by Judy Rebick
Mark Smith, who had been a youth worker for the Addiction Research Foundation when I was working for the Trailer in Yorkville, had become a psychologist and I went to see him. I remember our first meeting. He worked out of a small office in Rosedale. Mark is tall, classically handsome, well groomed, and fit. Not my type at all. But it was easy to trust him and we had quite a bit in common politically.
“I don’t want to talk about my childhood or any of that crap,” I said to him. “I don’t believe in it. I just want to talk about why I can’t do my work.” My main concern was returning to political activism. “Can you help?”
“We can’t do a lot while you’re depressed,” he answered. “The depression will run its course and then we can do the work of finding out what’s causing it.”
“How long will that take?” I asked, thinking, When that happens I won’t need therapy anymore.
“Generally, a depression like this will last nine months. In the meantime, we can talk about what is happening to you today,” he said. “What are you worrying about — Judy Rebick becoming a dishrag?” He laughed, but that was exactly what I was worried about. I was limp, just like a dishrag. I had lost my energy, I had lost my motivation, I had lost my interest in life, and I had lost my sexual desire. What else was left?
The truth was that I rarely felt much during those days. In some ways, I had turned into my father. All my feelings were channelled into anger. My sense of humour was gone, too. One of the things I remember about those early days of therapy was that Mark told me I presented like a man: I was worried about my political work, not about my relationships. Women were usually more concerned about relationships. Things with Ken were going badly, but that just wasn’t important to me.
Many of those therapy sessions were devoted to what I now think of as a reconstruction of my personality. I had driven myself into the ground. The Judy Rebick that Mark had known ten years before had disappeared. Now, with his help, I was digging myself out, piece by piece.
Ken wasn’t very sympathetic. “You have a good job, a relationship, a place to live, a good relationship with your family. What have you got to be depressed about?” he would ask, thinking it was helpful. We didn’t know much about mental illness in those days. He himself was suffering from agoraphobia and I didn’t have much sympathy either.
The worst moment between us was when we were having dinner one night in February in our new apartment in High Park.
“Today’s my birthday,” Ken said quietly. “You forgot.”
I was devastated. I never forgot birthdays; they were so important to me. I realized I was still really depressed. I wasn’t getting better.
Ken and I had an open relationship. “Breaking down monogamy” was part of the cultural experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Comrades were very serious about not becoming possessive or taking ownership of their significant others. They struggled with their jealousy, but challenging monogamy was an important part of their politics. For me it was no big deal. I never felt jealous. Since Roger had been my first major relationship, open relationships seemed normal to me. I had my political work and Ken had the odd affair with other women, which had never bothered me until I became depressed. I felt so insecure, so anxious, that I asked him not to get involved with anyone else until I felt better. But there was little left of what had once been between us. Ken got involved with a woman he was working with, and he wouldn’t end things with her. So we broke up. I don’t know if I threw him out or if he decided to leave, but I always believed he abandoned me. That wasn’t true: he had hung in for months trying to make it work.
Ken was a packrat who kept piles of newspapers, which he had always planned to clip for research, in the second bedroom. Seeing the empty room after he moved out made me realize that I had just lost the one man who had stuck with me through thick and thin. The pain was so great that it broke through the armour that the depression had spread over my feelings. For the first time since the split in the RWL, I cried. But this time, I couldn’t stop. I had to get out of the apartment. I called Leonard for help. He and his new wife, Andrée, came over to get me. They took me to their house, where I cried for hours.
When it was over, the depression had finally lifted.
* * *
The summer after I emerged from the clinical depression, my mother visited from Fort Lauderdale, where she and my father had been living since he retired in 1977. I saw them in Florida every winter and they came to Toronto every summer. My father thought he would continue working in Florida as a salesman, but his body had another idea. Soon after moving there, he had surgery to unblock his arteries. Even more serious, the following year he suffered a brain aneurysm that required surgery. I went down to help out. My mother was more upset than I had ever seen her.
“He’s not himself,” she told me when I arrived. “I don’t know if he’ll ever be the same.”
We went straight to the hospital.
“Hi Dad,” I said, leaning down to kiss him on the cheek. He laughed and started singing like a happy little boy. It was almost as if he were celebrating my arrival.
My mother was extremely worried, despite the doctor’s assurances that he would return to his old self once his brain started to heal. My reaction was different. I found him quite delightful and wouldn’t have minded if he retained this cheery, childish demeanour. It lasted about two days and never returned.
It was the summer of 1982. I was still in therapy with Mark. When he heard about my parents’ visit, he suggested I talk to them about the depression to see if we could identify a history or a reason in my childhood for such a serious illness. I invited my mother to my apartment for a private talk. I had moved to a lovely old building on Vaughan Road, and I suggested she come over to see my apartment, as I knew my father wouldn’t be interested. After showing her around, I offered her a coffee.
“It’s a lovely place, Judy.”
