‘How lucky I was to have Mrs H!’
Junot Díaz
We in the Caribbean know all too well: not all mothers are blood mothers. Lucky is the boy who gets a mother when he needs her the most – and I was very lucky indeed.
Picture me in 1977: eight years old, in the US for barely two years. The Dominican Republic lost to me, but alive like mad in my dreams. My English weak, my Spanish strong. My bewilderment and sense of loss, stronger still. I had no idea what I was doing, what I supposed to be. No immigrant handbooks. No sagacious mentors.
My mother was so overwhelmed she withdrew from her children. She kept us kids alive – a mighty feat considering there were five of us and my father barely gave her any money – but she became a half presence. My poor mother, who hadn’t talked a lot on the island, was almost completely silent in the lands of English.
Even if she’d had the means, which she didn’t, my mother was in no condition to help us: not with school, not with the language that glitched our tongues, not with the country that seemed determined to hate every part of us into the ground.
It’s hard to exaggerate how tough things were in those days. But like I said: I was lucky.
That year was also the year of Star Wars and Roots, but more importantly it was the year that the Hamawy family moved from Egypt to our neighbourhood in New Jersey. The eldest son, who had broken English like me, showed up to the bus stop with a book in his hand. I, apparently, had a book in my hand that day as well. And that oldest son quickly became my first true American friend, though neither of us were truly Americans.
My aunt once said a child makes a marriage real. Well, a friend makes a country real. And because I was best friends with the oldest son, I got his mother in the bargain – a double fortune.
Mrs H was a slender, modest, dark-haired woman who radiated calm and will, who never in my memory yelled or hit. She was the first woman I knew who drove, and who adored her sons strictly and openly.
I wonder what she saw when she first met me. Her son’s good friend, wild but loyal? A poor boy with promise, famished for love? None of the above?
Whatever she saw, Mrs H promptly took me in hand, without any fuss. She started taking me to the library with her sons, helped me get my first library card and encouraged me to read at a time when none of the adults in my life encouraged me to do anything besides shut up and behave.
Mrs H was the first person I knew in real life who pushed education in a clear, forceful way. The youngest of seven children, and the only one of her sisters to graduate from college, she understood at a profound level what education – or its absence – could do to a person.
“You must go to college,” I remember her telling me, as if it was yesterday. “There is no choice.” There was something behind those words – a hint of battles fought, of obstacles overcome, of futures overcoming pasts.
How lucky I was to have Mrs H; how this calm, poised woman shaped me. It was because of her that I learned to love Egyptian cuisine – she used to make a marvellous kamounia (beef stewed in cumin) and waraq’inab (stuffed grape leaves), but my absolute favourite was always her rice covered with ground beef, peas, carrots and almonds.
Mrs H brought me out of the lonely bubble in which I had been stranded by family and circumstance, and exposed me to a larger, brighter world of possibility.
Life being life, our time together was not endless. Just before I graduated from high school, the Hamawys moved to the suburbs. It might as well have been another planet, but Mrs H had planted her seeds well: her son and I made it to college, Rutgers, graduating the same year. He became a surgeon; I a writer.
Before I left for college, when the dream of becoming a writer was stirring in me, Mrs H gave me a present: a thesaurus. I don’t recall what she said exactly, but it was something along the lines that all writers should have one. I’ve lived in six countries and a dozen cities, and have lost almost all my possessions at one time or another … but I still have that thesaurus. I still use it. JD
‘We often joke that our friendship was written in the stars’
Kerry Hudson
This morning, I put my toddler in special socks. Given to him by my best friend, they were previously her daughter’s, and before that her son wore them. He has just turned 13.
As I pull these socks over my kid’s impossibly soft heels, he looks up to me and tells me, authoritatively, that they are “Mama Via socks”. When he says his own version of my best friend’s name, Levia, something warm and content settles within me. It feels like family.
You might be wondering why socks, originally bought in the Next sale, might be kept for more than a decade. But these are no ordinary socks: they’re magical, black socks adorned with glitter so that our children might walk across a universe. They are magical, too, because I’m estranged from my mother (and my father – a story for another time) and these socks, passed from my best friend, my other mother, are a kind of ridiculous but fitting family heirloom.
Indeed, we often joke that our friendship was written in the stars. We met properly on our first day working as bar staff at the Globe theatre in London, but discovered that our paths had crossed much earlier. In fact, it would turn out that we had met much earlier. When I told Levia where I had been studying drama, she said she had recently been on a bus with students from the same university and one had declared: “I knew I wasn’t in character on stage because I couldn’t stop thinking about the snakebite and black I’d have at the union after.” I looked at her stunned. “That was me!” We were best friends from that very moment. I was 21, newly and painfully estranged from my mother, and the universe had sent me just what I needed.
