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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Remembering My Other Mother This entry was posted on 9/10/2011 7:30 AM and is filed under Personally Speaking. I write in the month 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. When I was twenty-two, she was in her early forties, ten years younger than my mother. Len and I, already married for two years, had just graduated from college and he was soon to embark on an advanced degree. For both strategic and financial reasons, he was spending the summer in the Nevada desert as field assistant for one of his soon to be Columbia professors. I was newly pregnant so 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 my husband'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 in recent years, with miles between us, we got along very well. Now, returned to living under the parental roof, I bristled as she suggested improvements: a haircut, perhaps a blouse of a more becoming color, a more cheerful presence. Of 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 then a rarity, 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 tug of war. I was offered entry into 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 many years later, after my mother's death, but my mother won the middle rounds. How grand to be welcomed and loved without reservation by an other mother, with the accumulated wisdom of the generation before. Tender care without the admonitions or questions that all mothers must labor to suppress once their children are grown. I expect many can identify those adults, aunts, uncles,neighbors or teachers, who have taken on the mantle of wise elder without the tensions inherent in the ties that bind parent and child. Love and protection, offered while having no investment in another's perfection, can be a wonderful gift. CommentsDisplay comments as (Linear | Threaded)
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