The last time she had visited my home was when she and my father came to my bachelor apartment in Montreal in 1967, my last year at McGill. I was living in a tiny room up five flights of stairs that had a bar instead of a kitchen, with a hot plate and a fridge. I slept on a single bed that doubled as a couch and washed the dishes in the bathtub because the bar sink was so small. I think it cost me $50 a month. My father was upset when he saw the place, but given that he was broke and couldn’t contribute to my rent he kept his mouth shut.
Vaughan Road was a palace by comparison. My mother sat on the couch and I pulled up a chair to sit opposite her with my back to the TV. I served her coffee and she lit up a cigarette. I had quit smoking several years before because Ken had chronic bronchitis. In 1982, no one asked permission to smoke inside, especially not my mother.
“Mom, I want to ask you about something. You know I’ve been depressed.” I don’t remember talking to her about the depression, but she knew about it.
“Yes, dear. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better.”
“Thanks. I was just wondering if you have any idea of why I would be depressed. Depression is often hereditary. Did anyone in the family suffer from depression? Did anything happen to me in childhood that could explain it?”
She hesitated for a moment and then said, “You know, we’ve never been close.” Being open didn’t come easily to my mother. It was a big effort for her to say this.
I didn’t think our relationship was so distant, but somehow I couldn’t say that to her. I was a devoted daughter and in her way she was a committed mother. All my friends loved my mother. She was so kind and thoughtful. Sometimes I thought about how she was never that kind and thoughtful to me, but I figured it was just the usual mother-daughter friction. My mother was the good parent.
“You cut yourself off from me when you were five years old,” she said sadly.
“What?”
“It’s true.” She sighed. “And it never changed. There’s always bee
n a distance between us.”
“But Ma, why didn’t you do something?” I asked, pleading to know, to understand. “I was only five years old. Why didn’t you do something about it? Get help. Get advice. Find out what was wrong.”
“Well, we didn’t know about things like that in those days. What could I do?”
That was her answer to everything. Let’s move on. No sense in dwelling on the past.
In preparing me for the conversation with my mother, Mark had identified that I had become emotionally independent from my parents at the age of five and he told me that I should ask my mother what she remembered about that time. My mother didn’t know why and I didn’t know why either.
* * *
We started therapy in earnest then. I don’t remember much about the sessions but Mark taught me some important lessons. He showed me how I saw the world in black and white when really there was quite a bit of grey. He explained that a crisis is often followed by a period of wandering. Most cultures have stories of wandering after a crisis, for example Moses and Jesus who both had long periods of wandering in the desert. Mark thought that after therapy I would no longer be a revolutionary activist. His view was that I would have gained too much perspective to be a radical, but I think that was his projection. It actually made me a more effective activist. Being able to see multiple perspectives on my own life allowed me to better understand my opponents, even Right to Lifers who would soon be my opponents. It has been an invaluable skill.
But Mark wasn’t entirely wrong. Soon after my depression began to lift, I started going to RWL meetings. At one meeting, Barry, a particularly ornery and somewhat obnoxious comrade, was being expelled from the organization.
Barry defended himself and then the chair asked for speakers. No one but me put their hand up.
“As you know,” I said, “I don’t agree with Barry, but one of the reasons I joined this movement is because we believe in the right of tendency. I don’t see that Barry has done anything to threaten our movement; he just disagrees with this campaign. He might be more obnoxious about it than most comrades, but in essence his views and actions are no different than many other currents that have existed over the years. I think expelling him would threaten our principles as a movement.”
They voted to expel him. To me, democracy was always the most important characteristic of Trotskyism. Unlike other Marxists, the Trotskyist movement allowed the right of tendency, which meant that those who had minority opinions in the group could organize support for their views and even set up a sub-group to push for those ideas. This was central to our notion of democracy. If the RWL was going to stop supporting the right of minority opinion, then it wasn’t the kind of group I wanted to be part of after all. I looked around the room: almost everyone was from the old LSA. Barry was one of the younger members of the RMG, so maybe they were purging us. During the time I was on leave, Steve’s beliefs had aligned more and more with LSA’s thinking. I was the odd man out, so to speak, so I decided to quit.
The next day, I went to a meeting called by a group of women who were providing birth control counselling in the city. They explained how difficult access to abortion was under the law passed in 1969. That law permitted abortions for the first time, but they had to be done in a hospital with the approval of three doctors who formed a Therapeutic Abortion Committee (TAC). Access was very limited. The birth control counsellors spent most of their days on the phone, waiting to get an answer from a hospital that performed abortions. Most would never get through. The group wanted to set up an illegal clinic in Toronto to challenge the abortion law, like Dr. Henry Morgentaler had done in Montreal. Someone nominated me for the coordinating committee.
I accepted.
Eleven
Get Up, Stand Up
I was not ready to wander in the desert just yet. Instead, I jumped into the abortion battle, a struggle that was as all encompassing as the RWL.
