Today in honour of International Women’s Day, let me take a few minutes to tell you some stuff you may or may not know about my Ma.

One of the ongoing jokes we have is that she frequently asks me to write her eulogy now so she can read it before she dies.  That’s not what this is, but it will likely be ok with her anyway.

My Ma kind of speaks for herself, usually without saying anything.  Hair perfectly done, often outrageous clothing, and the HATS for gods sake the hats.

Ma was born in Berlin Germany about a year after Auschwitz was liberated.  My Bubbie and Zaidy were ‘living’ in a Displaced Persons Camp at the time.  She was officially the first born to my Holocaust-surviving grandparents, though there are a few historic clues floating around indicating that there may have been another child born first that died or was killed during the Holocaust.  Neither my Ma or my Uncle Al can verify this, but my Zaidy came awfully close to telling me once and I’ve been researching it ever since.

In 1948, after my Uncle Al was born, these tiny, impoverished, refugees finally had two North American families volunteer to sponsor them.  One was my Bubbie’s Uncle Sam in Philadelphia, and the other was my Zaidy’s Aunt in Toronto.  Obviously, they were each eager to use their own family, but my Bubbie capitulated to my Zaidy, and we were off to Canada instead of the US.

Talk about a future altering decision – one that I am most grateful for in 2025.

Being raised by Holocaust survivors comes with a unique set of challenges, including mental health issues, difficulties with relationships, and separation issues.  She came up through the Toronto Public School system and went from not knowing a word of English to mastering the language.  But at home only Yiddish was spoken, and to this day she is fluent though unfortunately those who can speak Yiddish are dwindling quickly.

She was an independent, forward thinker even then.  Smart as smart gets.  She left school at the age of 16 because she wanted to marry my Dad and a local dentist office offered her a hygienist gig on Avenue Road near Yorkville.  She married my Dad in 1964 at 18 (he was 19), and they moved to an apartment building at 100 Raglan.

She was barely 21 years old when she had me, and she has never had an issue saying that she had no idea what she was doing.  So, like other mothers in the 60s without a clue, she had my brother Carey 21 months later, my other brother 20 months after that, and my sister Nik 3.5 years after that.  She had a miscarriage at 24 weeks – a girl – between my brother and sister in 1973. For those doing the math, that’s 5 pregnancies, 4 babies – 3 of which were in diapers simultaneously.  She tells the story of how after my youngest brother was born she was standing over him changing his diaper and gently crying, when I toddled up (I was just about 3.5 years old) and asked her why she was crying.  She looked at me and with all of her 25 years she sobbed ‘there’s three of you guys.  That’s a lot of diapers.”

And that, according to Ma, was all I needed to stop shitting myself and start toileting.

I certainly wasn’t aware of it then, but the profound sense of empathy around which me and my sibs were raised was already firmly in place.

I was born in 1967, smack dab in the middle of the Summer of Love.  Seargent Pepper was only a month old, and the Toronto streets were teeming with hippies.  Ma always talked about going to The Riverboat Coffee House to see folk singers play.  The Riverboat was a tiny stage in the basement of a Victorian row house at 134 Yorkville Avenue, graced by the likes of Simon and Garfunkel, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Murray McLauchlan among countless others.  What a scene it must have been.

But my folks were NOT hippies.  Far from it.  Even though they were Baby Boomers and earned the right to engage in the life, they had three of us at the time and that didn’t leave a lot of room for weed or dissent.  Dad was an ambitious accountant that focused on work  and my Ma picked up all the slack.  Like all of it.  And gladly – at the time.

All through my life when people asked about the origin of my name, I would tell them that my parents did a ton of acid in the 60s and that’s why my name is Shael.  Everyone laughed, especially if they knew Ma because that shit was not on the approved list.

My Ma was everything to me when I was growing up.  She kind of had to be because my Dad was never home.  He was obsessed with his work and would be at the office well into the wee hours, come home and crash, then wake up after we left for school.  I almost never saw him, and now as I close in on 60 I can see very clearly how this affected me.  But Ma was dedicated to ensuring that we would still be able to all the things we wanted to do – for me it was theatre and music, for my sibs it was mostly hockey and soccer.  There were 4 of us and only one of her.  And my Dad would still come home and criticize how she did it.

We were all in school in the 70s and 80s as she reached her 30s, and she ached for some sort of life outside our home.  She was this incredible ball of strength, intelligence, and energy with nothing to do but baskets and baskets of laundry every day.  She started taking belly dancing lessons, and that changed her life.  She got so good they hired her to teach, and many an event would happen where she would be asked to costume up and perform.

Now Ma was in her 30s and gorgeous, so there are hilarious stories of prudish women dragging their husbands out of the room when she danced, which I find really funny.  Of all the great belly dancing stories, the best one is still my 18^th birthday where all of my friends were in the basement and asked my Mom to dance.  I started screaming “ARE YOU CRAZY??”.  But nope, 5 minutes later there she was wearing basically nothing and shaking her hips all around my newly adult friends, who were all sitting in a circle, staring, mouths agape, and wreathed in smiles. Straight out of a Mordechai Richler novel. I kid you not.

I was just mortified.  Having a hot mom at any age is not fun, let alone being a teen.

During the late 80s, it was apparent that my Ma was not happy in her marriage.  She tried so hard to hide it and normalize everything, but she was growing more and more resentful of my Dad and his ‘ways’ and it was soon untenable.

Listen – I’m not here to slam my Dad.  I loved him a lot, and I never doubted for a second that he loved me.  But by his own admission, he was a shitty, shitty husband.

They were divorced in 1992 and my Mom married my stepdad Carl, who is odd and wonderful and loving and very involved in our lives even now.  And he DEEPLY loves and cares for my Ma, and really, that’s good enough for me.

