Ep. - 1733 - SATURDAY SERIES: TOM BROSS

Reality Life with Kate Casey

Tom Bross joins Kate Casey to discuss his three-part memoir series about growing up in a family that shifted from a conventional Midwestern upbringing to California's hippie

Key takeaways

• Tom Bross's mother changed her name multiple times (Marilyn, Mare/Mayor) to reflect her shifting identity as a California hippie.
• After his sister Chris died in 1996, Tom took in her two young sons but ultimately made the painful decision to place them in an open adoption.

Main topics

• Unconventional childhood & hippie counterculture
• Parental abandonment & identity instability

Notable quotes

"Even your name could become part of your mother's next reinvention."

Conclusion

Tom's story offers a nuanced look at how childhood instability can for

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) Welcome back for another episode of Reality Life with Kate Casey. And welcome back to the Saturday series episode. I first came across Tom Bross through his Instagram carousels. He was sharing stories about his unconventional childhood with a sense of humor that immediately drew me in. And as I kept reading, I began to understand how much instability that he and his siblings had lived through. I recognized that combination immediately, finding humor in things that weren't particularly funny when you were living through them. Tom's family began as this picture of conventional Midwestern life, and then came divorces, a move to California, and a mother who embraced the hippie counterculture. She wanted freedom, adventure, and the opportunity to keep reinventing herself. But she also had five children, and they were left figuring out how to fit into whatever life she wanted next. At one point, she decided Tom should be called Jupiter. He was a Sagittarius. Jupiter was his ruling planet, and she thought he needed an identity separate from his father. Tom tolerated it at home until she called him in for tofu tacos and his friends heard her. And that was the end of Jupiter. It's a funny story, but it also tells you something about being a child in that house. Even your name could become part of your mother's next reinvention. While other people saw her as this cool mom, the one who was relaxed about drinking and drugs, Tom wanted rules. He wanted school. He wanted to know what was expected of him and what he could count on. And there's something very familiar about that for anyone who grew up with instability. The other things that kids complain about can be the very things that you wish you had. Tom wrote about his life in his three-part memoir series, Don't Call Me Jupiter. And when we spoke, I wanted to understand how those early experiences shaped his relationships, his decisions, and the kind of adult that he became. Years later, after his sister died, he took in her two young sons. He had planned to remain a bachelor, but suddenly he was responsible for children who had lost their mother. He knew what it felt like to be left behind, and he wanted to give them something different. What followed was an incredibly difficult decision about their future and one that changed his relationship with his own mother. What I appreciated about Tom is his willingness to hold complicated feelings about her. He can tell you what she put him through, but he can also recognize the curiosity and enthusiasm that he inherited from her. He doesn't tidy up the story to make her easier to love or easier to condemn. We talk about abandonment, finding stability, becoming a parent, and the questions you may never get to ask the people who raised you. And there's a lot of humor because Tom is very funny, and sometimes the details of a family story are so outrageous that laughing is really the only reasonable response. Here's my interview with Tom Ross. Speaker 1 (2:59) Well, I'm delighted to meet you. I came across your Instagram. Tell everybody a little bit about the family of origin and the early years of growing up. Speaker 2 (3:09) So we started in the Midwest. I like to kind of refer to us as the iconic Midwestern all-American family. We made the front page of the Cincinnati Inquirer because we were the first family to sort of promote. the oral vaccination for polio. And so there's a little picture of me reaching out for another sugar cube from Dr. Salk. And my grandma's in it, my mom's in it, my dad's in it. And we were beautiful. I mean, I look at that picture and I'm like, what a gorgeous family. And then you fast forward through a couple divorces and we ended up in California and we turned into a band of California hippies. My mom was really drawn. to an alternative lifestyle. I don't know if she knew exactly what she wanted, but she knew she didn't want to be raised the same way her sisters were and continued to live in the same town. They were extremely well off, but she chose a different adventure for her life. She too had five kids and she kind of dragged us around, putting herself first, leaving us to adapt constantly. to change in different situations. Speaker 2 (4:30) It's hard to sum up a three book memoir, but in a nutshell, that's it. We were the all American family that became all hippied out. And there were some really interesting long-term repercussions as a result. Speaker 1 (4:46) So of the kids, where do you line up? Speaker 2 (4:49) I'm exactly in the middle. So I have two older siblings and two younger. Speaker 1 (4:53) And how does it go in terms of girl, boy? Speaker 2 (4:57) Shelly's the oldest. She's the consummate artist in the family. Chris is the sister, sadly, we lost in 1996. I'm in the middle. Now, Molly's a couple years younger than me, and we have a half-brother. We never referred to him as a half-brother or step-brother or anything like that. He was just our brother. But my mom had another child with another man after her first husband. Speaker 1 (5:22) And what would you say... is the best way that your teachers would have described you in those