What My Mother’s Wife Taught Me About Life, and Love
Oprah said it best: “Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother.” I usually say some version of this when I try to explain to people how it was my stepmother, Allison, who was actually the most important and influential person in my life. To the average listener, this can imply some sort of inherent judgement on my biological mother—that she was absent, that she wasn’t focused on being a parent, that she was distracted by other things. That’s not the case: My mom was a good mom, a great mom, in fact. She was the quintessential ’80s New England working woman, who showed me every day what a strong female business leader with a fabulous wardrobe from Lord & Taylor looked like. But she did have a wild side, one that both craved attention and had no fear over breaking the rules. Growing up, my mom was not like a “traditional” mom; she was more like that friend whose aversion to authority would land you in detention, or whose high jinks might get you arrested. And then came Allison.
It was a Saturday morning in the spring of 1993. I woke up in my pink heart–wallpapered room to noises from the kitchen at the other end of our condo. I dragged myself out of bed in hopes that my mother might be making Pillsbury Toaster Strudels, but she was nowhere to be found. There was, however, a funky-looking blonde sitting at our dining table reading the local newspaper with a bowl of cereal and a cup of black coffee. She didn’t see me, and I slowly backed away down the hallway and back into my room to call my mother on her car phone.
“Mom, there’s a strange woman in our house. She’s at our table, having breakfast,” I said. “Oh, that’s my new friend, Allison,” she said. “Talk to her, honey, she’s not scary.”
So this was the new woman my mother was dating. It had been a year since my mom came out of the closet after I walked in on her sleeping with a woman almost half her age. She spent the next 12 months navigating her newfound lesbianism like a tornado ripping through all the various gay circles in Rhode Island—most times, with me in tow. With no articles in Seventeen and YM on what to do when your mom is gay, I was on my own when it came to figuring it out. It was lonely, and I craved any sense of a stable home life, or a mother figure who wasn’t wrapped up in her own drama. Someone to sit at the table with for breakfast was definitely a plus. “Hi,” the blonde said. “I’m Allison. I’m friends with your mom. She had to go do a work thing, do you want some Crispix?” Her green eyes squinted when she smiled.
Allison showed up in my life that morning and never left. My mother moved her in immediately, and all her “single lady on the lesbian dating scene” escapades stopped. She made it clear that Allison was special, and that she was here to stay. For me, it felt like a relief: Most kids of divorce crave a strong family unit and it felt like mine was coming back.
Allison was like no one I had ever known before. Before Allison came into our home, my mother kept the condo beige. Beige carpet, beige walls, beige couch. Even the beige framed print over the beige brick fireplace featured three Parisian women sitting on a beige beach. Allison changed everything in one stroke. She was a well-known local artist with esoteric work that provoked a lot of questions and used a lot of color. Within one weekend our little home was reborn: draped in her five-foot-long handmade quilts of violent red female goddesses holding gold knives and severed blue heads; home to her recycled trash sculptures of vibrant, deconstructed faces that were part Picasso, part Mrs. Potato Head. She had an artist collective in the Newport lesbian scene with her sister called Weird Sisters, she knew about the secret Sunday night show on 95.5 WBRU, she read indie zines like The Witches’ Almanac, and she taught me about the importance of setting an intention on a new moon and allowing yourself to go nuts when it’s full. She wasn’t the life of the party like my mother; she was quiet and introverted. She was like me.
So yes, Allison was a queer Wiccan solstice sister, but she was also everything I thought a traditional mother should be. She brought a kaleidoscope of creativity into our lives, along with an innate sense of warmth, kindness, and love that came with zero conditions or expectations. We’d sit together at the dinner table as a unit, at her behest, and talk about our day: what we were up to, what bands we were listening to, what happened at work and at school. She taught me random “mom things,” like the technical differences between folding a beach towel and a bath towel. She calmed my anxiety during the great wardrobe debacle of the 1996 high school winter dance (I somehow only had ballet flats to wear, and a date who was 6-foot-3). When I lost my virginity, she was the one adult I could talk to about it. When I fell in love with a woman in college, it was my biological mother who was shocked by the news.
“What?! I never thought my kid would be gay,” my mother said. “I thought I’d be helping my friends’ kids come out, but never my own daughter.”
“Mom, you’re gay,” I said. “What’s the shock?”
“I’ve known this about you for years,” Allison said, immediately diffusing the tension.
“You did?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, honey, you had all the signs,” she grinned.
As my other mother, Allison paid attention. She listened. When I was afraid that coming out to my dad would bring up unhappy memories of my mother’s coming out and their marriage ending, Allison spent a year coaching me through it. She never judged me for staying in an emotionally challenging relationship for nine years, even when it took me all of those nine years to finally listen to her and let go. She was my gauge, and my gut. Her word and intuition trumped all. Most significantly, Allison was the first person in my life to really see me, hear me, and accept every single part of my personality. She did this for my mother, too. It took bringing Allison into the picture to fulfill my mother on an emotional level and convince me that our home was safe and secure—that the bottom wasn’t going to fall out again.
Back in the ’90s, before gay marriage was legal, my mom proposed to Allison in the aisle of Walmart, on a whim. They gave each other silver hammered rings that they wore for almost 20 years before legally tying the knot in 2014. Immediately after they were pronounced wife and wife, I jumped in with a hug. “Congratulations, stepmother for real,” I said through tears. “Thanks, stepdaughter for real,” she hugged me tighter.
Eight months later, two days after Mother’s Day, Allison died. She had pancreatic cancer; she had endured the disease for eight short weeks. I found out that she was sick when I called both my mothers to tell them I had met someone special. They told me that the doctors had diagnosed Allison with ovarian cancer. It was treatable, giving us some hope. During her hysterectomy they found the cancer had spread everywhere, and there was no chance of survival.
When she passed away, the loss and the grief were enormous. I felt as if I had fallen into a vortex of the unknown. Allison had always been there: my rock, my true north, my reminder that I was not alone in this world. My brain couldn’t comprehend an Allison-less reality; it felt like tiny holes had formed in the tissue where my memory should be. It was like I couldn’t remember anything that happened during the last 10 years. I could only remember things that happened before 2003: like a Saturday morning, freshman year of high school, where I woke up to K.D. Lang’s “Miss Chatelaine” blaring, my mom and Allison dancing on the last of the beige carpet as they vacuumed. Or the volleyball game where my mom and Allison were on one set of bleachers and the rest of the town was on the other set. Or that Sunday night when the three of us were watching The Sopranos on the couch with my 84-year-old Bronx-born, 100 percent Italian grandfather who insisted on mortifying us by staying to watch The L Word afterward to “see what you girls are all about.” Or my 17th birthday party at the Salvation Cafe in Newport, where Allison and I shared a cake and a wish. Our birthdays were just two days apart.
She had always been the person who I called for guidance. And now, having lost her, I needed her the most. Luckily, we had been through enough together that I knew what her advice would be: The only way over it is through it—and no matter what, you must make it to the other side. Two months before we found out about her cancer, she was encouraging me to push through past heartbreaks, and not give up on love; she said that everything I had gone through was just all part of the process to eventually find my person. “Listen, honey, the perfect woman is out there for you. She just needs to meet you. I have a feeling. Trust me, a mother knows.”
She was right. Shortly after that conversation, I sat down for coffee across from the woman who is now my fiancée. I only wish they could have met.