From the time he was 14 or so, my brother Carey started exhibiting symptoms of anxiety and depression – two things that were almost completely undiscussed at the time.  As my parent’s marriage disintegrated, it started getting worse.  He moved out to a squalid apartment in the Annex to concentrate fully on medical school.  Soon I would also move out, and eventually Carey and I would move in together, which relaxed me a bit so I could keep a closer eye on him.  But the shadows were very strong.  Stronger than me or even Ma.

Nightly there would be sobbing coming from his room.  I would knock and he would tell me to go away.  Then the suicide attempts started.  We had several close calls, not the least of which was when his friend had to pull him down off the Bloor Viaduct.

During this time, Ma was a pillar of strength though everybody knew she was crumbling inside.  Carey asked her if she would be angry with him if he killed himself.  Even then – even with her child asking her permission to end his life – she still summoned her legendary empathy and selflessness and told him “No.  I will not be angry.  I will miss you a lot though.”

Sharon and I got married in 1994.  Carey was to be my best man.  But he was so overcome with anxiety that he checked himself into the psychiatric unit at Markham-Stouffville Hospital the day before the ceremony.  How we got through that day I have no clue, but if you look at our wedding pictures you can see us smiling but we look very much like deer caught in headlights.  And once again, my Ma was a pillar of strength, propping everyone else up while she was quietly dying inside.

Sometime in the early morning hours of January 28^th 1996, Carey checked into the Emerald Isle Motel on Yonge Street and took an overdose of anti-psychotics and a bottle of vodka.  He was not yet 27.

Mom arrived back from identifying the body of her son in a state of calmness that I have never seen before or since.  She didn’t talk much.  And then suddenly, predictably, it was about everybody else.  But the Ma I had grown up with left us that day – never to return.

Don’t get me wrong.  You all know that she still has all her amazing qualities.  It’s just that her joy was replaced by a bittersweetness that would hit us all differently.

My Dad ran away.  She did the opposite and ran towards us.

Mental health issues are the gift that just keeps on giving to our family – generation to generation.  And all the while, Ma has been relentless in her support and advocacy, even as every incident takes a little more out of her.

My Ma seriously thinks we have forgotten everything about our youth, and that all her love and sacrifices are forgotten in time.  So here I am listing the most important things I learned from my Ma.

KINDNESS & EMPATHY: There was never an event, movie, TV show or book that I read with her that she didn’t highlight for me where the human kindness was, and how much it means to the person receiving it.  I brought that to my business, where PACE won awards for being the one of the Best Workplaces in Canada over and over again.

FEMINISM:  I learned very early on about how our systems are designed to lift men up and keep women down.  She marched in support of Henry Morgentaler pushing us in strollers in the late 60s and early 70s.  She strongly lobbied the government for free childcare way back in the 70s.  She was a stay-at-home mom but fully recognized the need for it for women who chose to work outside the home.  She taught her daughter how to survive in a man’s world, but more importantly she taught her three boys not only to treat women equally, but also HOW to do it.  She stood up to a husband who did not want her to work and did it anyway.  She taught us about “slut-shaming” way before it was a thing and made sure we understood clearly that sex was for BOTH people in the couple, not just for the guy.

SEX-POSITIVE: From a very early age I was taught that sex is fun and not just for procreation.  It influences our moods, our confidence, our self-esteem.  Honestly, I am way more uptight about sex than she is no matter how hard I try – probably some kind of rebellion lol.  Pre-marital sex was strongly advised from a woman who left home at 18 just so society would let her sleep with my Dad whom she adored.

ACCEPTANCE:  Like everybody in her generation, demonizing homosexuality was imprinted on them from birth.  She may not have understood it early on, but she never once said it wasn’t an option, and would discuss it openly if asked.  And when she would say that she would be concerned about us living that life, we knew it was because it was such a hard life and not for any stupid religious reason.  Don’t forget, this was the 70s and early 80s when they were raiding bathhouses.

My sister Nik is gay, and when she came out my Mom did struggle, but it was brief and Nik was always fully accepted regardless, which I think she always knew but that’s for her to comment on.  Again, the struggle was against years of ingrained bias and not a lack of understanding.  She fully recognized that it was her fight, not my sister’s.

LIBERAL IDEALISM: All of the above leads to this.  My Bubbie was an unrelenting Socialist and Mom got that part big time.  The big joke for me is that I was raised with a keen understanding of capitalism from my Dad and my Ma’s social conscience.  She was a union supporter through and through, which I absolutely was not, and there were many arguments at the dinner table around this.  But like anything else, experience changes you, and when I started to really see the tragic results of monetizing EVERYTHING (Hi America!) I started to see the benefits very clearly (though NOT without serious faults).  Her strength of character helped raise my awareness and I’m not sure that she even knows that.

COMMITMENT TO OTHERS:  One of the most memorable things she ever said to me was “Leave this world with a positive effect on at least one person and you’ve been a successful human.  To be remembered for your kindness is better than anything else.”

I owe everything to this brave woman.  Everything.  And I’m saying it now in front of the world because she deserves to hear it now.  If only to remind her how much I love her even after I fuck up.  And I do.

Ma – you are one of the brightest stars this world has ever or will ever produce, and I don’t think you will ever fully grasp that.  Today think about what you brought to this world as a woman and revel in it because you deserve it.

You have added and continue to add positivity and light to this horror-filled shitshow and that’s saying something.  And you are so loved – not just by your family, but for the hundreds of kids you educated and the thousands of people you have affected directly or indirectly.

You by all accounts should be placed on a pedestal this International Women’s Day, so I gladly and gratefully polish it and lift you up.

Now let’s have some chocolate and a cold glass of milk like we used to when I was little.