About my Mom and Frank

It's time I told you something about my mom. It's a story about love and the things we give up for love. It's a story about lost opportunities. It's a story that begins with a death and ends with one.

Many of you out there are aware that my father died of a heart attack when I was just about two years old. This was over thirty years ago, and it's a theme I keep coming back to in my life for obvious reasons, though his death is really just the departure point. When my dad died, he and my mom had been married for twenty years. They'd had two children together and then, years later, they'd had me, when people in their late thirties and early forties tended to be done with having babies. In the year or so after my dad's death--when my sisters were teenagers and I was pushing three years old--a time when my mom was just beginning her lifetime of grief over it, she became involved with a man named Frank, a married man named Frank.

They'd met through mutual friends, or in Jewish circles in the community or something. Frank and his wife Bernice had kids my sisters' age--all the siblings were in the Jewish youth group together during their high school years, the youth group I went on to join fifteen years later when I was finally a teenager. Everyone in their mutual circle knew the affair was going on--friends, all the kids--but no one ever talked about it. Frank's wife knew. She didn't consent, but she knew, and I imagine she felt she just couldn't do anything about it. Frank and my mom had an active relationship that lasted on and off--but mostly on--for about seventeen years. They've loved each other their whole lives since, but have never been able truly to be together.

During one of the "off" times, or I suspect, in order artificially to instate an off time, my mom met and married her second of three husbands, Charlie. She's recently admitted to me she married this man primarily because she thought I'd needed a "father figure." It's so very, very sad what people will do to entertain their perceptions of what would be best for other people. Frank stayed in an unsatisfying, perhaps miserable marriage because he thought it was the right thing to do by his wife and kids; my mom entered into a doomed marriage so I could have a sixty year-old Scientologist who kept a stack of Playboys in the bathroom, drank screw drivers like water, and came attached to several adult children who were all completely insane "father figure." Oh, and she was lonely, by the way, and she deserved to be loved wholly. He was good to her, relatively speaking, and I liked him despite the colorful description above. The marriage to Charlie lasted six months. My mom simply couldn't stay with him because she was still in love with Frank.

Once, when I was around seven or eight, Mom and I were having dinner at this restaurant we loved, called Tasso's. It was one of those "Greek-American" restaurants where the only Greek food on the menu was salad with feta and olives and Greek lemon soup; otherwise, it was all burgers and fried chicken dinners and noodles and such, and this kid was always happy with one of those. I think I ordered the fried chicken that evening--the evening when my mom and I both noticed Frank and his wife being seated a few tables over from us. It wasn't ever something my mom had sat me down and explained to me; it was just understood, and talked about naturally. I knew that Frank was married and that he and my mom were involved romantically. I knew intrinsically, even when I was that young, that it must've been difficult for my mom to encounter him with his wife in public. I asked her, "Can I go over and say 'hi' to Frank?" She wasn't secretive, and she wasn't ashamed. She didn't instill any fear in me at all. She simply said, "Of course you can go over and say hi." So I did. I don't know if that encounter with sociable seven year-old me was painful for Bernice--I hope it wasn't.

My mom called me yesterday morning and told me the news of Frank's death. He'd been very, very ill for a long time, and the last time my mom and I talked about him, just a few weeks ago, it'd occurred to me that it might not be long. My mom has had a shit week. She didn't go to the funeral. She almost did. In fact, Frank's sister, who had met my mom years ago and knew how important she was to Frank, was insistent that she come to the funeral; after all, Mom is in mourning too. Ultimately, she decided she didn't want to look into Frank's sons' eyes. Frank's sister had arrived earlier in the week, when it was clear Frank was on his way out. She called Mom and invited her over to visit Frank. She was able to sit with him while he floated in and out of sleep. She said to him, "I love you," and he opened his eyes and said, "I love you, too." She said, "Do you even know who this is, Frank?" and he opened his eyes again and said, "Of course," and he said my mom's name.

My mom says she feels a little freer now that he's gone. She'd felt a resurgence of all kinds of emotions about him over the last few years. Righteous anger that he'd wasted their lives. Intense guilt that she wasn't there for him more after he was diagnosed with the cancer. A holy fear that her current husband would find out that they were still friends and had continued to meet for coffee once in a while. Frank was my mom's great love, arguably beyond her love for my dad, and far beyond her love for either Charlie or Hubby #3. When they were together, she never wanted her time with him to end, she'd told me recently. She wanted to be with him completely, and perhaps the predicament was self-reinforcing. Maybe she wanted him so because she couldn't have him. I can't say I haven't resonated with this kind of desperate longing myself at times.

I'd dreamt about Bianca that night, just hours before my mom called me with the news about Frank. I had often reflected on Mom's relationship with Frank when Bianca and I were involved; I had identified with the insatiable draw to this person I could never really have. It's not surprising to me that I have some of the same relationship "karma" (I'm using the term very loosely) as my mom. The differences in the arrangements of these two affairs were vast though, due to the generational and subcultural chasm that distinguishes my experience in the world of love and sexuality from my mom's. My relationship with Bianca had been approved by her partner. We'd, the three of us, sat down together to negotiate it before there was ever even a kiss. This is something that suburban heterosexual folks with families in the 1970s could never imagine. Ultimately, my affair turned illicit, too, and I'm not going to waste my time or yours rehashing it again, since you can read about it, and all my regrets therein, here. In the dream about Bianca, she wanted to be with me, but clandestinely. She wanted to drag me off and fuck and didn't want anyone to know about it; after all this time, she still wanted me, but it felt wrong. I couldn't bring myself to do it.

Frank was kinda conservative. He worked for a well-known company that made light bulbs as well as triggers for nuclear weapons. Years ago, when he'd learned that I was working for a peace organization, he said, "Oh, so you're one of those bleeding hearts." The thing about him was that he wasn't adversarial, he was a jokester. I was never really at odds with him. He loved my mom in the only way he knew how. I just wish that he could have seen more possibilities in his life. I wish he could have done the real right thing by Bernice by telling her the truth. The truth is painful in the moment, but stings far less over time than betrayal. I wish Frank had had the courage to live the life he wanted to live. And I continue to wish for my mom that she do the same. It's never too late to decide to do your life differently. I hope we all can remember that.

Rest in peace, Frank.

Love,

Bree

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