The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A time to cherish mother
A son shares and treasures precious family memories. PLUS: MOTHER’S DAY STORIES IN METRO, PARADE MAGAZINE
The phone rang. A call from Florida. My stomach dropped a little.
Sure enough, Mom was sick again.
So I hopped on a plane to south Florida, bracing for another chapter in my mother’s decline, and another attempt to convince her to go into assisted living.
“No,” was her consistent answer. “I can make it on my own. When the time is right, I will know.”
This was early 2014, and Mom’s fiercely independent nature had come to work against her. She was 83 and living alone, my father having died four years earlier, and she had a list of ailments and medications as long as your arm: diabetes, heart palpitations, intestinal troubles, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, a little stroke here and there.
We had hired an aide for her, a lovely lady from the Caribbean, but mom kept sending her home. She refused to have the woman work on weekends.
“She has children,” Mom would say. “She needs to be with her children.”
Anita Schneider never liked accepting help from anyone, period.
When I walked in the front door of her condo, a place perpetually suffused with the scent of mothballs, I found the dining room table covered with stacks of unpaid bills, unopened mail and offers she’d accepted from places
like Publishers Clearing House.
Her pill box, a long one used to hold pills for the entire week, was a mess. Sometimes she took her medicines, other times not. Subsequent visits uncovered more problems. Her checkbook required a complete re-figuring.
Her phone bill had huge charges stemming from long conversations with companies — scam artists, probably — calling from places like Jamaica.
“Just hang up Mom,” I implored. “Don’t even talk to them.”
She could never be so rude, she said.
Her dinner, I found out, often consisted of a bagel with a slice of Swiss cheese.
Mom had always been so vital, so full of life, so strong. It was hard to see her like this. Five feet tall, with a little dutch-boy haircut and a touch of Charlie Chaplin in her walk, she had been like a second mother to my friends growing up, especially the ones who couldn’t connect with their own parents. In her working days, she was the bookkeeper the big boss confided in.
But you didn’t want to cross swords with her. I’ve seen her go toe-to-toe against a burly store manager who wouldn’t let her return an item. She would — with her quick mind, steely sense of right and abundant willingness to make a scene — reduce him to ashes.
But now she seemed frail. I worried about her making it on her own. So the old argument ensued.
“I’m not an invalid,” she insisted.
Over time, though, I found an ace to play. Instead of urging her into a facility in Florida, I said I had found a place in Alpharetta. It was clean and the people were nice. The best part, I said, was that she’d be close to me. We would see each other every week. Anything she needed, I would provide. We’d eat out together at restaurants, watch movies, and go to garage sales. She pondered it. “OK,” she said. “I’ll try it. But if I don’t like it I’m coming home.”
2 Troubled childhood
Maybe Mom resisted going into “a home” because she grew up in one.
She was only 5 when she entered the Pride of Judea Children’s Home, a four-story brick building on Dumont Avenue in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Founded in 1923 by Orthodox and Russian Jews from Europe, the facility took up a city block and included an infirmary, synagogue, kitchen, dining room, living room, sewing and laundry room, library, study rooms and bedrooms. As many as 250 children between the ages of 5 and 18 lived there at one time.
The home, as the kids there called it, not only took in orphans but also kids from families in financial distress. This was 1936 and the Depression was devastating the lives of so many Americans.
I have an old black-and-white snapshot of Mom as a little girl standing in front of the home. She’s wearing a simple dress and has a haircut that seemed shaped by a bowl over her head. The building towers over her. But she’s smiling.
Mom’s father, Issac Ginsberg, fought in France during World War I and came back a tense and high-strung individual. Today he would be diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. Back then they called it shell-shock. Her mother, Ida, who I remember as having a big heart, a big laugh and a fiery temper, was excitable to the point of throwing things when she was angry.
Put them in a room together, and a violent quarrel was sure to break out. By the time Anita was 5 and her brother Leon was 10, Ida and Issac had split up. Neither one could afford to feed and clothe their children, so they were taken to Pride of Judea.
Separately, Ida and Issac visited their children every week. And occasionally Mom left the home to visit her parents. For a time, Ida made money selling apples on a Brooklyn street corner. Anita stood beside her for hours.
