding and preventing a murder while the Chinese Cultural Revolution played on the TV, I asked my father why he had done it, perhaps risking our lives to take in relative strangers. “We were the logical people to do it,” he said. “Matthew would have threatened anyone in the Chinese student community and found them immediately. I always think about people who hid Jews from the Nazis. As a decent person, you have to do your best to save a life.”
In the end however, it was my mother who convinced Matthew that it was possible to walk away. How she did it, I will never really know. Cecily and Tony and all their friends met with Matthew at a restaurant in Chinatown and she told him face to face that she would never marry him and that she loved Tony. My parents, and one of my father’s acquaintances, an off duty cop, his weapon under his ski jacket, sat discreetly at a booth in the back as if they were there by chance.
Usually, however, it was less dramatic than this. Kids stayed in the basement, adults too when their lives were complicated. A former housekeeper after her husband cheated on her. Sunday afternoon people would just drop by. My mother had a colleague named Simon, who had been her intern. Simon and his wife, Jeannie, often dropped by on Sunday afternoons with their three little boys. There was an older boy and twins, less than fifteen months apart. The three boys would rampage around the house, my sister and I playing with them while the grown-ups chatted, drank coffee and ate danish.
When I started hanging out in feminist circles, I became friends with Mia, who did abortion counselling at the Montreal Women’s Information and Referral Center. In those days, before legalization, she would counsel women on birth control and refer to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who was beginning his historic campaign to make abortion safe and legal. “Remember,” Mia told me, patting her pregnant belly. “There is no such thing as no abortion. There is only safe and unsafe abortion.”
As I began doing birth control and abortion counselling myself, I was struck by the fear, sadness and desperation of the women I dealt with. They were trapped in coercive and abusive relationships, and by poverty and societal stigma. There were almost no women where having an abortion was an easy or a first choice in my years doing this and none since in the many years of my practice.
With the new laws in the United States, the effects a lack of access to abortion have on women are being highlighted once again. Women are being forced to travel long distances, resort to unsafe and dangerous practices. Women are putting their lives and fertility in danger. Recently, a Native American woman was jailed because she had a miscarriage attributed to her not caring for herself properly by using drugs during pregnancy. Nowhere is any man being held responsible for these unwanted pregnancies.
When my mother died a few years ago, Simon and Jeannie came to the Shiva. “Your parents were so good to us,” Jeannie said. “When the kids were little, your parents’ house was one of the few places we could go and bring our boys. We had so little money in those days, and finding a babysitter who would take three babies was next to impossible.”
“You know,” Jeannie said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “I got pregnant again just after the twins were born. I was so desperate; I thought I might kill myself. Somehow your mother found a doctor. He did a safe abortion for me. I think she saved my life, my marriage and my sanity.”
“No, I didn’t know,” I said. “But I am not surprised.”