My Two Moms.(Personal account)

When a dynamic Frenchwoman burst into Susan Bell' s life and became her father's lover, her world turned upside down--in a good way.

Last spring, my nine-year old daughter, Lucia, asked me to read her my acknowledgments for a book I'd just written. At the phrase "To my mothers," she interrupted: "Won't they think that's a mistake?" The plural didn't sound right. I had grown up with two mothers, however, who lived thousands of miles apart and never conferred on my upbringing. I wanted to honor both women who raised me.

Popular wisdom tells us that blood relations are our closest. But it was a woman with no genetic tie to me who kept me emotionally, and perhaps literally, alive from the age of twelve to 20. Her name was Jacqueline, and she was my father's second wife. I won't call her my "stepmother," because the term suggests a mechanical, obligatory mothering, or worse. Whereas Jacqueline mothered me with a zeal and warmth all the more startling because my birth mother, Helen, had not died or disappeared. Jacqueline didn't have to give me so much, she wanted to.

Jacqueline and Helen were opposites. One was flamboyant, the other modest; one materialistic, the other frugal; one affectionate, the other distant; one playful, the other tense. I did not, at the time, appreciate this maternal yin and yang. As a teenager, I found it impossible to love two thoroughly different women, and so, to make my life simpler, I chose one over the other. Although I felt guilty for gluing myself to, in conventional terms, the wrong mom, I never once reconsidered my choice. To let myself love and be loved by Jacqueline was not an act of defiance. It was an act of self-preservation.

Starting in 1947, my birth mom, Helen, bore or brought in six children when six did not sound like so many. She gave birth to a son, Steve, but could not get pregnant with a second child. When two young cousins, Marty and Richie, became orphaned, my parents took them in. Three wasn't enough, so they adopted an infant, Randy. In the hope of bearing one more--God willing, a girl--my mother underwent the medical wizardry of the times and at last, in 1955, gave birth to a daughter, Amy. Five felt like plenty, and my parents abandoned their childbearing efforts. Three and half years later, I surprised them.

Big is not always better. Our big family, by the time I entered it, did not resemble the celluloid kind, where kids and parents get into terrible fights, then in the yard, under the dusky light, apologize and hold hands going in for dinner. In my family, we fought and didn't make up.

We were all at the mercy of my dad, who told me when I was twelve, with characteristic indelicacy, "I knew on the honeymoon it was a mistake to have married your mom." If true, this explains, in part, his frequent outbursts over the 25 years of their marriage. My parents had tied the knot young, after a wartime courtship too short to be revealing. Helen's starlet legs and eagerness to please won my father, who had, himself, a powerful, ribald charm. This charm made him more handsome than, in fact, he was. Celadon eyes and a strong jaw were marred by an enormous, D-shaped nose. Undeterred, my father flaunted his grotesque facial knob as a second sexual protrusion that made him more masculine than guys with only one.