Mother’s Day is always a very conflicting Hallmark holiday for me, although my adopted mother passed more than twenty-five years ago. This was a woman who could not bare children of her own, and did not want to adopt at all, but was talked into it my my adopted dad. He died when I was eleven, and from that point on my mother never missed an opportunity to remind me, almost on a weekly basis, that I was adopted, that I wasn’t “blood”. She was cold and aloof, but those were not by any means her most significant traits.
She was a Wellesley student, and spent her junior year abroad in Germany in 1937. She was a language major, read Goethe in german, and while in Munich at the university, saw Hitler and Goebbels in the biergarten one evening. To hear her tell the story, it was the high point of her life. I suppose that from a strictly historical perspective, I should let that slide, but for a college graduate, she was not only a germanophile, but anti-semitic, anti-hispanic, anti-black, asian, Irish, Catholic and anti-indigenous. She lived in a very tiny world of Pittsburgh nouveau riche industrialists, and I fled her world as soon as I was finished with high school.
Close to the time of her passing, I tracked down my birth mother, which turned out to be another disappointment. I knew that was always a possibility, but it so happened that she was married to a real estate partner of Donald Trump. TFG did what he always does, and bankrupted her husband. With five half siblings scattered across the continent to put distance between them and their mother, I was appointed by my youngest brother, tongue firmly planted in his cheek, to bring the family together. If you’ve ever seen the comic film The Men Who Stared At Goats, you are seeing my mom’s vocation before Trump. She flew LSD for Captain Trips (Al Hubbard) to Stanford Research Institute for sessions monitored by the CIA. She worked directly with Willis Harmon at Stanford. No, I am not making this shit up. I met several of the researchers from SRI at her home in Palm Beach Gardens. Google Willis Harmon for further details, or better still, read Acid Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain. It details the role academic institutions played in CIA sponsored LSD research.
All of my parents, adopted or biological, have passed on. And I am beyond tired of being linked to so many of our cultural whirlpools that suck the life out of whatever critical thinking remains in our poor grey matter. There have been a number of very inspiring diaries about mothers who have made a difference, so I thought that I would attempt to show the flip side, while acknowledging that whereas we may be hostages to fortune, we can erect a stable foundation of context and self-actualization… ah, hell, Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there, good, bad, or mediocre. Bringing us into this world is miracle enough.