I’m a lucky lady. I’ve had my fair share of child and adult-sized dramas which led to my need for ten-day silent meditation retreats, years of therapy, and two years of solo-travel, but I’m certain that if it weren’t for all three of my moms, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
My actual mother, Wynn, is a pistol. She defined the term, “shooting from the hip,” since she says whatever is on her mind, which doesn’t always work to her advantage, but for the most part, others find refreshing. When my last boyfriend’s mother met my mother for the first time, she said, “You know, your mom tries to come off as being kooky, but really, she’s solid as a rock.” I smiled because I already knew that (more than Ashford and Simpson). I know all about her kookiness because I inherited it and have learned all of its hard lessons. Yet during that particular trip last summer, which was one of the hardest times in my life, my mom did show up like a rock. But she wasn’t always that way; it was a role she had to grow into over time.
My mom has never been a straight arrow. It started when she struggled through school as a child. But she was smart back then. After working in education, I learned enough to know that what she probably lacked back then was someone to help channel her abilities in the right direction. Sitting in a desk and minding her manners was not little Wynn’s style. At the private school she was sent to, her classmates got dropped off in their families’ limousines, so she made her mark by putting Saran wrap across the toilet seats. She went to more boarding schools than can be counted on one hand. Nine times out of ten, if I mention someone from my youth growing up around Chicago, my mom will say, “Oh, I dated their father … or their uncle,” because my mom was gorgeous and knew how to have fun.
Later, when my parents divorced, my mom busted her ass working as a single mother with three daughters in the house. She took the ‘L’ train to downtown Chicago every day to work at an advertising agency and always managed to make it look easy. We were a part of her little successes along the way, which many times included a frivolous act on her part—like when she traded in our station wagon for a Nissan 280ZX sports car. It was a sleek black number with a gold pinstripe, which she hated and decided to remove. So she drove the used roadster onto the front lawn of our rented house and enlisted all of the neighborhood kids in the removal effort. There we stood, about ten of us, each armed with a hair dryer connected to an extension cord, so we could help my mom melt the pinstripe off her new wheels.
There was a time in my life when I wasn’t sure if my mom and I would ever be friends, particularly when I was a teenager. As she likes to put it, “I don’t do teenagers, I do babies.” (And she’s finally stopped hounding me as to when I’m going to have one.) Instead my mom has stood by me and watched me grow, sending me emails that always say, “You never seize to amaze me,” and then giggles through her electronic smiley faces when I email back saying just one sentence. “Mom, thanks, and it’s cease.”
My second mom is my stepmother, Liz, who came into my life when I was ten. She was the inverse proportion to my mother. Liz did do teenagers; in fact, she raised six of them. She had her own three children and then got to help raise my sisters and me as we came, one-by-one, into her house over time.
I’ve told people that I lucked out with my two moms because they fill in one another’s gaps. So in those teenage moments when my mom couldn’t deal, Liz stepped up to the plate. And when I knew there was something that I could only work through with my mom, Liz intuitively knew when to step back. Liz is the yin to my mother’s yang, and my father has been fortunate to have two long-term marriages with both. Liz gave my sisters and me the full-family gatherings that otherwise didn’t happen much in our upbringing. She bridged a gap that can easily happen between daughters and their father after divorce. She has been there to teach us about communication and speaking up when the moment called for it. She talks to me at length about the process of writing and about other books that make our hearts skip. But nothing pleased me more than hearing her on the phone with my mom over the years while they chatted about shared books, because I was the only kid in school who could say two things: that my dad had married a woman older than he for his second marriage and that both of my mothers got along.
My third mom wouldn’t have come into my life had I not taken some risks of my own.
