Growing up in Lakewood, N.Y., in Chautauqua County I lived among a platoon of moms.

There was my mother, of course, a single mom widowed when I was 9 and my father died. But our neighborhood was filled with mothers who operated like a combination neighborhood watch/safety net for all of us.

Every Mother’s Day, their impact on my life comes flooding back.

My first day of school — after moving from Brooklyn in the fourth grade — I was rescued by a kind mom when I got off the school bus at the wrong street. I remembered the neighborhood faintly from visiting the summer before. I wandered until a family friend — another mom with three grown children — saw me and took me inside their home. I remember the cookies she fed me while she called my aunt, who eventually showed up with my mother to take me home.

The experience cemented the notion that moms were go-to people when........

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