As with Anna Freud and a host of other teachers, many of them women, Buxbaum was part of a movement of European educators who came to child psychoanalysis in their second careers. These child analysts entwined their previous learning experiences with psychoanalysis. Buxbaum was part of this movement to create a psychoanalytic pedagogy and bring it to the wider community. As a Ph.D. within a growing group of white male M.D. analysts who would set up practice in Seattle from the 1950s on, Edith Buxbaum not only kept her balance; she found, as well, a niche of her own.

I was in Pushkar, Rajasthan, home of one of the two Brahma temples in India and in the world, drinking mango juice and watching two monkeys making love in a tree. Ironically, out of respect to Brahma, the Hindu god of creation, all public displays of affection-- even hand-holding-- are strictly forbidden in Pushkar; why are the monkeys allowed to be so free? The better question is, why are we humans so restrictive, so afraid of freedom and love?

In one sweep, my mentors, my stalwart believers, the keystones of my personal foundation left this earthly place. First, my maternal grandmother succumbed to a series of strokes. She died never imagining that within months, her vital daughter, my mother, would be in the midst of her own neurological nightmare.