Anita Coleman, portrait, 1968

MY MOM: WITH ME NOW MORE THAN EVER

- Liane Weintraub, Editor-in-Chief

It’s hard to say at what age a girl needs her mother most, but arguably 16 – my age when my mother became ill and subsequently died – is a landmark year.  

There is such a jumble of incomplete thoughts and incoherent emotions in most teenage girls, that when you throw trauma, loss and almost paralyzing fear into the mix, it results in a murky mixture of confusion.  Most of high school and a good part of college were, for me, hazy at best.  I was lost in my own head, sorting through feelings I couldn’t even articulate.
Since then, I’ve made sense of the events of my life, to the extent that anyone can “understand” losing a mother at 16, and then a father, 5 years later.  It may not all be explainable, but it’s a fundamental part of who I am today.  It just sort of got absorbed into the adult “me,” along the way.

This year has been particularly interesting for me, as it was the year I turned the age my mother was when I was born.  I can imagine that this must be strange for anyone to think about, whether one’s mother is alive or not, but it’s especially symbolic for me, for some reason.  I’m also aware that I’ve been alive for more years without my mother than I was with her.  Yet somehow, I feel her presence more and more as the years go on, and in many ways she is more tangible to me now than she was then.
When I was a young child, my parents were like fairy-tale figures.  Always loving, always wonderful, always creating magical things for us to do.  As my brother and I got older, we retreated – as teenagers do – into our own decidedly un-magical worlds.  And so we drew away from our parents, who were a generation older than the parents of our peers.  Now that I am a parent, my mother’s reality has become my own.  I know her now as the real person she was – not simply as the Queen in a storybook.

My mother, Anita Coleman, was born in New York City, a first-generation American.  Both her parents came from Russia, and as an introverted only child, she probably grew up feeling fairly isolated.  She went to Fieldston High School and then Sarah Lawrence College.  This was where she discovered her passion for art, and she went on to study sculpting with renowned artist, David Smith and then opened a gallery – the first “cooperative,” artist-owned gallery in Soho – which she named “Hansa,” after her mentor, painter Hans Hoffman.  At the time, it was a daring (and even slightly scandalous) thing for a young woman to move downtown to work on her own.

By the time my brother and I were born, our parents had been married 14 and 16 years, respectively, and our mother had left her art career far behind.  It’s almost impossible for us to imagine her as a “rebel” who went against society’s notions of what a woman ought to do in life. We never knew her as an artist, a businesswoman or an entrepreneur, but only as a supportive wife and doting mother.  But I can sometimes envision – like rewinding a movie I never actually saw – how she must have been, and this imaginary film is my greatest source of inspiration.
My daughter is called Ava (we often refer to her as “Avita”), and my son is Coleman (we call him “Cole”) in honor of my mother.  We have pictures of her (and, of course, also of my dad) throughout our house.  And on this Mother’s Day, perhaps more than ever before, she is with me.

Anita Coleman with her children on the beach in Southampton, NY