Other Mothers
At 16 I had nothing.
No roof that was mine. No plan. I used to go to parties to find friends to spend the night with. That’s how I found places to stay.
I slept on 86 different couches. One night each. Sometimes two if I was lucky and quiet enough. I was always stressed. Always mentally moving to the next thing.
Where was I going to sleep.
Where was I going to eat.
I was scared in a way I couldn’t name because I was too young to understand what I was actually in the middle of.
I didn’t know the risks. I didn’t understand the gravity of what I was doing. I was just a kid trying to get through the night.
One night I was at a party. My friend’s dad was a doctor. Their house felt like something I didn’t have a word for yet — security. I was in the kitchen, sitting on the counter, playing with a paperclip. I’d bent it open. I put it in my mouth the way you do when you’re young and not thinking.
And then one of my front teeth just broke. Fell apart. Right there.
I walked around with a hole in my front tooth for days. I was ashamed. I wanted to hide. What else was I going to do.
Then Lara’s mom called me. Asked me to meet her. I told her where I was — on the street — and she came and picked me up. I thought maybe we were just going to talk.
She took me to a dentist.
I sat in that chair and listened to the price and started getting ready to leave. I didn’t have it. I didn’t have anything close to it. I remember the shame of that moment. Sitting there in that chair with nothing.
She looked at the dentist and said: Please fix it.
Three words. She said it like it was obvious. Like there was no other option.
I stood on the street afterward and watched her drive away.
I still think about that car turning the corner.
That same winter I was cold. I only owned t-shirts. I don’t know if she noticed or if Lara said something. But that Christmas she gave me a box.
Inside was a Schott leather jacket. $300. My size.
I still have that jacket. I will never get rid of it as long as I live.
She wasn’t the only one.
Craig’s mom let me stay with them for a couple of months without once making me feel like a burden. Kelly’s mom just opened her door. A well known artist in Arizona gave me a safe place to land when I had nowhere else to go.
I called them all eventually. One by one. I told them what those moments meant. Not the polite version — the real one.
One day I saw Lara post something on Facebook about her mother. Something warm, a daughter writing about her mom. I left a comment. I told the whole story. The dentist. Please fix it. The street afterward.
Later Lara told me she’d read the comment out loud to her mother.
She said her mother got choked up.
I needed to know she knew. I needed her to know that a scared kid on the street in Phoenix remembered every single thing she did. That he carried it with him to Hollywood and Japan and every place in between. That he still has the jacket.
That he always will.
I was hungry a lot. But I was lucky.
Not lucky the way people mean when they say it casually. Lucky the way you are when the world has no reason to be kind to you and it is anyway.
You were my other mothers. My other family.
I made it because of you.
— Neon