I need to tell someone about my mother

How wealth and privilege can shield us from healing and truth.

My earliest memory is from 1984. I’m on the side of a highway in Connecticut, and my mother is telling me to pick up all the pieces of glass from the smashed headlight of my grandfather’s Mercedes while she talks to the cops. It was notable to me because I recall realizing, for the first time, that I understood how to count to twenty. On the way back she coached me on how to lie to minimize what happened; I don’t remember the rest of that day very well, but I do remember that it took ten more years to understand that it was unusual.

My mother Midge in New York City; 1976

That’s one important thing to know about my mother. Another important thing to know about my mother is that I don’t talk about her, which is hardly a unique situation and one you may well relate with… but also there are some special reasons that I do not talk about my mother.

The first is the sheer absurdity of her story; there are so many elements to my mother’s life that sound like fantasies, and I’ve definitely seen more than one of her yarns change in the retelling. A more powerful reason is that I don’t want to talk about myself, and while this story isn’t about me it has to be about me because it’s my story too. While I can’t speak to the full truth of her life, I can attest to some of the more fantastic moments because I was there for them.

I didn’t mean to write this; it began as an obituary. I’ll get to that. This first bit, I suppose, is a testimonial.

According to the legend, in 1978 Midge Steuber dropped acid while flying a Cessna from an airport in Connecticut into LaGuardia. That was the first of three near plane crashes she was rumored to have been involved in, although I can only attest to the third because I was in the copilot seat. She climbed Kilimanjaro twice, went to Everest base camp, and was strapped into a bed during a winter crossing of Drake’s Passage to get to Antarctica for no other reason as she didn’t want to be turning 60. All of those things I know to be true. By many reasonable measures she lived an accomplished life.

My mother and father in Mexico in 1982

She also hurt me, over and over, in so many big and small ways. She and my father met at an AA meeting in 1981 in Austin, Texas, and I was born in their trailer a year later. After a few months, my father — an aspiring amateur rodeo rider — relapsed. She decided she’d birthed the devil and left in the night for her home base back in Pelham, NY. For twenty years she told me my father died; I didn’t learn until years later that he lived until 2000. Legal records show I have three half siblings, but the trail runs cold in the 70s.

Whether or not she had a drink she was a drunk every day that she lived. Before I was ten we’d lived in ten states and I’d been in ten major car accidents. Sometimes she’d lay down in the back seat if she was having a panic attack on the highway — once I could reach the pedals, anyway. She also told me many times I was a demon. That I was her third, and only failed, abortion.

An excerpt of a letter sent to by my mother to every teacher and parent of a friend I had through elementary and middle school. While it feels strange to share, it’s also oddly notable.

But oh boy, did she ever love me; she found every shrink she could to confirm I was a genius. I skipped the fifth and eighth grades. She loved me so much that I was in the ninth grade at eleven, and I rode ponies, and we found all the best schools and she told me every fucking day that she loved me and loved me and loved me so much … except when she didn’t, and then one day when she stopped. Around the time of my fifteenth birthday she decided not to speak with me again.

It’s not all on her. I wasn’t the mascot she wanted after a certain age; somewhere around thirteen I discovered that there were these things called parties, and also that there were women, and that with a little ingenuity I could arrange for these facts to co-occur in pleasant ways. This was, of course, of particular consequence vis-a-vis Operation Golden Child, which meant by any reasonable standard of behavior her response ended up being overblown.

Over the next few years it became clear that I inherited her lack of risk aversion. I’ve broken twenty-eight bones (if you count my nose a bunch of times). I ended up a salesman for a while in my 20s, and I was better at it than ethics probably deserved. Eventually I decided I didn’t like whatever it was I was doing before, got a couple degrees, and here we are today. I forget who said it, but “someday it just isn’t your parents’ fault anymore.” I take full accountability for the person I am, and for the most part I’m proud of who that person is.

Someday it isn’t just your parents’ fault anymore.

But there’s a specific form of madness that’s only available to those with a certain level of privilege. I’m not saying my family was rich rich, but the world’s largest croquet center bears our name — a testament to a legacy that was more about social standing than true wealth. There’s a little two foot sprinkler in Milwaukee with my name on it that my family insists is a “water feature.” For all the conceits of abundance, though, there was always enough. Had my mother not had a family she could run back to, with a string of luxury cars to provide, she would have lived a very different life. At a certain level of wealth and visibility, public attention alone can evoke consequences; for a lower level of wealth it’s possible to crash through a hundred rock bottoms before it starts to hurt.

Consider this: without the safety net of a Pelham estate, without a surname that meant croquet and chemical shipping, where would her escapades have led her? How would the story have unfolded for a single mother, five times married before 35, who moved roughly every six to twelve months, indulging her worst instincts while struggling with mental health? In a society that so often fails its most vulnerable, she might have ended up in a very different place. Instead she owned a not insignificant percentage of a mining town.

In late 2016, all of my childhood materials — art projects, fingerprints, etc — were dumped by my my mother outside the door of our home. The archive was remarkable.

The opportunities that she denied herself — she never held a job, never lived in one place or participated in a community — might have forced her to confront her dysfunction if ever she’d engaged with them. It felt like she was running from herself her whole life, darting around the globe trying to find a home. When that inevitably didn’t work out, she burned the bridges and just started again somewhere else. The privilege that protected her also prevented her from growing; the subtle tyranny of a life lived without consequence.

There’s a peculiar type of madness that’s only available to those at a certain level of privilege.

My life, of course, would have been dramatically different too. Instead of skipping grades, riding ponies, and attending the best schools … well: When I was eight years old my mother got me drunk on a river boat in Haiti because she thought it was funny. I could easily have lived a life characterized more by survival than privilege, and there’s a very real question that I have had to grapple with: To what extent is my own place unearned? The disparity is striking, even painful to consider. My mother visited fifty-seven countries in her life; my father died of alcoholic liver failure on a reservation in Texas. Who balanced those scales? And to what extent am I perpetuating this dysfunction too?

This is the invisible power of privilege, the unearned grace it extends.

My mother and I never truly reconciled. We spoke again a few times whenever her most recent spiritual awakening told her to — and then she’d cut ties. She died in a hospital in Los Angeles while her oldest friend held her hand, and I’m happy for that. I’m also appalled that I wasn’t told until three months later. From the paperwork I’ve seen, I do know she had her body compressed into soil and distributed as seed packets. I didn’t get one; if you did, I suggest thinking long and hard before planting it. My mother was why hurricanes are named after people.

I don’t have any answers here. If you manage to find the point I’m trying to make, please do let me know. But I do know that I wasn’t truly reckoning with some very important questions until she passed — I didn’t even realize I needed to — and that to live a mindful life I must. In finally being truly orphaned I feel as though I’ve been born.

As I wrote this today I dug through my photo library to see what older pictures I could share. I confirmed a handful of additional matches that the app suggested; now it says there are “No Remaining Photos of Margaret Steuber.” I suppose that’s true now, forever, and it was an unexpected punch in the gut. In the spirit of honoring what remains, here’s an obituary I know she’d be proud of:

Margaret “Midge” Forsyth Steuber was born sometime in October of 1952 and died sometime in December of 2022. She had at least two strokes and five cancers, by her own account. She passed having thoroughly met her lifetime goal of skipping her body like a rock, utterly spent, over life’s finish line. She needn’t always be missed but she mustn’t be forgotten.

She loved her son.

The author as a child with his mother.

Lucas “Luke” Steuber (MS CCC-SLP, MA Applied Linguistics) is an essayist, software engineer, clinician, and mental health advocate. lukesteuber.com

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