The Whole Truth

Who Made Me — No. 2

 Campaign Briefing: An Afternoon Post

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

My parents taught me two things that I have never been able to separate from each other, no matter how many years I have spent trying to understand either one on its own.

My father taught me what honesty means. My mother taught me what it means to stand up — not just for yourself, but for someone else. I did not always recognize those lessons while they were being delivered. I have spent most of my adult life recognizing them after the fact.

My father was working to become a stockbroker when I was five or six years old, transitioning from a job as a bell captain. He read the Wall Street Journal. I remember the way the cartoon was drawn at the bottom of one of the pages — a small rectangular frame, maybe two inches high — showing a young boy standing on one of those old spring-loaded penny scales, the kind that printed out your weight and your fortune on a little card. The card in the cartoon said: you were adopted.

I asked my father what that meant.

He put down the paper and told me. All of it. He explained what adopted meant, and then he told me that it was true — that he and my mother had wanted children, had been told they couldn't have them, and had gone out and found me. Those were the words he used, or close enough to them in my recollection: they went out and found me. Three years later they began adoption proceedings again and my mother turned up pregnant with my sister. Three

years after that, because they had always wanted three children and everyone told them it was a fluke that could never happen twice, they started the process again — and my mother turned up pregnant with my brother.

My father did not know when he might have told me any of this on his own. I don't know either. But a cartoon at the bottom of a newspaper page asked the question for him, and he answered it completely, honestly, and without flinching, to a five-year-old who had no framework yet for what he was being told.

That is what honesty looks like. Not the absence of difficulty. The refusal to hide from it.

My father and I were in a personality conflict from the time I was born until the day he died. I want to say that plainly, the same way he would have said it, because softening it would be its own kind of dishonesty. We clashed. Persistently, sometimes painfully, across decades. And I have never — not once — doubted that he loved me. I have never doubted that my best interests were his concern. We just clashed. I think that is one of the sadder true things I know about my own life. But it does not change what he taught me, sitting in that chair with the Wall Street Journal in his lap, the day a cartoon asked the question he answered without hesitation.

My mother was five feet tall. I want you to hold that detail while I tell you the next part.

I was suspended from school one day when I was about fifteen — at a time when a suspension could result in six months in juvenile hall, which gives you a sense of the era. My mother came with me to a meeting with a vice principal and the teacher who had suspended me. The vice principal was well over six feet tall, a substantial man who had once coached a professional basketball team.

My mother had us there fifteen minutes early. When the vice principal came walking in, I pointed him out. He went to the counter — no more than six feet from where we were sitting — and struck up a conversation with someone I didn't recognize, not even the teacher involved in my suspension. Just a social conversation. Our appointment time came and went. He finished, went into his office. The teacher who had suspended me arrived around the time we were supposed to have been called in. She went in. Five to ten minutes later, we were.

I watched my mother's face during all of this. I knew that face. I had seen her angry with me enough times to recognize it. But somewhere in those minutes, while he stood six feet away and talked about nothing that concerned us, the anger shifted. It was no longer pointed at me. I didn't fully understand that yet. I would understand it shortly.

When the teacher began reviewing my record, she reached back into the previous year's difficulties. I said, as politely as I could manage, that I believed those were from last year — that this year my attendance was better, I wasn't in trouble, things had changed. The vice principal looked at me and told me not to talk to his teacher in that tone of voice.

My mother stood up. She was five feet tall. She leaned across the front of his desk, put her finger in his face, and told him not to talk to her son that way. That he was being polite. That the teacher was presenting inaccurate information. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

He had earned this from her. He had been standing at that counter when our appointment was supposed to start, and he had made a choice about whose time mattered. My mother had taken note.

The suspension was rescinded. I was to return to school the following day.

She walked me out to the car. I had just gotten my learner's permit, and all I could think was that I was still in an enormous amount of trouble when we got home. She looked at me and asked if I wanted to drive. I said yes. She slid the keys across the roof of the car and said: we showed that son of a bitch, didn't we?

Integrity. The duty to protect others. Those were the lessons. I don't think I was nearly as good a student as either of my parents deserved. But I have never forgotten what my father's face looked like when he put down the paper and told a five-year-old the whole truth. And I have never forgotten my mother's finger, and the size of the man she pointed it at, and the fact that she didn't hesitate for a single second.

They were different people, my parents, and they taught differently. But the lessons pointed in the same direction. Tell the truth. Stand up. Don't let the size of the room, or the person across the desk, change either one of those things.

I am still working on it.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN