Bea V. Larsen . . . .Commentaries |
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Bea V. Larsen is a Senior Mediator at the Center for Resolution of Disputes in |
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The Other Mother This entry was posted on 9/15/2007 1:01 PM and is filed under Personally Speaking. I write this on the day that my other mother died at the age of ninety-nine. Vicki was my father's kid sister, the aunt who was happy to take me in when I ran away from home. In 1951, I was twenty-two, she in her early forties, ten years younger than my mother. Len and I had just finished college, and he was soon to embark on graduate study. For both strategic and financial reasons, he was spending the summer in the Nevada desert as field assistant to one of his soon to be Columbia professors. I was newly pregnant and this was not a good time for us to be apart. But I had a safe haven, parents who happily welcomed me home to await Len's return. This college graduate, wife, and soon to be mother became a child again, worse still, an adolescent. My mother was a loving and generous woman, and with miles between us we got along very well. Now, each day I bristled as she suggested improvements: a haircut, perhaps a blouse of a more becoming color, a more cheerful presence. Of even greater moment, I was unable to put aside feelings engendered just weeks before when Len and I, pressed together in a street corner phone booth, had called with the exciting news of our expected baby, a first grandchild. Vivid in memory was the question she asked: was it planned? I fled to the small white cottage of my aunt in Lakeville, Connecticut. Vicki was then employed as an editor at Doubleday, and commuted weekly to New York City, returning home laden with manuscripts of aspiring authors. Recently divorced from her doctor husband, (he still beloved in our family), she was raising her young son on her own. Divorce was a rarity then, and though unspoken, the family assumed she must have been at fault. My mother and my aunt were loving competitors, first for my father's affection (and, of course, my mother won that round), and then for mine. Vicki was delighted to harbor her runaway niece, no doubt pleased to be the winner of this round. I was offered the excitement of the publishing world and a glimpse into the life of an independent career woman, sophisticated and defiant. But most of all I was given unconditional acceptance. Over the next thirty years, our relationship thinned as we each moved to distant states and she remarried. We became close again after my mother's death in 1987, but my mother won the middle rounds. How grand to be loved and welcomed without reservation by an other mother, with the accumulated wisdom of the generation before. Tender care without the admonitions or questions that a mother must labor to suppress. Having no investment in another's perfection can be a wonderful gift. CommentsDisplay comments as (Linear | Threaded)
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