When my mother married her third husband, I, at the age of eleven, was given the duty, or privilege, of proposing a toast at the banquet following the wedding. My uncle Buck coached me—“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” I was to begin.
I kept going over it in my head. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” until the moment arrived and I found myself standing with a glass in my hand saying, “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking—” I stopped. I couldn’t remember what else my uncle had told me to say, so I said, “I want to propose a toast to my new father”—I paused—“and my old mother.”
Everybody laughed and applauded. I could hear my uncle’s high-pitched twitter. It wasn’t what I was supposed to have said, that last part. My mother wasn’t old, she was about thirty, and that wasn’t what I’d meant by “old.” I’d meant she was my same mother, that hadn’t changed. No matter how often the father changed the mother did not.
I was afraid I’d insulted her. Everybody laughing was no insurance against that. I didn’t want this new father, and a few months later, neither did my mother.