In several of these stories I have mentioned in passing both my biological mother, Vera Marie Lubinetzky Robinson, and my “Brazilian mother,” Amelia Toledo. There was also a third mother mothering me through my early and mid-30s, my New York Jewish mother Rose Warren. The book I really should have written would have been titled “My Three Mothers” – I only wish I had interviewed them more thoroughly and recorded more of their stories while they were still alive. In 1994, these three exceptional women were very much alive and guiding me through the passage from early adulthood to finding my generative life purpose. Although they deserve an entire book, what I offer here is a tiny snapshot of my three mothers through the lens of the influence each of them had on the person I was becoming at that time.
Let me introduce them in the order in which we met.
Vera
Frank and Vera liked to shock people by saying they met behind the locked doors of a psychiatric ward. The statement was 100% true, but my parents were leaving out the bit about them being students in graduate school at the time, my father training as a psychiatric social worker and my mother as a psychiatric nurse. I prefer to think of them as change agents and entrepreneurs, reinventing and risk-taking in their subsequent professions of mental health, nursing, and higher education.
My parents were shaped by the deprivations, prejudices endured, and traumas of their childhoods, and by the way in which their horizons and perspectives were opened during their respective service overseas during World War II. They passed to their children the values of intellectual curiosity and a liberal education; a commitment to what we would now call diversity, equity and inclusion; and a dedication to teaching and healing. They brought that lens to every job and institution in which they worked.
Vera modeled for me the life of a professional woman who never compromised her responsibilities as a mother. She also modeled for me the danger in trying to fulfill all the duties of a conventionally defined wife and mother while having increasingly demanding professional roles, periodically wearing herself down physically to the point where she would end up hospitalized. Learning to say no and to ask for help were hard lessons for her. Vera also was a valued and loyal friend to other highly capable women. She and two of those friends returned to graduate school together in their 50s, supporting one another to get their doctorates so they could qualify for the academic deanships they deserved.
Momʻs dissertation topic, Humor in the Health Professions, opened a new professional door for her when it was published as a book. She became “the humor lady” in demand for consultation and nursing school commencement addresses. As Dean of the Cal State-Fullerton School of Nursing, she also integrated and promoted holistic approaches to medicine.
Central Park, 1994. Carman, Vera, Carman’s lady friend Billielee and me.
Although as a first-generation college graduate and child of the Great Depression, she worried about my financial security as I left Wall Street, it would be hard for her not to recognize her own aspirations and mold-breaking as inspiration for my personal growth and search for professional satisfaction more resonant with the “family business” of intellectual innovation, teaching, mentoring and healing. Vera continued to offer unconditional love and support for my choices, as a mother and as a friend, through 1994 and as she would until the end of her life.
Rose
To introduce second mother Rose Warren into the narrative, I have to jump back 15 years to 1979, another year of big changes for me. That year I left my job as a budget analyst with the Colorado State Legislature for graduate school, first buying a Victorian house in need of renovation and moving into it with the man who would become my husband five years later. I planned to contribute to Coloradoʻs energy future by getting a graduate degree in mineral economics at Colorado School of Mines.
The fellowship I had from the Colorado Energy Research Institute required me to work for them and I was assigned to a project headed by Peter Warren. Peter was a mathematician and administrator on leave from the University of Denver to serve as Director of Research and Policy Planning. Peterʻs professional reputation was stellar; it was the press about him as one of Denverʻs most eligible bachelors (following his divorce from his first wife) that made me so judgmental. Co-founder of the Denver International Film Festival, on the board of Colorado Contemporary Dance, something about extensive collections of butterflies and shells, I had the impression he was rather full of himself. Pretty sure he saw me as an impertinent imposition.
Both of us reacted with exaggerated eyerolling and a firm “no way.” I readily offer my gratitude to CERI Director Martin Robbins for his refusal to take no for an answer, for knowing that Peter and I would be great research partners and possibly suspecting we might become devoted friends. Four years later I moved to New York City to take a promotion offered me by Mobil Oil and Peter insisted I also befriend his mother, whom by then I had met on several occasions. I knew he was right, I would need a mentor mother figure to navigate the City. I rented an apartment in the Kips Bay Towers designed by I.M. Pei because it was walking distance to work and right across the street from Rose Warrenʻs rent-controlled apartment.
