Conversation Between Two Mothers

On my way to Sun Valley for business a couple of weeks ago, I was able to stop for a quick visit in Boise to see a woman I have known all my life. Our parents were longtime colleagues and friends at the boarding school where I was raised. Alice and her husband were fifteen years younger than Mom and Dad. I am fifteen years younger than Alice. Her sons range from ten to fifteen years younger than I. Kind of a staircase of family relationships.

When I returned home for Christmas my first year of college, Alice and Bob told me I was then old enough to call them by their first names. Yikes: a definitive right of passage that I treasured then and try to provide for former students now. I’m old fashioned that way. As I recall, I used a variation of,“Hey, you” (but politely) for awhile, until I settled into a more comfortable relationship with my emerging adulthood. Then we became contemporaries.

When our girls were little, Alice and Bob’s boys were early adolescents. It was to Alice that I frequently turned for advice. Other than Dr. Spock’s book, to which my contemporaries turned for basic developmental information, our resources were the people we knew, not unknown authors or TV/lecture “experts.” In my very studied opinion, Alice’s boys were the kind of teenagers that I hoped our girls would become. As a family, they had fun together, travelled together, moved about the country together. Her children did not throw tantrums — at least that I ever witnessed. Nor did they whine and clamor for things they could not have. Alice informed me that she hated whining, and her consistent response to any son who tried wheedling was, “I can’t hear you when you are whining.” Not a bad strategy, I discovered.

My path and Alice’s criss-crossed over time, from Ojai, California, to Washington, DC, then back to California. I could always count on her to recommend an excellent book and to serve a fine dinner. She and her husband and my parents were closest of friends for over sixty-five years. In fact, Bob was a student of Dad’s his first year of Thacher. They shared glorious highs and significant lows of life across those decades, including their oldest son’s sudden death at age sixteen, Bob’s quick and devastating pancreatic cancer, and my mother’s gradual decline from Parkinson’s disease. One morning when my ninety-year old father was feeling uncharacteristically “fuzzy,” it was Alice whom he called and who rushed him to the hospital.

Alice is the one remaining parent. She lives in a memory care facility very close to her middle son. I hadn’t seen her since my father died five years ago and was not quite sure what to expect. Would she recognize me? Have any shared memories? As others whose memories come and go, Alice’s social skills remain finely tuned. Even as we spent time together, I wasn’t sure where I was on her radar screen. Both of her sons were with us that day — an extra treat that underscored the deep connections between our families. Their presence made for easy storytelling and fond reminiscences. Alice looked exactly as she always had and occasionally expressed a reaction, but I wasn’t sure if she really knew me.

The following week, when I visited again with her son and his wife, I asked if Alice had known who I was. “Oh, yes,” he smiled. “She talked about your visit the next day. Except that she felt you were much too old to be Ruthie. You must have been your mother.” It took me about two seconds to realize our visit had been the best possible. I got my desired visit with Alice (and her sons). Alice had a wonderful conversation with her dear friend Margaret, my mother, with whom she had not had a visit since 2005. What sweet moments life provides.

Author: Glass

I retired in July after forty-six years in independent school education. I taught students in classes from PreK-12, was a middle school head for many years, and a head of school for 17. View all posts by Glass