Other Mother

(entry for 10/2/24)

Before I was even born yet, I had two mothers. My actual birth mother, named Helen. And her one-year-older sister, Eda.

This unusual arrangement was made very clear to me, as soon as I was old enough to understand the concept, and probably even before that, truth be told.

The primary reason for this situation was an event that had happened a couple of years earlier. Aunt Eda had fallen in love with a young man named John, and when she told her mom, Emma, about it, Emma put her foot down. “No,” she said. “You can’t marry him. Your brother, Sammy, died before you were born, and your sister, Louise, died when you were a teenager, and your sister, Helen, has married and lives with her husband, and you are all I have left. So ‘No.’”

And that was that. Eda told John the bad news, and he eventually married a young woman named Dorothy, and Eda never looked at another guy the rest of her life. (Interestingly, after John died, Eda and Dorothy became best friends, even though it was very clear to both of them that Dorothy had been John’s second choice.)

My mom, Helen, felt a wee bit guilty over what had happened, although she had nothing to do with the imposition of the ban herself. (It didn’t help that my dad had previously dated Eda twice, before he decided to prefer my mom and eventually marry her.) I’m not sure exactly which of the sisters broached the subject first, but by the time I was born, it had been decided between the two of them that Eda would officially be my ‘other mother.’ The fact that my birth was a few days earlier than expected, resulting in Eda missing out on the event during a train trip back from California, where she had been visiting, had no impact on the relationship at all, unless it actually made it even more certain.

This idea of double-mothering me was presented to my dad as a fait accompli. I’m sure he wasn’t thrilled with it, since he found the family entirely too female-heavy anyway, but he knew better than to object. Nor would it have done him any good to do so. When my mom made her mind up about something, there was no shaking her on it.

As long as we lived in or reasonably close to Denver, this was no problem. Periodically, Aunt Eda and Grandma Emma would come to live with us, sometimes in our basement when we had one. Sometimes a few doors away. But always near-by at least. For a while, both of them had jobs at the ‘San,’ as we all called Porter Sanitarium and Hospital, where I had been born, and since the San provided low-cost apartment rentals on campus, they lived there at times, but only if my family was ‘handy,’ as they would put it.

When we moved to Greeley in 1947, it wasn’t a big deal, partly because it wasn’t that far from Denver to Greeley, about an hour, and partly because I stayed with Aunt Eda and Grandma a lot anyway.

When we moved to Montrose, in 1949, it became a bigger deal, because that town was five hours from Denver. (At least it was supposed to be, if speed limits were obeyed. My dad routinely shaved a half hour off that, if weather was good and it was daytime.)

After we had lived in Montrose for a year or so, Aunt Eda and Grandma came to live with us. They both gave up their jobs at the San to do it.

When we moved to Grand Junction in 1953, they came too. At first they lived in a converted garage on our property on Orchard Mesa. When we bought our alfalfa farm in Fruita in 1954, they moved into an apartment in Grand Junction proper, but were still close by.

So, the bottom line was, wherever my aunt (and her mother) lived, I was sure to be with them a great deal as well, one way or another. And vice versa. When I went to Oregon to go to boarding High School, and also when, almost simultaneously, my grandmother died, Aunt Eda moved to Salem, Oregon, about a half hour from my school. Wherever I went, even after I got married, within a year or two at most, here was Aunt Eda, living within a few miles of me.

After my first child was born, the constant presence of my aunt lessened a bit, but only a bit. The end of the intertwining of our lives continued until my sister had a son. Then, suddenly, Eda transferred her sometimes suffocating allegiance to him, and I was off the hook, so to speak. (Much later she transferred it again, this time to his son!)

I did not ever realize the impact the relationship had on me until it was over. Then suddenly I could see how rather strange it had been. There had been no boundaries to speak of, or very few at least. Somehow, in some mysterious way, she had lived through me, all of my days. My triumphs and disasters had belonged to her as well as to me. My joys had been her joys, my sorrows hers as well. (The same lack of bounds had been true of my relationship with my real mother, too. It was almost as if boundaries were somehow sinful! I sometimes felt as though I were the only Gentile in the world who had two ‘Jewish mothers.’)

How does one give up one’s own life in order to fulfill someone else’s? She had renounced her own needs in order to satisfy her mother’s demands. In many ways, she was always the last to get what she needed. The payback she claimed from the world was to use someone else’s life to fulfill her own. Is that fair? No. Was it comfortable? No. Is it understandable? From some limited points of view, I think it is. I escaped, and I’m glad I did. But, along with some resentment and some guilt combined with innocence, I have a soft spot there as well, to this day, though she has been gone now for more than twenty-five years.

She died in 1998, at age 89. When we told my mom, then 88 and bed-ridden and almost comatose, she gave a rare smile. “She was always first,” she said.

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