Moving from a far-left group into the women’s movement was not as much of a cultural shift as you might think. I, along with other RMG women, had been involved in the International Women’s Day (IWD) Committee since its founding in 1978.
The 1980s was the height of the women’s movement in Canada. In addition to the battle on choice, women were fighting for pay equity, affordable and accessible child care, and gender equality under the constitution. There was already a network of rape crisis centres and shelters providing services to women and advocating for better laws and more awareness of male violence against women. Young women had established co-operative daycare centres on campuses across the country and were working to get government support. We had the struggles of the seventies under our belts, having learned a lot about organizing and lobbying. And there were more women in professional jobs, which provided both a financial base and a certain access to power that we hadn’t had during the previous decade, but women were still struggling for equality.
I knew some of the women in what became the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, who were active in IWD. Many of them considered themselves socialist feminists. At the beginning OCAC was a coalition of these socialist feminists with the more moderate women from the Canadian Association for Repeal of the Abortion Law (CARAL) and radical feminists who saw men as the enemy. So there were lots of differences within the organization, but the most difficult thing for me to deal with was the radical feminists who were hostile to male doctors even though we couldn’t find a female doctor who was willing to work at an illegal clinic at first. I didn’t see men as the enemy and was particularly supportive of trying to convince Dr. Henry Morgentaler to open the clinic in Toronto.
The radical feminists were uncomfortable with our supporting a Morgentaler clinic. They wanted a women’s clinic that feminists would control. But when the first physician recommended by Dr. Morgentaler didn’t work out, we all agreed that it was better to have a Morgentaler clinic than no clinic at all.
Our first indication of public support for the clinic was at a rally we held in the winter of 1983 at an auditorium in downtown Toronto. Dr. Morgentaler was the featured speaker and I was the MC. People were lined up around the block to get into the room, which had a thousand-person capacity. We knew there would be Right to Lifers in the audience, so I was ready.
When Dr. Morgentaler began to speak, they started chanting, “Murderer! Murderer!”
I asked them to stop, but when they wouldn’t I called out to the crowd, “What do we want?”
“Choice!” they responded.
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
I got the crowd chanting “Choice! Now! Choice! Now!” drowning out the opposition and raising everyone’s spirit. The chant was used at future demonstrations and rallies. The hecklers were removed by ushers.
At the end of the rally, Dr. Morgentaler gave me a big hug. I was not much of a hugger but I knew he was so I tolerated it.
“Judy, would you be willing to be the spokesperson for the clinic? I need someone in Toronto to do the job and I like your energy,” he said.
“I’ll need to discuss it with OCAC, but sounds good,” I replied.
It was the first time I had met Dr. Morgentaler.
* * *
The pro-choice battle gave me renewed energy and a powerful sense of purpose. But looking back, there were signs that I had still not completed the necessary emotional work post-depression. I had done much valuable work reconstructing my personality with Mark, but part of me was still buried. Between my political activism and my job, I had little time to think about how I was feeling. I just barrelled through the days, avoiding any introspection, but something always stopped me.
That summer I suffered a near-fatal accident. I was riding my bike on my way to Harbourfront for one of the many meetings I attended to build support for the clinic. It was morning rush hour, and I was worried I was going to be late so I took Bathurst Street, which I usuall
y avoided because of the steep hill and the TTC yards. I was rushing down the hill when my front wheel got stuck in the streetcar tracks. My body was thrown over the handlebars, and I came crashing down onto the road. We didn’t wear helmets in those days, but luckily I had broken my fall with my hands. When I came to, I was surrounded by worried people, one of whom was the man whose car had stopped inches from my head. I had a terrible pain in my left wrist and my left side, so someone called an ambulance. When I got to the hospital, the doctor, who spent more time flirting with me than examining my injuries, said my wrist was broken. I told him my side hurt more than my wrist.
“It must be a muscle cramp,” he responded.
That week I was scheduled to go to Oberlin College in Ohio, where the Socialist Workers Party was having a summer educational. Even though I had quit the RWL, I was still politically aligned with the group and kept in touch. The large campus was spread out across many miles. The pain in my side was gone, but I was still having trouble walking. Once I got home, I went to see my doctor. She touched my side and said, “Your ribs are broken, Judy.” The X-ray showed the ribs were not only broken but had separated. As soon as I heard the diagnosis, the pain was unbearable and I had to stay in bed for a month to recover. It was a sign that I was still dissociative.
Fortunately Alvin and Glenna had rented a cottage with a beautiful beach on Georgian Bay, and they spent time taking care of me. But my obsessive running and dieting were sabotaged by the broken ribs. Ever since I had lost the thirty pounds, I became obsessed with watching my weight, dieting, and jogging about five kilometres a day. After the bike accident, all I could do, and all I did do, was eat. I gained all the weight back in one month. The post-depression therapy with Mark was putting me back in touch with my feelings, but I was still keeping so busy I could push my emotions away. Now that I couldn’t do anything, I could not help but feel my emotions.