The Calendar on the Wall
It just so happened that my mother lived in the same neighborhood as Rachel, my husband Mark’s older sister, and for years I had considered this one of those small, unremarkable strokes of good fortune that make ordinary life slightly easier than it might otherwise be. Family birthdays required less coordination. Emergency school pickups were possible without a long drive across town. Sunday dinners could happen spontaneously rather than requiring a week’s notice and a filled gas tank.
Looking back, I should have paid closer attention to how often Rachel used the word available.
She would call and ask whether Mom was available, and I would say I thought so, and Rachel would say great and end the conversation before anything further could be discussed. At the time, I understood this as the efficient shorthand of family, the way you stop explaining yourself to people you have known long enough that explanations feel redundant. What I missed was the distinction Rachel had drawn, invisibly and early, between a person having plans and a person being home. In Rachel’s operational framework, being home and being available were identical. If Mom was at her house and not visibly committed to something else, she was available. What Mom might have preferred to do with her afternoon was not a variable that required consideration.
Rachel used to describe Mom as her bonus mother, and I understood this as affection. In a way, I suppose it was. But the thing about claiming someone as a bonus mother is that it also implicitly claims some of the things that come with being a mother, including a particular access to that person’s time and domestic labor that is not usually negotiated explicitly because it is assumed to flow naturally from the relationship.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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