I always wanted a mother like the mums from TV adverts. The kind where you say, in adulthood: “My mum’s my best friend.” I didn’t get that, but, in Levia, I was given the best aspects of that sort of relationship: encouragement, love, unconditional championing and genuine pride. The ability to kindly call out my bullshit and to tell me the brutal truth with a cuddle.
We are very different in many ways and perhaps that’s why it works. Twenty years later, she runs an inner-city nursery school. She’s calm in a crisis and always cheerful. She is fiercely sociable, her birthday parties always packed to the rafters. Conversely, I get easily stressed and I’m a well-masked introvert with a maximum two hours socialising on the clock before I want to be alone. But with her, I always feel braver and calmer.
In our 30s, while I was still careening around the globe, dancing in Berlin and Buenos Aires night clubs until 5am and sleeping with unsuitable men and women, Levia was already married. When she had her first child and then her second, she insisted that I be their godmother. She trusted that, despite my chaotic upbringing, I could nurture her children – even though I doubted my own ability.
I became seriously ill last year while living in Prague and she was the only person I would speak to on the phone. I would call her, flat on my back, with my mobile on speaker, propped on the pillow next to me. Two decades of friendship, respect, trust and absolute enduring love would have us laugh-crying and cry-crying for hours, the tears running down the side of my face.
I was 14 years behind her when I decided to have my own baby, but when I thought about models for motherhood, it was her unyielding patience, kindness and joy that I drew upon as an example for my own parenting. She is still the best mother I know.
I’m a firm believer that the universe gives you what you need – even if it’s just a pair of children’s socks to remind you who your chosen family is. Some people refer to their best friends as “sisters from another mister”, but Levia is, for me, another kind of mother. KH
‘The first time we met, her kindness shone through’
Lemn Sessay
I was 21 when I met my mother. She was 42. I had been stolen from her as a baby and placed with foster parents. We met at dusk in Fajara, a small residential district by the Atlantic Ocean, in a tiny country on the west coast of the giant continent of Africa.
Turning up out of the blue put her in a difficult position. There was someone staying at the house. As we walked up the pathway towards her front door, she said: “I’m sorry, I have a visitor – can we talk about this after she has gone?” So I sat in the front room and made small talk about the high rainfall in Manchester.
My mother and I have met about 20 times since then. Whereas she is a private person, my life has been public record from the day I was born. My search for her began with a letter from these public records, sent by my mother to Wigan social services in 1968: “How can I get Lemn back? I want him to be with his own people in his own country.”
I didn’t get the chance to have her as a mother growing up, but she is the only mother I would ever want. Thirty-four years after our clumsy, inadequate first meeting, the relationship is clearer and closer than ever.
In that time, I have also learned that familial figures are not limited by blood. Linda is similar in age to my mother. She is fun and wise and kind. I am living in her beautiful home in south-west London for three months while she visits Thailand and I wait to move into my new house. It is spring and two wood pigeons are circling each other in the garden.
How did we meet? In 2013, I needed time away after a breakup. A mutual friend asked Linda, on my behalf, if I could stay at her place in the south of France. The first time we met, her kindness shone through and, that summer, she allowed me to stay at her beautifully restored home, in a village with a population of about 600 people called La Romieu. The solitude was exactly what I needed.
Since then, I’ve invited Linda to significant events in my life: she was there when I became chancellor at the University of Manchester; she came to the celebration dinner after I received my OBE. Linda has been a true and firm friend. She also has a brilliant, crystal-clear memory, and is easily able to recall dates and times, which, in lieu of family, has meant a lot to me. She is at ease wherever she goes and speaks to everyone as an equal.
Linda has demonstrated to me what is important in life: friendship, family and finance. True independence is, in fact, all about relationships. Linda demonstrates how a lightness of being comes from hard work; more recently, she has become a writer and proven that it is never too late to realise your dream.
Trust is not my best, most exercised muscle. But I can really talk to Linda and she is there for me, always with my best interests at heart.
In France, Linda wanted me to relish the feeling of home: the idea that home is more than bricks and mortar. Years on, I now know that I have the capacity to feel at home in myself, to be kind to myself, to be my own best parent and a good friend to others. In that quiet place, in La Romieu, in the summer of 2013, surrounded by fields of bowing sunflowers, Linda and I began our dear friendship. LS
• Lemn Sissay’s new series, Lemn Sissay Is the One and Only, airs on BBC Radio 4 every Friday at 11.30am until 24 March.
