The Proxy Mothers
How and where I found myself on January 6th
Each time I realize it is not 1999, I am baffled. I noticed so much incremental growth until that summer, when I entered the nebulous place between child and adult, and have never felt squarely confident in the authority vested in me by time & experience. But here we are, 22 years later, and I feel no more confident and mature than I did then.
Last year was my mother’s 50th college reunion, something she has been looking forward to since 2018, when they started planning it. She pours over her school’s alumnae magazine the second it comes in the mail, and I believe she has a good handle on the whereabouts, careers, and offspring of 300 of the 400 graduates of her class. For as long as I can remember, my mother has given me updates about women I’ve never met - she sends and receives Christmas letters, and has a recall superior to any database that could ever try to capture the fullness of life of her most sacred cohort.
Her email address literally is her initials, school name, and class year.
This place is the centerpiece of her identity, and I never got it.
Fifty four years since she entered formal adultness, she was ready to connect - but because of the pandemic, she and her classmates of St. Mary’s, the small, Catholic women’s college that is a sister school to Notre Dame, could not gather in person to celebrate. They hired me to facilitate a virtual reunion via Zoom during which time many of them made contact for the first time in 50 years. There was joy and anguish at the realization that these other women were out there in their own private life boats, navigating similar waters, experiencing flavors of grief and wonder and lack of direction as life threw the massive stumper of C19 at all of us.
We spent three days together, learning Zoom, talking about world events and personal tragedy. They shared their hobbies and passions, prayed in a virtual liturgy service, and wondered what the hell had happened to the 50 years between then and now. They came to know and trust me in that small window of time, and at the close I had the opportunity to tell them all of the legends I had heard of them from the moment I was born through this, my 40th year. I thanked them for choosing to attend college at a time when women attending college was not the standard practice - and thanked them for pioneering in fields out beyond the desk of the administrative assistant.
Their individual bravery allowed me to select which college, not whether college.
Everyone cried.
They had all moved beyond the borders of the smallness of their socially contrived roles, and into something bigger. They had plugged into spiritual communities from New Zealand to Rome, the coasts of the US, and the deep roots of the midwestern heartland - straddling staunch feminism and Catholicism.
Strange, but true.
When we signed off, they did not want another year to pass before they connected again. They did not want to waste any more precious time navigating the weirdness of adulthood without the connection of their fellow pioneers, and so they hired me to facilitate a monthly event - sometimes an informal conversation, or book club, or a tour: the Atlanta Contemporary Art Museum and Monterey Bay Aquarium.
When my person was intubated in the ICU for the second time, I facilitated a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel for the St. Mary’s Class of 1970 from the ICU waiting room, masked and adrift in the 24 hours after The Epiphany and the capital riots and mired in my own terror. I didn’t know what else to do. My despair and exhaustion was more than one mother could possibly manage, and so another 30 or so mothers stepped in.
After so many years working in the world of birth, I often think of the Epiphany as the strangest story. Three wise men brought gifts of high value but little use to a baby in a stable? We must be missing a chapter where the proxy mothers stepped in and brought swaddling things and nourishing foods and peri-care items. Or perhaps that sort of thing was so commonplace it wasn’t worth writing about.
Commonplace or not, I think proxy motherhood is worth writing about.
My epiphany, in the virtual wonder of the Sistine Chapel surrounded by 30 women and their distinct prayer circles following their post-graduation diaspora, was learning about God breathing life into Adam while a machine breathed life into my person.
I am so lucky.
Lucky that he got the last non-COVID ICU room the day of the epiphany and the insurrection. Lucky that my mother leaned into her bravery and shared the reality of my life in that moment with the women on the call. Lucky for the proxy mothers who also did not know what to do in a circumstance where there is nothing to do but pray, but did know how to pray, and did know how to ask others to pray.
I know they lit candles that night. I know there were phone trees and prayer circles mobilized, rosaries and ceremony from the vestiges of modern motherhood.
I believe equally in medicine and magic, and this is partly why.
Because the next day he rose again.
My proxy mothers have reached out and reached in over the last few months, sending random prayers and blessings (and occasional comics and homemade pepper jelly... some of them are Midwestern to the core), and this has made so much difference. I can appreciate the sisterhood of shared sorrow, and the gratitude for reconnecting those who had felt so lost. They have adopted me as an honorary member of their class, which feels in many ways like coming home, and living among the legends of my childhood.
Sat nam, my virtual latte friends, and thanks for reading.
