Celebrating Women’s History Month

Lawrence resident and author keeps her mother’s artwork close to her heart

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Marcia Hain Engle was a poet before she could write. Her mother, Beatrice Glaubman, would write down her poems in what she called Marcia’s “Garden of Verses” starting when she was four or five. “She was a little concerned with me at first,” said Marcia, with a little laugh. “The poems could be about life and death and people I loved who had died. She wanted me to write about sunshine and flowers.”

March is Women’s History Month, so the Herald has taken the opportunity to highlight Hain Engle and Glaubman. These women have documented their own lives through their art, and have left a lasting impression on those around them.

The Lawrence resident has written five books, and countless poems. She said that most of her books deal with healing, “because I needed to learn that lesson. You find yourself here, and a second life is the life with god’s help you choose the life to give yourself. With a loss or illness or something with a child, numerous things can go wrong and make you question why you’re here and how you can remain here in a productive way.”

Marcia’s first husband, David Hain, died in 1991, her second husband, Morton Engle, died in 2010. Following Morton’s death, while attending meeting with a bereavement group she met Joan Cohen, whose husband also died in 2010. Cohen said that she wasn’t happy with the group, she even left and came back a few times, eventually Marcia showed her an early draft of her most recent book, “Be Comforted- a Bereavement Journal,” published in 2014. Beatrice died in 2006.

“I was blown away, it was just what I needed to read,” Cohen said. “I was at a very bad time in my life and was looking for comfort, looking for a way to go on and cope with a very difficult situation. It’s not that it’s a guide, but it just resonated with me … I told her, you’ve got a message here of resilience and hope, it just needs a little pairing down.”

Cohen, a high school librarian, edited “Be Comforted.” She said that she had dabbled in writing, but never done anything like this before, and that she excised some parts and tried to hone in on the message of resilience. “When it comes to giving sage advice, she’s number one on my list,” said Cohen. “Her talent for poetry leaves me in awe.”

The subject of another one of Marcia’s books “No Mommies at Millbrook: A Mother’s Journal,” her son Andrew, is similarly impressed by his mother’s abilities. “Every time she puts pen to pad it’s incredible,” he said.

Andrew had issues with substance abuse as a teenager and received treatment in Daytop at Millbrook, a drug treatment center in upstate New York. “She was always there for me, both my parents were,” Andrew said. “When I got involved in it the unconditional love from them was beyond anything … I wouldn’t be here without her, not as the person I am, or even physically.”

Marcia explained that the title came from a conversation she had with a staff member while crying. They asked her if she would try to operate on her son if he had appendicitis, “I don’t know what it is with mothers,” she said they told her. “You think you can make everything better yourself.” According to her, that conversation helped her while writing the journal, which she hopes has helped others in her similar situations. “Don’t give up, there is always another way even when you’re angry or frustrated you can’t do it all alone,” she said.

“No Mommies at Millbrook” is the only book that Marcia’s mother did not illustrate, she even used some of her art for “Be Comforted,” which came out eight years after her mother died.

Beatrice Glaubman worked in her father’s business after graduating from St. John’s Law School, Marcia said that she was always a talented artist, and that after her father, Marcia’s grandfather, died, Beatrice began painting. She would paint works corresponding with Marcia’s poems, and Marcia would write poems that related to her mother’s paintings. “She was brilliant,” said Marcia of her mother. “She just wanted to light up the world with color, designs and flowers.”

Glaubman had a one-woman show at the Peninsula Public Library, she showed her paintings to temple sisterhood groups and at private collections in California and Arizona, but the canes she painted for herself and friends as well as New Year’s cards she and Marcia would make were the projects Marcia remembers most fondly. “I would write a poem, and mom would do a painting,” she said. “People collected them too, they were works of the hands and the heart.”

A few years ago, one of Marcia’s granddaughters found an old card of a sunflower and asked if she could paint her own on the back. That year the card she mailed out spanned four generations. “I wore red to [my mother’s] funeral, because that’s who she was,” said Marcia. “She was such an inspiration.”

The esteem in which she holds her mother is obvious from the tone of her voice, it’s a similar tenor that can be heard when other people around he speaks of Marcia. Cohen aptly summaries her friend as, “A very interesting lady, with so much to offer, and she offers it with love.”