Hold onto my skirt, Ida told her daughter. Don’t let go. Don’t go anywhere.
I know all this from family stories. I also obtained the file kept on my mother at the children’s home. Inside are about a hundred pages of evaluations, medical records, report cards, little notes from her parents. The pages are browned and brittle; if you bend a corner of a page it snaps off. Paper clips are caked with rust.
Mom always said the home was a good place. She described it as though it were a summer camp. She was popular among the other children, who she described in ways that reminded me of the old “The Little Rascals” TV show. Her file told a deeper story. On March 14, 1941, Anita was called into an office to speak with a counselor. How did she like school? the counselor asked. Anita, now 10, attended P.S. 202, the elementary school four blocks away from the home. Was anything bothering her?
Anita hated tests. Was this a test, she wondered? She didn’t want to fail.
Turns out, her school work was spiraling downward. The counselor, who took note of Anita’s bitten nails, wanted to know why.
She felt tense at school, Anita admitted. She’d been in the home five years now. She was ready for her parents to get back together. She wanted to live with them again.
A month later, she met with a counselor again. She felt rejected by her parents, the counselor noted. She feared further rejection.
In her room at night, where she bunked with a half-dozen girls her age, Anita quietly prayed for her mother and father’s safety. She worried they might get hurt in a fire or an accident.
And she had dreams. Frightening, recurring dreams, like the one where she was locked in a gas station, unable to escape.
She had hopeful dreams, too. In one, her parents have reunited. Anita runs away from the gigantic brick building with its tall wrought-iron gate, and joins her parents. Everyone is together and happy.
3 One of a kind
Some might say Mom was a feminist before that term was coined. She strongly believed in her own rights. But she never wanted a career; she wanted to get married and raise a family.
Anita and my father, Milty Schneider, grew up together at Pride of Judea, where he had been abandoned. They didn’t fall in love as kids. Anita just knew Milty, who was seven years older, as the quiet, well-mannered boy who sometimes hung around her brother, Leon.
One day, in 1957, Milty showed up at Anita’s door. He was 34 at the time; she was 27. He had served in the war, and she was working. He said he had two tickets to see the movie “The Ten Commandments” that night, and he asked her to accompany him.
She declined, saying she already had plans.
Too bad, he said. He’d just throw the tickets away, then.
Not one to let things go to waste, Anita changed her mind and said she’d go.
Milty drove her the movie theater in his 1941 Plymouth. Then he walked up to the box office and bought two tickets.
Mom may have been the world’s worst cook. Many an animal died in vain coming to her kitchen. But she was a good sport about it. I remember, when I got older, she had a button that said, “Bad cooks make good lovers.”
Her fashion sense reflected her sense of humor. She carried a pocketbook made from the hide of an alligator, head included. She loved her lunchbox that looked like a big green pickle.
I’ve never seen anybody clean a house like her. Floors were scrubbed with a pail and wet rag, on her hands and knees.
“This house is spotless,” she would announce when I came in with friends. “Keep it that way.” So what kind of mother was she? To this day, when something great happens in my life, my mother’s voice is there, cheering me on.
And when I feel like an utter screw-up, her voice is there, as well. She could be a hard critic.
We passed through so many burning hoops together. When the first girl I loved told me she didn’t love me, Mom was there. When a friend on our block in Long Island died very young of cancer, she was there, giving me my first lessons about death.
She was the one who noticed that when I squinted into the sun, I closed only one eye. And she dragged me to 14 eye doctors before she found one who would operate on my lazy eye.
She was tough, too. If my brother, Howie, and I were bad, real bad, she’d threaten to send us to the Pride of Judea home. A few times, to make her point, she picked up the phone and started dialing.
At times, she had her mother’s temper. She never hit, but she had a slipper she could throw around corners. If I didn’t take out the garbage several nights in a row, I became, in her words, a “lazy bum,” somebody who didn’t give a damn for anybody but himself.
So much of who I am is either a reflection of her, or a reaction to it. If you know me, you know her.
I have a fear of failure to this day. Why do I work so hard at my job? Why do I try to be such