I'm very close to my mother, perhaps in part because I'm the youngest. Plus, because of my mental health issues, she has often come to take care of me when I have needed extra mothering during my alleged adulthood.

Interestingly, I also look more like my mother than any of my sisters do. In photos of us at the same age we look like the same person.

She got married at 19 to a man who was eight years older and with whom she was not truly in love. She got pregnant, they were both Catholic and it was before abortion was legal, so marriage was the only option. But she did feel love for him, and he was a good man, so she committed to making a life with him and proceeded to pop out more kids.

My father made lots of money but had to travel much of the time and wasn't home a lot. But Mom's mother, my Grandma, lived close by and was often there to help.

Mom and Anna met in kindergarten and have been best friends ever since. Their families lived a few blocks from each other in a smallish town during an era when kids were largely unsupervised and ran around outside until dark. They had countless overnights and went on vacations with each other's families.

Both were pretty, popular in school and had boyfriends whenever they wanted them -- but the boyfriends took second place to the primary friendship between the two girls. This was the 1960s, and while some girls went to college it was still more common to get married young and start a family. After Mom got married (because she had to), Anna got married also because it was what girls did.

At first, Mom and Anna's friendship continued with daily visits and multiple phone calls, but then Anna's husband got transferred to Albany, New York -- more than 500 miles away. Their relationship was reduced to letter-writing because long-distance phone calls were too expensive. They saw each other only once or twice a year

A couple years later, in 1969, they started talking (in their letters) about the idea of Anna coming for a visit. They were both 23, and Mom had two kids while Anna had none, so it made sense for her to do the traveling.

In the middle of this old-timey letter-writing correspondence (like something out of a Ken Burns documentary), Anna sent Mom a flier about a big outdoor music concert that was being planned not far from Albany, on a farm near the town of Woodstock. So, they decided to reverse their plan. Grandma was happy to babysit, so Mom flew to Albany. She and Anna stuffed a tent and some sleeping bags in Anna's VW bug and set out for Woodstock.

Fortunately, they left early and did not get stuck in the now-famous traffic jam, as 450,000 other people showed up also. Two girls alone in such a crowd could have been at some risk, but within the first day, they hooked up with a larger group of Anna's friends, and they all pitched their tents together and tried to keep their few possessions dry in the near-constant rain.

Although Mom and Anna did smoke weed (and still do), neither had tried anything stronger -- until the dudes in their friend group scored some LSD.

And that, dear reader, is how my mother ended up dancing naked in the rain at Woodstock. She still remembers it vividly because she was tripping, and her brain decided to freeze-frame every second of that experience. I heard about this growing up, and it became a legendary story within my family as over the years the Woodstock concert itself became legendary. I'm sure in other families, kids ask their parents to tell and re-tell the story of how they won the big sports championship or how they escaped from a repressive foreign country to emigrate to America. Those are probably good stories too. But for me it was, "Mommy, tell the story about when you danced naked in the rain at Woodstock!"

All of that happened about five years before I was born -- the surprise fifth daughter who showed up nearly three years after what my parents thought had been the last one. I was born into a loving, secure family in which none of the children had experienced anything more traumatic than the death of a pet. But then, when I was two years old, my father was killed in a traffic accident on one of his business trips. My mother was suddenly a widow at barely 30 years old with five kids to raise.

As he had in life, my father made certain his responsibilities would be met in the event of his death. He had invested his money well and also bought a very big life insurance policy. So the family was secure financially while everyone but me had to deal with their grief. Being so young, I was oblivious and accustomed to my father not being home.

At about this time, Anna's marriage ended in divorce and, still childless, she moved back to her hometown and was often at our house. Like Grandma, "Aunt Anna" was a parental figure throughout my childhood.

I have vague memories of occasional men that either Mom or Anna went on dates with, but none of them lasted long enough for me to remember their names. Mom and Anna were like a couple in that they did everything together, but all that time they were just platonic best friends. When my older sisters started moving out of the house, Anna moved in. She had her own room, but often slept in my mother's bed -- not sexually, but just because they liked watching late-night TV together.

My friends in the neighborhood considered my house the coolest to hang out in because Mom and Anna were so laid back. They were usually having drinks and playing records, and on weekends they often had parties. It's a good thing substance abuse was not among my mental illnesses because there was plenty of alcohol in our house. Neither Mom nor Anna were inclined to drink a lot, but they would have a few drinks and make each other laugh.

As I got older and started having the confusing emotions of puberty, I had a secret crush on Aunt Anna. I didn't think of it as a lesbian thing, but she was a beautiful, elegant, adult woman that I admired and wanted to be like. I felt that way about my mother also, but Anna was not a blood relation, so my young mind was free to think of her in a more sexy way.

