Facing Forward is billed as a straightforward memoir of troubled times in mid-life, but there is much more going on here. There are pages devoted to 9/11, questions about the exact nature of God (what he demands of us; what we demand of him), thoughts on the shootings at Columbine, the harshness of growing up in a dysfunctional family, her father's breakdown (and shock treatments), and meditations on gays vs. evangelicals. It ends with a visit with the Christian author Frederick Buechner.

Zoba can be acute in her writings --- especially passages dealing with people of the street: taxi drivers, bag ladies, casual drunks. She tells of a 73-year-old street lady named Dottie who visits her husband's church, once went to Toledo (Spain, not Ohio --- she pronounces it correctly) and speaks in capitals HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, PRETTY LADY. YOU'RE SO BLESSED TO HAVE SUCH A HANDSOME SON. HE'S SO MASCULINE (this said to Zoba and her son at church).

Meeting Dottie reminds Zoba of the Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day, once seen visiting with a bag lady at her offices. The writer Robert Coles comes in, stands around for awhile, and finally Day turns to him and says "Are you waiting to talk with one of us." Coles wrote,

With these three words she had cut through layers of self-importance, a lifetime of bourgeoisie privilege, and scraped the hard bone of pride.

However, memories of being mother to three boys commands the most heart-rending passages. They are angels when young but then they --- as all children must --- grow up and turn away from her. One son "tortured me with unexplained absences and late nights out." Her reaction, [and her italics]:

I didn't create this character. What has gone wrong?

She spends three days baking a birthday cake for son #3.

"How big a piece do you want?" I said to my son.

"I'm not having any."

I looked at him.

"I'm full," he said. He pushed his plate away.

I ate the piece of my heart in silence. I lifted my glasses to my eyes. I carried my plate to the sink. I retreated to my room. A day later he said to me, "I'm ready to stop living in this house." I wanted to say, "I know the feeling."

I helped you draw your "Space Pig," she says of one of them. I baked you heart-shaped cakes she says of another. I drew Ewok for you. I pushed you in strollers up the hill. I made memory books for all of you. "I have suffered," she is saying, "and what do I get for it? A kick in the pants."

At one point, she looks in on the three of them sleeping in the same room. "My sons, together, sleeping in their beds, safe from the world, home. Mine." Later, she spells it out: "My children were mine."

Now it's a fine line between raising and loving children and owning them. Zoba shows us the pleasure of having them as youngsters, but then as they age and she becomes more fearful, she comes across as a needy woman with a desire to possess. That need of ownership could well flaw the reciprocal love of motherhood; it certainly would help to drive away those that she most cares for.

I remember once reading that a Buddhist family treats its children as honored guests in the home. To Zoba, these children --- if we are to believe her words --- were not guests. Rather, they were possessions.

It's no accident that throughout Facing Forward, she returns again and again to the story of Peter Pan. She tells us that it was the love of that book that caused her alcoholic father to name her "Wendy." Peter Pan, we are reminded, is the eternal boy who had no mother.

There is one other peculiarity in Facing Forward. Zoba is very good in her descriptions of everyday life of the people of the streets. At the same time, there is a crudeness, if not a cruelness, in some of her observations of people less fortunate than herself.

Waiting for an airplane, she spots a woman waiting in a wheelchair and thinks [italics hers]:

I'd rather die than sit alone in a wheelchair in an ATA waiting area, wearing a fuchsia pantsuit and a blue wrist corsage.

She sees two other disabled people waiting in line for the same flight:

Behind the woman with the corsage was a wheelchair bound man whose hair didn't look gray enough for him to need it by virtue of age.

Finally,

In the third wheelchair sat a woman in tinted glasses, with a puckered look, as if she forgot to put her teeth in. She wore shiny pink too, a jacket, with turquoise polyester pants.

Zoba finishes off, [again, her italics]: Shiny pinkish outfits must be the rage in Florida-bound geriatric women's casual wear.

There is a hostility here in the description that reaches far beyond merely painting a picture for the reader. You can be in a wheelchair, she is saying, but if so, you should conform not only to my taste in clothes, but to my view of disability. This is coupled with the phrase, repeated at least three times, that puts us disabled people into orbit: "wheelchair bound."

For one who claims to be steeped in Christian fellowship and tolerance, these passages demonstrate an antagonism towards those who are not able to move around as she does. Zoba sees in the disabled a picture of her future, and she doesn't care for it at all. She asks,

Was I destined one day to sit alone in an airport, wheelchair bound, with gnarled hands pressed into sad eyes? Is this where it ends? Wearing shiny outfits, poised with others in wheelchairs waiting to board a plane for Florida?

The Sufis say that what we fear the most must come to pass. Thus, in response to Zoba's question Is this where it ends? the answer has to be