I am enjoying the ironic anonymity of public transport as we roll along on my Amtrak train this morning toward San Francisco, looking out over the valley in what I hope is the calm before some nice rainstorms the next few days. I love the train, perhaps because it is slower and more civilized than the BART I commuted to work on for nearly 15 years, but also because it always conjures memories of when my children were very young and we would frequently travel back to the bay area for visits with dad, or just so we could visit friends and family.
In the back and forth world of holding a family together after divorce I think it was very fitting that we often opted for the civility and conviviality that the train provided for our transition from home to home. We used to play card games, sometimes with some other child or teen who might be on the train alone pulled into our group. And especially in the summer I would read to the kids on the train, all three of them huddled next to me. I remember the trips when I read them "The Life of Pi", omitting or altering in the way a mother lion will for her cubs, the more tragic portions of the book - but not the shipwreck, not the profound sense of loss that compelled Pi Patel to bond with the animals who were his fellow travelers and to mourn the loss of one after another of them as he silently did for his own family lost to sea - and to bond with the tiger Richard Parker. My children loved that book, laughed with peels and rolls at the young Pi's misadventures while still in India fumbling over religion and taboos. Two years ago at Thanksgiving we all went to see the movie together when it premiered, and while we loved the movie, were captivated by it- it was not as vivid as the book. Still it was a great movie and seeing it together as two of the children were young adults and the youngest a high schooler standing taller than the rest of us at last - it was very sentimental.
Trains are sentimental conveyances. They remind us both of destinations and of journeys past. They hold the promise of future travel and adventure too. But this is not a valentine to the train - it is a Valentine to people I love - the Momoh family, and in particular to the other mother who waited at the other end of the trip, month after month, year after year - loving my children as much as her own. And, of course, that is mutual on my end. Rosemary Momoh is an extraordinary person. When people tell me I have raised my children well, that they are good, loving people with open hearts and that it is fortunate that their dad and I chose to keep on raising them together and to be friends and family to each other I just shrug. Our children were born endowed with their own personalities, their own capacities to love. Yes, we helped foster that by not screwing up too much and by trying to be open and loving ourselves - but we could not have held our family together, could not have seen it take this remarkable form it has now adding the three younger children - had it not been for Rosemary. She had to be open too - and from the very beginning.
I didn't think it extraordinary at the time, but I guess it is not too common that the former wife comes to the hospital and is welcomed into the home after the births of the children from the subsequent nuclear family. But welcomed I was, and what a gift to see three new wonderful members of our family come into being - to see how all of the children wrapped around each other from the very beginnings of their lives. When we are all together, whether it is at home or on vacation or at some family event - we feel whole and natural and enveloping. The sound of each of the children's voices is music, literally, in my ears. When we are together we don't have to think, we can just be. And, again, that would not have been possible without Rosemary, without a willingness to navigate through the early, more difficult times of trying to fold in an existing but evolving fabric that certainly had its tensions, and then help us iron out wrinkles together to be who we would all become together and individually as a family.
I would have loved Rosemary and all of the younger children anyway. They are open, kind, funny, down to earth and warm - each a unique jewel radiant with his or her own inner beauty. But I get to love them more, get to love my own children and of course my former husband, on greater and better levels, because Rosemary is who she is and because she trusted in love from the very beginning. I think the gift we have given each other as mothers in this extended family of ours is acceptance, love, respect, and maybe most of all - kindness and compassion. When raising a large brood of children those gifts indeed make every day full of love. Every day is Valentine's Day in that regard. But, I want to give this Valentine to Rosemary in February and remind our children how important it is to honor that special kind of love that isn't about the chance of blood relation but about reaching out and embracing - about seeing a circle and willing it to be open to expanding to include you - and then continuing to open it up wider and wider while fortifying it with love.
So I continue on today's train ride to a familiar destination and I can conjure in my mind the wide eyes and broadening smiles of our collective children and of Rahmon and Rosemary greeting us at the platform, of the trips up to Oregon to see the girls at college or to gather for a graduation celebration. They are all with me every day, but especially on train rides, and I know this journey has been and continues to be so much richer and so much warmer, so familiar and comforting because Rosemary has walked beside me.
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