In Tasha, Brian Morton (Florence Gordon) offers up a biography wrapped in a memoir, an attempt to understand the complex and complicated woman his late mother was.
Morton starts with his own understanding of his mother. He recalls her harebrained adventures as a young mother, their strained but never estranged relationship as he became an adult, and later her slow decline into depression and "despondency" following the sudden death of her husband, Morton's father. "When you're young, it's hard to see your parents in context," Morton writes. "Your parents are the context." Following years of complicated caregiving as his mother aged, and her eventual death, he yearns to understand his mother. Thus was born Tasha, an attempt "to see her whole, as I didn't succeed in doing when she was alive."
Tasha Morton was the first-ever copy girl at a local newspaper. She paused her education for 10 years to mother her two children before eventually earning a master's degree and starting a career as a teacher in her 40s. She attended the board of education meetings in her town every week, served on the board for 20 years until the age of 80, and kept attending meetings even after failing to win re-election in 2005. She organized against racist redlining practices in her town.
Morton offers up these accomplishments as context before focusing more fully on his mother's eventual stroke and slow decline toward death. Tasha is a beautiful and kind, if not always nice, tribute to a mother from her son, told with a quality of self-reflective honesty that is at once heartbreaking and heartwarming. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer