My Three Mothers

A beautiful 19-year-old girl married a handsome military officer six years her senior, an “officer and a gentleman.” Charming and flirtatious, she was favored by everyone, adored by her own father, and adored by mine. To me too, when I was little, she was a wondrous mix of Snow White, a quiet Geisha, and the mother played by Jane Wyatt in the 50s TV show Father Knows Best.

Without planning, she gave birth to four children in her first five years of marriage. As one of those young children, I was often told that I was lucky to have such a young and beautiful mother. I remember not understanding why this made me lucky. Mostly, I remember feeling love and longing toward her. With long, curly brown hair framing twinkling light blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and an angelic smile, she was visually soothing—like white linen, like porcelain, like a delicately flowered pillow. Her disposition was calm and quiet, and she seemed knowing. As a young child, wherever she was in the house, I would find her. I would sit down and talk to her endlessly while she quietly listened. I became determined to be like her, both for myself as well as for her approval. She was my ideal.

I had no way of knowing then that she was a natural introvert. I did not know that she felt un-mothered by her own mother, parented more by her father for whom she was the favorite. I always knew she loved my father, but it took me a long time to pick up on an edge of bitterness she also felt toward him for his expectations of her. I could never have known then that she had never wanted children. “Are you sure you do?—I didn’t.” I didn’t know until she told me recently that she felt that the best years of her life had been her teenage years, at home with her own large family, at long dinners filled with laughter, big birthday parties, and picnics in the backyard to which she often brought her enamored dates.

Knowing none of these things, I loved my mother as she appeared—quiet and ladylike. Someone to “behave” around. So