early years. Speaker 2 (5:32) As things got really chaotic at home, I gravitated towards the boundaries and the rules and the requirements of school. I was a straight-A student and teacher's pet often to the point of excessiveness. I really... I had two personalities, I think. At school, I represented myself one way. I wore different clothes. When I got home, I changed into the hippie garb, you know, for my mother's approval. Speaker 1 (6:02) Really just like disrobing and then almost taking on that new persona. Speaker 2 (6:07) I still wanted her to love me. I let my hair grow out, not as long as my sisters because they thought we were twins, but down to my shoulders. And she was a seamstress. I had patch clothing and, you know, we weren't. very well off and at home. I was her little hippie son. Speaker 1 (6:26) Now she changes her name too. Speaker 2 (6:29) Yeah, a couple of times. Talk Speaker 1 (6:30) to me a little bit about that. Speaker 2 (6:32) So after her second divorce, she scattered the family. She needed to find herself. So she sent the kids away to stay with relatives. My sister and I, my little sister and I went to stay with our dad who lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts at the time. Shelly and Chris, the older girls stayed with grandma and grandpa in Cincinnati. My little brother, Alex, went with his dad and his new mistress, his new woman in Sacramento. And while we were gone, it was only a couple months. But when we got back, I didn't recognize my mother at all because she had changed so much from that conservative housewife into a full-blown hippie. And she had some help. She happened to have a hippie friend named Donna Rau that I had the pleasure of visiting last year, accelerate, like kind of unleash the beautiful butterfly within. And when we got back, even the flight attendants, they were called stewardesses back then, were like, are you sure this is the right family? Because you guys don't match. By then, she was in Birkenstocks, mule tooth necklace, embroidery everywhere. And my little sister and I still look like we were dressed for a guest appearance on the Mike Douglas show. His grandma bought us new clothes. So the house had changed when we got home. There were plants everywhere. And eventually my mother did what Donna did. Donna said, Donna is more than a mama. So you will call me Donna instead of mama. She told this to her kids. A couple months later, my mom said the same thing. You know, I'm more than just a mother. I'm a person. I'm a human being. I'm a free spirit. So call me Marilyn. And we were like, wow, we have to call our mom Marilyn. And because she was so loose and open to drinking and drug use at home, all our friends in junior high and high school thought we had the coolest mother in the world. You know, your mom parties. She parties with us. She'll buy us alcohol. And she felt it was safer for us to party somewhere where we weren't getting Speaker 1 (8:35) in cars and driving and things like that. Speaker 2 (8:37) And another year went by. She went through many, many boyfriends and eventually settled on one that all of us kids really loved. And on a camping trip. She was looking at the sky, which opened up. She's very proud to be an Aries. She's very much an Aries personality. She's April 15th. And in the sky, the clouds kind of formed like airy ram horns. And so she announced on that day, as a creature in this beautiful universe, I hereby declare that my name will be Mare. And I was like, well, that's just short for Mare. That's no big deal. And she goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not short for Mare. It means C in Italian. Charlie was Italian. And she goes, that's the name he gave me. And you guys will call me Mayor now. And of course, I dealt with everything with a sense of humor. And I'm like, what a freaking nightmare. She goes, what? And I go, oh, what a beautiful nightmare. And my sister, Chris, is nudging me. Go along with that. But we all had to just constantly try to keep up with her. You know, what she brought into the house, her new philosophies. A lot of it was very interesting, to be honest with you. I love having an open mind and learning about new possibilities. But some of it was also just roll your eyes crazy, especially to kids who are going to be like, oh God, mom's at it again. Speaker 1 (10:03) Well, let's just go back for a second. What were her parents like? What was the kind of life she had before? She got married and had children. Speaker 2 (10:11) The life I kind of wanted as a kid because she was spoiled rotten. She got a brand new convertible on her 16th birthday. My grandfather only had like a fifth grade education, but he was a people magnet. People loved him. In the book, I said he had more charisma than Jesus. I mean, everywhere he went, people wanted to hang out with him. He was a talker. He was smooth. He was always smoking a cigar. He taught us kids how you could take wintergreen lifesavers and chomp on them in the closet and they spark. So he was cool right off the bat to us. And he started working at a car dealership when he was 15. And by Speaker 1 (10:54) the Speaker 2 (10:55) time he was 25, he owned it. So he also wasn't able to serve in World War II and he knew there would be a big demand for used cars after the war. He sent trains as far as Texas and Southern California to bring back to Cincinnati. And they ended up buying a huge farm. They lived in Bridal Hills. My mother had baton lessons, tap dance lessons, equestrian lessons, singing lessons. Same with her brothers and sisters. They were spoiled rotten. They had a driver. They had hired help. And for some reason, she wanted out very bad. Speaker 1 (11:34) Do you think there's a possibility that there was an assault or something that happened to her? That Speaker 2 (11:40) is possible. Yeah, because it was such a break from what her brothers and her other two sisters did. But I don't know. All I heard from grandma was that she really wanted