Living in a one-bathroom house in an all-female family, we all saw each other nude sometimes. Mom and Anna were confident women who were not shy about their bodies around me and my sisters. I had always liked being nude also, of course, but now I was having different feelings about my body -- and Anna's. Because there was only the one bathroom with no shower (and therefore no shower curtain), it was normal for each of us to be taking a bath with the door ajar so someone else could tap on the door and come in to pee and have a brief chat. I loved doing that when Anna was in the tub, and one time, as we chatted, she was shaving her underarms, her own eyes focused on her task. The image of her wet breasts and white underarm imprinted itself on me as the perfection of womanhood and would flash into my mind unbidden many times thereafter when I was in my bed at night, touching myself.

When I was a freshman in college, I came home and told Mom and Aunt Anna that I thought I was probably a lesbian. I wasn't a bit worried that they would freak out because we knew other people who were gay, and my mother had always taught us kids there was nothing wrong with it. So Mom and Anna took me under their wings and let me talk about everything that had happened to me -- which included recently having finger sex with a girl in my dorm and keeping that fact secret from my boyfriend.

After that weekend visit home, I returned to college with resolve to be the person I was. Unfortunately, this meant breaking up with Jack so I could be with Kelly.

I had no idea that my conversation with Mom and Anna about my sexuality was going to change their lives also. Both of them started thinking about their own relationship, and a few days later at the breakfast table they were talking about me -- that it was good that I was figuring out my sexuality -- and one of them said, "maybe we're like Libby; maybe we're lesbians too, and we just don't know it yet."

So they talked about it in a theoretical, intellectual way. After all, they did love each other, they did find each other beautiful, they loved the physical touch of cuddling under the bed covers -- and neither was put off by the fundamental concept of lesbian sex. After all, it still involved the same body parts -- unlike with male homosexuals who had branched out to a whole different orifice.

Then they decided -- again in an intellectual way -- to try kissing. They had kissed each other on the lips many times before, but this time they were going to try a real kiss. They stood up from the breakfast table, held each other in their arms, and put their lips together. The first kiss was tentative. The second was not. Both felt a rush of passion as they stood in the kitchen kissing deeply and caressing each other's backs through their clothes. Then they looked into each other's eyes and they KNEW.

If this had been a movie, the credits would roll at this point, or (if it were another kind of movie) there would now be a steamy sex scene. In reality, it was 7:45 a.m. and they both had to go to work. So, having just shared a life-altering kiss with her best friend of 45 years, Mom and Anna each had to get in their separate cars and go to work.

They both worked downtown and always met for lunch at a bustling little diner. Seated at a booth, they poured out the thoughts and feelings they had each been obsessing over all morning. Many times they'd said "I love you" to each other, but the same words meant something different now.

This very private conversation was interrupted several times by various acquaintances who favored the same lunch spot -- two of whom asked to join them and scooted into the booth. Mom and Anna's important conversation was reduced to fleeting moments of eye contact during which they silently agreed to do more than kiss when they both got home from work. And they did.

I knew nothing of this until a few weeks later when I came home again, all bubbly about my relationship with Kelly, and about all the interesting women I had met through her. There was a particular sorority house favored by all the lesbian athletes, and I had been hanging out there with Kelly, smitten by the flirtatious attention I was getting from muscular female jocks.

I tend to be a chatterbox sometimes, and it was a while before Mom and Anna were able to tell their own news. I started picking up on a changed vibe, though -- a different way they looked at each other -- and I almost guessed it before they told me. I was overjoyed and wanted to hear all the details -- which they told me a little more explicitly than I expected.

I heard the above story, plus what happened when they both rushed home after work. They had another kiss in the garage and then dashed giggling upstairs, where they undressed and got in the same bed they'd slept in together many times. But this time, they were naked and making out like teenagers. Soon, their hands made their way between each other's legs, and they discovered an important fact about lesbianism -- if your partner has her own clitoris, she knows what to do with yours.

I loved seeing the change in their relationship. Mom and Anna had always been comfortable showing affection in a best-pal kind of way. But now they were in love and could not get enough of each other.

Even today, several years later, they are constantly holding hands and stealing random kisses and looking into each other's eyes and giggling. It is sweet to see. Once or twice, I have heard them having sex (which they seem to have gotten rather good at). I like it when they visit us because we have so much private land that they are comfortable going naked in the pool or even walking the grounds. If I am sneaky, I will spy them in an intimate embrace, and soon they will announce that they are going to their room for "a nap."

Sometimes I think, heck what took them so long? But I know that attitudes in this country have been changing over time and that it was harder in the 70s than it is now. Plus, they might have come out long before if they'd been oriented same-sex from the start. Some people definitely are -- like Mona and Andrea. Some people probably are, and it just takes a while to realize it, like me. But other people are naturally oriented heterosexual, but for whatever reason, it just doesn't work out for them that way. They don't find their True Love in that gender group, or the person they thought was their True Love dies, and so they think it will never happen to them again. And then, after decades, you look up, and there she is, staring back at you from across the breakfast table where she has been all along.