I have two moms. No, it’s not because of a divorce or a death in the family. It’s not some bizarre family-of-choice situation. I didn’t grow up on a commune in San Francisco raised by a whole village of mother figures. I have two moms who love each other. They’ve been together for 27 years. I’ve been around for 21 of those years, and I’m here to tell you definitively – two moms are better than one.
Two moms taught me how to change a tire, and in my driving history, I’ve had to change a lot of tires. When I blew out the right front tire on my car during my senior year, I called one of my moms for advice. She drove out to find me and fixed the car in pouring rain while me and several of my classmates watched in awe. Last summer, when I blew out the right front tire on my car again, both moms stood over me in the driveway as I jacked up the car and struggled to loosen the bolts on the tire. Our well-meaning neighbor wandered over, toolkit in hand, to make sure the trio of females was doing all right on our auto maintenance project. My mothers shooed him away. “We appreciate your help,” one of them said, all graciousness and poise, “but she needs to learn how to do this on her own.”
My mothers are the sort of people who could easily be the alter egos of some benevolent superhuman. They are mild-mannered, unassuming, going about their daily lives – until someone commits injustice in front of them, that is. In the years before I was born, my mothers fought the company one of them worked for in order to secure healthcare benefits for their spouse and as-yet-unborn children. When my brother and I were young, our moms lavished time, attention, and experiences on our elementary school classrooms, but never failed to include the surrounding classrooms, too. “We don’t want anyone to feel left out,” they said. In my mothers’ world, no one is left out. They lead quiet insurrections against injustice great and small, from the chronic underfunding of public schools in Washington State or the lack of kosher foods in a grocery store around the Jewish holidays. I wonder if it’s tiring. I wonder where they hide their super suits.
My mothers greet everyone with a smile and a firm handshake, at least until you know them well enough to earn a hug. They remember the smallest, silliest details – my best friend’s favorite food, the kind of coffee my math teacher liked to drink, my martial arts instructor’s preferred birthday cake. To be in my mothers’ orbits is to be loved, cared for, forgiven. Even as a pseudo-adult, I find it hard to lay problems to rest, move past mistakes, unless I’ve earned my mothers’ forgiveness first.
Two moms are better than one. I’ve always known that. This Mother’s Day, I’m grateful for my double dose of mothers. I’m grateful for their courage, their protectiveness, their senses of right and wrong. I’m grateful for the times when they’ve held me up and the times they’ve let me stand on my own. I’m grateful for the times they’ve sat my brother and I down with identical serious faces and told us that, after much deliberation, they’ve decided to renew our contracts for another year. And I’m grateful for the times they’ve helped me change my life – and my tires.