The apple did not fall far from the tree. Without the arts education I had begun receiving from my BFF Elizabeth Schlosser followed by the advanced degree acquired on Tuesdays with Rose, I doubt “Buy art from friends who are artists” would have made my Four Things list. Peterʻs highly developed appreciation for visual and performing arts came from this maternal source, and was reflected in the love of his life, his fabulous second wife Katharine Smith-Warren, a curator, art advisor and artist.
Rose was born in Brooklyn at a time when electric lights had not yet replaced gas street lamps, horse buggies still traversed the bridge to Manhattan, and her brother fainted the first time he heard his uncleʻs voice on a telephone. Like me, she raced through high school and college. She married a man who flew for Bill Lear, and told tales of landing in a farmerʻs field on cross-country flights so the plane could be refueled. She chose a career in the fashion industry, traveling to Europe and Russia by passenger ship and train. She would say things like “My friend Merce is at the Joyce next week, we should go.” Of course, she was old friends with the pioneers of modern dance. If she wanted to see a blockbuster show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the kind where you buy your ticket in advance and then stand for two hours in line to get in, we would simply walk to the front of the line with our tickets in hand. The security person would take one look at her high cheekbones and elegantly upswept hair and usher us inside, no questions asked.
Rose Warren, her son Peter and daughter-in-law Katharine, Christmas 1989.
Rose was also an independent thinker, a rebel. During this period when I was between marriages and complained of my biological clock ticking, she suggested that I had plenty of money to hire a nanny and should consider one of these boyfriends as a sperm donor (the Bank was not quite ready for single mothers of illegitimate children and I was not quite ready to test that barrier). Raised with the kosher Jewish prohibitions against eating pork and shellfish, she relished bacon and insisted that her birthday meal consist exclusively of caviar on pumpernickel toast accompanied by real French champagne. Luckily her birthday fell on December 21st, allowing me to make those purchases during the annual holiday sale at Macyʻs Herald Square.
At the age of 80 Rose decided to start smoking and drinking again, declaring herself unconcerned that doing so could cut a few months off her lifespan. She began our Tuesday evenings sipping a gin-and-tonic, while smoking a cigarette in a fancy holder. She also decided to reread every book on her shelves beginning with the one in the upper left hand corner. When I bought a bright blue Mazda Miata 1990 convertible, scoring an original the year the car first came on market, Rose named it Lolita because she had just finished Nabokovʻs novel. Naturally she insisted on being my first passenger, chic scarf tied around her head as we drove with the top down. Perhaps it goes without saying that Rose saw and honed my artistic and cultural sensibilities and applauded my leaps into the unknown as the only way to get to where I was meant to travel.
Amelia
I met Amelia in 1992; she would have been around the age I am today, mid-60s, at the height of her professional recognition, but nowhere near the end of her creative output. Shortly after we were introduced, Amelia had simultaneous exhibitions at the two most important art museums in Brazil. At the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), her retrospective of over 130 paintings, sculptures, and objects took up three floors. Meanwhile, the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio (MAM) displayed 17 new sculptures in an exhibit called “Cortes de cor,” an installation in which a new “virtual space of color” was created, engaging the viewer in the art as he or she traveled through a “labyrinth of air.” Amelia was intensely curious about static art in relation to movement and energy; different ways of seeing the physical, natural world; and exploring the possibilities of traditional and unlikely materials. Talking with her and watching her artistic process didn’t just expand my artistic vision; it always expanded my human vision.
This playful watercolor hangs in my bedroom, a calligraphy of meanings I hope to discern
Like the rest of my creative Brazilian friends, Amelia had lived abroad. She spoke English fluently, which initially was helpful in expanding my Portuguese fluency, not just in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but in the sensibility and nuance that is required to grasp culture and match the energetic signature of a place and people through spoken language. As she painted in her study, Amelia danced to jazz and popular music, indulging in a puff of maconha. Fortunately for me, Mô, her son and collaborator, a talented artist in his own right, embraced me without hesitation as part of the family. I was once again blessed to have a mother-brother friendship package.
Amelia was the mother of my three who physically traveled with me during these critical years, linking Sampa and St Lukes Place and Manitou Springs, integrating with my other family and friends, helping me discern and interpret and weave threads of the path forward in my nascent reincarnation. Amelia was by my side as spiritual and artistic and intellectual and nurturing impulses were becoming a single whole. She and Carman Moore spoke the same language in different media, preparing me for the new world into which the Mass for the 21st Century was soon to lead me.