NOW MAGAZINE’S STORY COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITHOUT MY MOTHER’S EVER-SUBVERSIVE LION SPIRIT

I’ve been suffering from mother envy all my life. Here’s why. All my friends wanted Lilein Schaeffer – NOW’s vice-president and founding mentor – to be their mother. But not for some milk-and-cookies mom-ish reason.

It was because she was usually the most surprising and interesting person they had ever met.

For one thing, she was a feminist revolution within herself and by herself. So throw away your stereotypes. The story of Lilein will just bust them up.

I had the gift of being by her side as she passed at home in the ease of late morning last Sunday, December 12. The sky was weeping rain, and on both sides of her bed beloved voices were sharing stories. But don’t be lulled into thinking it was simple.

Lilein took her own sweet way in dying just as she did in living. She fearlessly forged her own path in everything she did. And the story of NOW Magazine could never have been written without her.

She looked like an old woman on the outside, but she was a flaming young Frida — in the Kahlo sense – on the inside. She was brilliant and fun and positive beyond reason. And with all the deep hardships she faced head-on in her iconoclastic life, she was deeply unorthodox and wise. Her way was never the easy one. It was fierce. That was Lilein style.

She was born completely ahead of her time into the wild and perilous art-crazed Berlin of the 20s. Growing up in the heartland of harsh parenting was just the first set of challenges to fire her revolutionary spirit. She learned pretty quickly how it felt to be a little Catholic schoolgirl stranded in a hostile Protestant schoolyard.

And as a young kid, she traversed the seismic epoch shift that brought Hitler on just taking her daily downtown walks from her house to the zoo.

She had to fight the power from a young age, and never stopped.

But Catholicism, move over. It was the family’s untended and unacknowledged Jewish roots that imposed her big next move. Proudly, her father had become a famous force in the newly coalescing field of urology. But the writing was on the wall. By late 1939, Lilein and family were on their way to a new day in Mexico City.

For the young Lilein, Mexico City offered a special spice to life. I’m not just talking food. Her youthful Mexico was the same richly adventurous place where the actual Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera – whom she encountered – were exploring their creative, political and spiritual lives.

She eventually married (a much older and debonair Hungarian-Czech) and had her first child. Once number two was on the way, they decided it was time to conquer America. They bought a mail-order suburban home in Levittown, New York, just outside New York City, and my life began there, with my mother’s first and only taste of suburban life. She hated it.

So once her husband said no wife of his would ever work, she had no choice but to grab her girls and run. For the gifted Lilein, some kind of career was a matter of life or death.

Back then, instead of walking out, most women took Valium in mourning for their wasted talents and messed-up marriages. She chose life. She always chose life, and that meant living the social and economic consequences of being a single mother well before it was okay.

To make matters worse, her highly learned family didn’t feel women should be educated, so – no kidding – they had pulled her out of her post-secondary studies in Mexico after a minor but romantic infraction and sent her to cooking school.

As a result, she could pull together a dinner party at the drop of a hat but it took about 20 years before she got to put herself through the university ed she was denied. That was in the mid-60s, when she’d become a newly widowed single mother of three upon the death of her second husband, this time here in Toronto

How did she do it all? You can try her secret weapons if you can muster them. You just need to marry the unrelenting determination of a hungry lion with the bold creativity of a complete nonconformist.

A fresh widow, and on her own again, this time till the end, she got a masters degree in psychology from York University and a mess of younger, bohemian friends.

Here’s another more subtle feminist challenge she had to face: she discovered that the neatly coupled mainstream didn’t really welcome lonely widows. Firstly, the wives saw them as potential danger. But what really bothered Lilein was that the husbands insisted that they always pay her tab. For an independent, self-reliant spirit like Lilein, that set up a barrier she would not cross.

So she found her fun with smart and free-spirited fellow rebels instead. That’s why many of her close circle ended up being much younger or queer or both.

And with degrees happily in hand, she found her way to a passionately engaged if sometimes frustrating career as a school psychologist at the Toronto Board of Education that extended over 17 years. Bold, determined and ever-creative, she used her same secret weapons to get the kids at her schools the help they needed. You’ve probably already guessed that she never met a bureaucratic rule she wouldn’t try to tear down or  pull apart to help her kids.

She was the very first person to hear the bold NOW idea from my publishing partner-to-be, Michael Hollett, and me. In a heartbeat, she was in, body and soul, and she never looked back or wavered.

Even though her NOW phase started only as she entered the last third of her life, she was always there with full energy to cover off whatever we needed most. The span was enormous – investor, babysitter, circulation director, education writer, corporate vice-president, truck driver.

But most of all, her beautiful, ever-subversive can-do energy is integral to who we are at NOW and how we have kept the courage to remain a stridently determined independent voice for close to 30 years.

But, no, that wasn’t all she was up to during her retirement years. In 1997, when the Harris government waged its war on education spending by cutting trustee salaries to a tiny stipend, the lion in Lilein was roused to action. She decided to run for the school board and brought the same age-busting vitality she gave to NOW to her new political career.

At 76, Lilein was elected along with Jack on the Layton/Tabuns councillor/trustee ticket. The current board had its first meeting last night. And fittingly, it started with a tribute to Lilein’s short (one term) but brilliant board days from her friend and former board colleague, Shelley Laskin, who has just returned to the board after a long personal recess. See Laskin's tribute here.

No one could help but notice. Lilein was fascinating and a passionate warrior in life and in dying. Her passing is still fresh within me, but I feel it has made me more fierce, more insistent that we unhook from whatever is twisting us into knots, and more committed than ever to fearlessly taking the adventure of life into our own hands.

Read Michael Hollett's tribute to Lilein Schaeffer here.