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Title : Fights My Mother Taught Me
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Fights My Mother Taught Me
The men my mother worked with were supervillains, or at least that was my impression and frame of reference. Near as I could tell, they were Lex Luther/Skeletor-type foils to all the Good Things™️ my mom was trying to accomplish for the homeless and HIV-positive mentally ill population of 1980s Northern Manhattan.
I listened to my parents talking at the dinner table, the way kids do when they sense adult conversation unfolding—observant and rapt, hanging on every word in the hopes of gleaning illicit information. The characters were always the same and the plot was too, with minor variations.
The antagonists were egomaniacal male physicians and administrators whose priorities at a prestigious academic hospital did not include the patients my mother treated. They were perpetually trying to undermine her work by belittling it, defunding it, or otherwise throwing up roadblocks.
My dad was her cheerleader and partner in umbrage while she enumerated the latest offenses and indignities visited upon her by powerful men.
“Unbelievable asshole!” he would yell, shaking his head. “Where do these people get off?!”
One morning, one of these unbelievable assholes called the house. I insisted on speaking to him. As far as I was concerned, he was a famous celebrity. I didn’t want to interrogate him; only hear the voice of the man that my mother spent all day long yelling at, to know that this boogeyman was real.
“I probably picked fights I shouldn’t have,” my mom told me recently. “But it’s just not in my nature to submit to authority, especially when it jeopardizes my patients. I would often be the only one in a meeting to say the emperor has no clothes. My career probably suffered for it, but whaddya gonna do?”
Years ago, I called her at 3:00 a.m. because I was feeling pressured to do something professionally that I wasn’t comfortable doing. I felt I was being asked to put my name on something I disagreed with, and that did not reflect my legal opinion or conform to my ethical boundaries.
“You can control what you put your name on,” she said. “That’s the one thing you always ALWAYS have the power to do.”
Years later, when I was unconstitutionally fired from the same office despite all the excellent legal work I had done, she said:
You've been a successful and prominent lawyer in Alaska because of who you are and not because of the jobs you have held. Nothing about YOU has changed. During this time of adversity and transition, know that all of your talents are untouched by recent events. I have no doubt whatsoever that your career and your voice will continue to flourish.
Then she reiterated to me that it was worth fighting back against the specific wrong that was done to me because it was bigger than me. She validated my instinct that this was a fight worth picking against people and institutions who are malfeasant, and she told me that sadly, most of the world is corrupt. The longer you work, she said, particularly in a man’s world, the more you understand that to be true.
She told me that most people just want to cover their own asses and won’t stand on principle no matter what happens, and I should just resign myself to that fact. It doesn’t serve you well, she said, to blame them or waste time feeling betrayed or angry, because it doesn’t move you or your ideals forward. It’s dead weight. That, she told me, is a bleak lesson of our nature that repeats itself again and again throughout human history.
“You will pay a price for fighting back, for speaking up, for standing your ground,” she said. “Only you can decide if it’s worth it to do that in any given situation. For me it always was. Probably too often, in fact.”
My mom’s encouragement to conviction and the example she set by picking fights was simultaneously the most burdensome and the greatest gift she ever gave me.
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