Everyone needs another mom

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

She was a shadow figure for years, made up of parts, never a whole. Her hands washed dishes, scrubbed pots, filled pans with oils and meats and spices. Her feet walked from the table to the countertop to the stove. Her voice was soft, and always friendly. "Do you two want something to drink?" Even when it was firm, it was never harsh. She suggested; she didn't demand.

And yet she remained a phantom. Though mother to Helen and Alice, wife to Joe, sister, cousin, neighbor, friend, for me she was simply Janet Butler's mother. Through my child's eyes I saw nothing more.

I was as happy at her house as I was at my own. She wasn't like so many other mothers. Janet and I played marbles in her dirt driveway and she never told us we were making her life harder by tracking in mud after she'd just cleaned. She let us lounge on stormy Saturday afternoons in front of the TV, watching double feature horror movies, without once declaring that our brains would turn to mush. She never said anything mean or undermining like, "I should think your mother would have taught you better table manners," even when I forgot my mother's instructions and held my spoon like a shovel.

She was unfailingly kind. When I was in her home, I was home.

I don't know when I began to love her, but I think it was the Sunday afternoon I went with all the Butlers to visit their relatives in South Boston. Janet and I were about 9. I sat in the back seat of their station wagon, eager to meet aunts and uncles and cousins I'd only heard about. I couldn't wait to play on the grounds of the Gate of Heaven School where Janet used to go. This was to be a great adventure.

And it was, until we got within five minutes of our destination, and I began to cry. Suddenly I didn't want to be with the Butlers at all. I didn't want to meet people I didn't know. I wanted to go home.

And they took me there, all the way back to Randolph - on back roads because there was no Expressway then. They retraced their route without one nasty word or exasperated sigh. No one in that car made me feel as if I had wrecked the day.

I think the seeds of love for all the Butlers took root that day.

They grew strong over the years. Janet and I were teenagers together. We abandoned horror movies for love stories, and spent our days giggling behind closed doors, whispering, dreaming, planning.

And all the while, the sounds from the kitchen remained the same - mother sounds, the sounds of everyday life, which I thought would never end.

But they did one day, in my house. My mother had an accident. She was in a wheelchair. She needed a place without stairs. My father sold the house across the street from Janet's, the house in which I grew up. That might have been the end of it, the end of untroubled youth.

But it wasn't. Because sometimes when I ached for my past, for the smell and feel and sound of it, I'd go home to Janet's. Janet wasn't there - she was married, and I was married - but her mother was still in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning. I would sit at the table and look at the stove that was just like my mother's stove, and at the plates hanging above it that said Helen and Joe, so like the plates my parents had that said Dot and Larry, and I would feel safe again.

Last Sunday, her family had a surprise birthday party for her. Janet was there, of course, all the way from California, and Helen and Alice and all the grandchildren and some old neighbors and many of the South Boston relatives I was supposed to have met so many years ago.

"You better not write about this," she said as she always does, as if her life doesn't warrant print.

But I have to write this time, I told her. Because so much is said about change and so little about constancy.

I come to her house on empty and leave on full. I come looking for my past and I find it. She alone remains as she was, as I remember. In the same neighborhood, in the same house, in the same kitchen, doing the same things: Nurturing, giving, mothering.