My mother, Chrisann Kohlhepp, died in March 2023.
This year was my third Mother’s Day without her.
In going through my mother’s house after her death, I found enough loose and spare keys to fill a quart size bag. I did what you do when you find keys—figure out which keys fit the locks in the house, which keys go to my siblings’ houses, keys to the neighbors to see if they fit their houses, etc. I tried a lot of locks, y’all!
I thought, “What the hell are all these keys for?” I asked my siblings, neighbors, other family members, and friends. Really quickly, I started using the bag of keys because, if for no other reason, it got a reaction from people. I would hand the person I was speaking with the “bag o’ keys” and the person would search through it for keys that might be theirs. There were a few matches using this strategy.
But what I got using the method of the “bag o’ keys” was stories about my mother’s life. About half the keys are from the ten years that she was a foster mother. This is the story of those keys:
My siblings—all of whom were my mother’s foster children—told me that she had to change the locks whenever a foster child would move out. I learned these children’s stories through my siblings. These were children my mother cared for and loved.
As many other gay children do, I “escaped” my small city in upstate New York in 1994 for larger, “gayer” places. Since I was living my best life 800 miles away, these children were names my mother told me on the other end of the phone. Most of these children never made it long enough to my annual Christmas return home and I never put a face to a name.
Now their stories of abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents came out of my siblings as matter-of-factly as if they were telling me how to use a key in a door.
Listening to the stories of foster children I never met, I was learning that my mother had a more complicated life than I realized. It must have been so hard for her to come home from work regularly and say goodbye to a child she’d helped to raise for weeks or months. To pack up the clothes and toys she’d purchased for the child, maybe make their favorite meal one last time, and then give that child one of my mother’s epic hugs before she said goodbye.
As I heard these stories from my siblings, I realized both how resilient my mother must have been to continue taking in foster children after each one of these “goodbyes.” How routine it became for my mother and siblings to change the keys to the house when a child would leave. And how much I had missed by living my best life 800 miles away.
I missed sharing important pieces of my mother’s life by “escaping” my hometown. I didn’t realize how much I had missed until after she died. I’m glad I didn’t carelessly throw away that bag of keys. I followed my curiosity with those keys, and the stories those keys represented helped me come to love my mother more than I already did.
I miss my mother, Chrisann Kohlhepp, every day.