Four Westchester Writers Still Thinking About Mom

For most of her life, Susan Hodara didn’t have the kind of relationship with her mother that she would have liked.

Growing up, she saw friends being able to confide with their moms while hers was happy to play the role of a dutiful and passive wife to her strong-willed father. One of Hodara’s most vivid childhood memories of her mother was seeing her back turned toward her while working in the kitchen.

It wasn’t until years later when Hodara’s father was dying that she saw a much different side emerge.

“He had Alzheimer’s, the relationship’s changing and then she was the caregiver and she was being much more responsible for things and I talked to her before I talked to him,” recalled Hodara, a New Castle resident. “So our relationship started to grow as he became diminished.”

Hodara joined Mount Kisco resident and writer Joan Potter, and two other Westchester writers, Vicki Addesso of Eastchester and Pound Ridge resident Lori Toppel who have been part of their writing group, in co-authoring their new book that was recently released, “Still Thinking of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers.”

Potter, a longtime journalist and a teacher of memoir writing classes, initially began compiling stories about her mother shortly after her passing in 1995. But it wasn’t the right time to continue.

“I took a writer’s workshop in the city and it was too soon after her death because my teacher said it’s like she’s looking over your shoulder,” Potter recalled.

It would be more than a decade later when Potter would take what she had written, aided by a 20-year-old cassette tape that her mother had made where she spoke of her life growing up in the small Adirondacks town of Tupper Lake, N.Y., and meet with Hodara to start on what would be a nearly six-year project in late 2006.

The book, released by Big Table Publishing of Boston, doesn’t gratuitously bear dirty laundry. Instead, it traces some of the woman’s strongest memories of their moms–the joyful and sorrowful–and how some of those stories helped them understand them better and affected their relationships with their children.

“You can follow four different women through four different kinds of relationships with their mothers–not particularly happy, not terrible, horrible, horrific things,” said Hodara, the only one of the authors whose mother is still alive. “They’re just life, a relationship between a mother and a daughter. If anything, readers will find things to identify with in all of the stories.”

Toppel is the only group member whose parents were divorced. Her mother turned bitter after her marriage fell apart, causing terrible strains between mother and daughter. Addesso joined the writing group shortly after she had breast cancer surgery and treatment. She recalled her mother as a loving but lonely woman, raising four children and taking care of in-laws. It wasn’t until Addesso joined the writing group that she was able to fully express her feelings about her mother.

For Potter, listening to her mother’s tape gave her a new understanding of her life, learning of stories for the first time and filling in the gaps on others. Both of Potter’s maternal grandparents died young–her mother’s mother during the 1918 influenza epidemic, her mother’s father committed suicide. After Potter’s mother married, she returned to Tupper Lake to raise her family.

Potter said she recalled the many times throughout her life when her mother “rescued” her, whether it was when the local police were ready to raid an afterhours establishment she was at while still underage or when she was a new mother herself living in Brooklyn and unable to console her crying newborn.

“She just picked up the baby and it stopped crying,” Potter said.

But there were also the painful memories, none worse than when Potter’s father was dying. Her parents had moved to California and Potter’s mother didn’t want her daughter to make the trip.

“Even now, a zillion years later, the fact that I wasn’t there, because he was conscious, and I didn’t come…” Potter said while trailing off. “That was the most hurtful thing she ever did, yet she was trying to protect me.”

Throughout the writing process, which was delayed two to three years because of differences with an agent, the four women managed to be compatible. The book is divided into four major parts, with each writer spending about 40 to 60 pages, followed by a conclusion.

“You put four people together to do a project it’s not necessarily going to work out, and we somehow have been able to work together in a really respectful way,” said Hodara. “We’re all different but we mesh well.”

Hodara and Potter stressed the work is not mini biographies of their mothers’ lives, a key distinction since memoir writing is meant to be someone’s memory. (Each woman wrote between 40 and 60 pages about their moms.)

Hodara said she is grateful for the opportunity to not only share her experiences with others but to get to know her mother better. No memory was better than an anniversary party that was thrown for Hodara and her husband a few years ago.

“(My mother) came with a song that she sang in this restaurant where we had, I don’t know, 50 to 75 people, and she stood up and sang this song to me and my husband for the anniversary party,” Hodara said. “It really was amazing to everybody.”

The book is available at www.BigTablePublishing.com, Amazon.com and on the authors’ website at www.StillHereThinkingofYou.com. The paperback version is $15 or $7.99 on e-book.