But she wasn’t saying it the way people usually do, in a well-meaning but misguided effort to persuade me that I should make yet another attempt to reconcile with her. She knows my mother, and has known her since at least the late seventies. There was a time when I looked to her as one of a collective bunch of surrogate moms: the often very gentle and wonderful women with whom my mother shared a series of communal dwellings, at the various times I lived with or was visiting her.
Some of their names: Ann, Mugsy, Kathy, Susan. If I had a problem (like Dan, the pedophile junkie who came around and was bothering me), I knew I could go to them. They never judged me - they knew I was only a kid.
Somehow, though, my actual mother always managed to convince me I brought all such problems on myself; when I came back from my dad’s one year, she told me all about Dan’s overdose from speedballing, adding “I knew you two were so close, so I’m sorry to have to tell you this bad news.” So while I felt only numbness concerning the news of Dan’s death, it was clear from my mother’s cues that she fully expected me to grieve. So I made sure that by the time we got back to Random House (one of the incarnations of the communes, also known as “The Fringes”), I was crying in exactly the measure she evidently expected.
But my mother’s women friends had my back. They didn’t always know everything that was going on with me, but whenever I found the nerve to tell one of them, they listened.
They listened like mothers.
And they loved me, and I loved them.
And then, over the years, I lost touch with most of them. It became apparent that when my mother had told me to accept all these assorted and sundry hippies as my own family members - which I did, with all the straightforward sincerity of a child who, after all, does need some configuration of family within which to survive - what she actually meant was “until such time as any of them are no longer favored by me.”
Years ago, I was delighted to have re-established contact with Ann. My mother was in town (we were still speaking then). I thought she’d be as delighted as I was, and handed her my phone, saying “Guess who!” - as Ann came on the line.
And she gritted her teeth and stared at me with rage the entire time. Made it very clear she had no interest whatsoever in speaking to Ann (Ann, who had never been anything but wonderful to me), and later implored me to never do that again. “My family members” were only my family members until my mother tired of them or had developed some inexplicable grudge - at which point, they were effectively dead to her, and, she thought it did not need to be specified, must therefore be dead to me as well.
Conversely, there are some people from the Fringes era with whom my mother has remained in touch. But those people weren’t, I finally understood, supposed to be my family members either. They were hers. Until she tired of them, and then they could belong to neither of us.
I mentioned that something amazing and huge happened. Here is what happened:
Ann emailed me.
Her subject line was Hope you are still here.
She began:
How are you and yours these days? Your oldest daughter would be well into her trying teens. Just grit your teeth, love her and hang tough! That’s all the sage wisdom I have to impart about that.
(See that? Talking like a mom. And speaking to - and respecting - me as a mom. Which, it should surprise no one, my own mother never has, even while I’ve maintained continuous custody of both my girls over the years, rather than randomly leaving them in the care of God-knows-who, coming to take them back again whenever they were in a semi-stable situation, only to seek termination of custody rights shortly thereafter. But I digress.)
And it went from there - some 7,000 some words via email, exchanged between us over the last 24 hours, which led to an almost two hour long phone call, and now we are making plans for her to come visit us within the next month.
“You need a mother,” she said, then continued. “Hell, I’ll be your mother.”
I didn’t have to think twice about her offer.
I said yes.
