Some mornings, in those gray moments between dreaming and waking, I confuse the past with the present.

I hear a small girl cry for her mother and, for an instant, imagine that it is I who is crying. "Mommy," still evokes my own mother, and the call echoes a need that somehow has never been met. But now the cries come from my own small daughters, and I am the one who must summon up the comfort and the answers.

I hit the floorboards running. In the predawn dimness, I run, half-blind, without my contact lenses, into the fuzzed atmosphere of childish fear. In this haze, the alarm sounds in my subconscious. It is easy to remember another household, another time, another call for help. Now my daughters are eight and six years old. When I was eight, my nightmare was real -- my mother died.

In the shadows that surround us, I am mentally returned to that earlier time, the apartment in New York City that I shared with my mother, and later, after her death, with her brothers -- my uncles. The uncles stayed with me for the next eight years.

This was a major move for my uncles: They had long lived separate, if similar, solitary existences in different boroughs. My Uncle Len had cultivated an aura of mystery -- he stayed in hotels, seemed to use aliases, and alluded to working "undercover." For years, I believed he was a spy. (As an adult, I deduced that he had been an economist who sometimes moonlighted as a private eye.) He was also a writer of detective stories that featured heroes like himself -- giant men in slouch hats and coats who traveled incognito to exotic ports of call.

Len traveled light. As he said, he carried his clothes in a manila envelope. When he moved in with me, it was with a file, not a truckload of cartons. His kid brother, Gabe, two years younger at 38 when he moved in, was quite unlike Len. Gabe loved to sing and play children's games. He sang night and day. He knew nothing about domestic life. Both my uncles were regarded as eccentric, if not insane, by the women in the neighborhood.

Into this household soon stepped a fourth person -- my grandmother Etka, from Russia. She was 80 when she moved in, and I was eight. We shared a bedroom that we called the Girls' Room. We also shared our night terrors -- Etka, too, woke confused by phantoms, crying out for help. Some nights, my grandmother -- a veteran of five home births -- imagined she had given birth to a baby, and that the baby had become lost in her bedding. My uncles would run in to comfort her.

Today, if my daughters cry loudly enough, they will wake one of those same uncles. Len, now 84, lives with us. (Gabe, who married almost 30 years ago, lives in Israel.) He will call out, "Is everything all right?" The very sound of his voice, which reassured me during my childish nightmares, will soothe us all now.

My life today not only repeats but also reworks the patterns that are woven through our family history. The key difference may be that what was odd in the late 1950s has become less unusual now. At the time I was born, families created by deliberately single women were almost unknown in middle-class America. Ahead of the trend, my mother was a 35-year-old career woman when she had me as a single parent. In that more traditional time, she was obliged to weave a tapestry of white lies to cover any embarrassment or scandal. She invented the legend of my namesake father, Larry, a "war hero" who had died overseas. He was the most handsome, bravest soldier -- the best dancer, the most decorated pilot. When she died, she left the legend, and a photograph, with me. I still have that snapshot in a file I try never to open. Never distinct, it has further faded and cracked, as has my belief in its subject. Now I am not even certain the man is my father. He could be a stand-in, someone tangible that my mother could present to me. Nevertheless, I cherish the picture.

My daughters are adopted; most likely, they were born out of wedlock, as was I. Both were orphans as a result of political situations in the separate countries of their birth. In our circle of friends and acquaintances, there are many other adopted children, some from similar circumstances. Perhaps we are the new "typical" family -- single mother with adopted daughters of mixed ancestries.

The homogeneous home may also belong to the century just past. As a consequence, the intimacy of the home has opened to accommodate refugees from foreign turmoil. The girls' biographies are also the histories of their respective nations.

My older daughter, Sasha, was born in the aftermath of the Romanian revolution. The dictatorship had outlawed all forms of birth control and abortion, resulting in thousands of unwanted pregnancies, babies born and put up for adoption. My younger daughter, Jasmine, is a member of a sad sorority of sorts -- 300,000 girls abandoned each year under China's "one child" policy that makes it horribly practical to place a first-born daughter in an orphanage in anticipation of having the desired son with the next pregnancy.

At 43, I found myself an unmarried mother -- as my own mother had been. I was divorced after 27 years of marriage. Why? Was it personal? Partly, of course. But were we also part of a greater phenomenon -- the explosion of the "nuclear family"? What reconciles me to my own shattered history is that the combined efforts of my husband and me rescued two baby girls from a situation far more grave than the one to which we unwittingly subjected them -- our divorce. I trust that our "broken" home is still better than any orphanage. Certainly, it is the best and only shelter I can provide. The girls sleep together, most nights snuggling, undisturbed in their cuddlesome world. But I know, first-hand, from my own childhood, when I lost a mother who was dancing one week and dead the next, that all safety is an illusion. Only luck, fragile as a membrane, separates us at every second from disaster.

As I stumble into each day, gathering up my daughters, consoling them, rushing through the rituals of morning, I am aware that some distance down the hall, my Uncle Len is also awakening, or perhaps, more accurately, is still awake. He claims he never truly sleeps -- only rests. I recall his pose, sitting in his wing chair, from childhood -- we called it his "Lincoln Memorial look," in honor of his hero, the great U.S. president who Len still somewhat resembles.

So the girls and I have our hero on the home front after all, as legendary as my father. At 84, he will still somehow manage to move quickly if a small girl cries for him. He gives my daughters what he always gave me -- unlimited love and approval. His stream of consciousness is a running commentary of praise for the duo he has dubbed "the Adorables." They are the brightest, the prettiest, the most gifted. They paint like Picassos, sing like opera stars. They have Uncle Len bewitched.

Every family is a culture unto itself, and ours differs in its details from other homes. We have our own language of love, customs, songs. But the purpose of family remains constant -- the protection of the children, the inclusion of the past generation, the need we have for one another. And so we proceed with our lives: singing, painting, decorating our walls with personal designs. Under our roof, three generations reside, another reprise of my original home.

Although my grandmother behaved more like an aged kid sister -- she swiped my costume jewelry and even my clothes -- she also taught me how to say "I love you" in Russian. We quote her every day. She was petite, with eyes as bright as espresso beans -- until the bad one clouded over, opaque with a cataract. Sometimes, as my Uncle Len still does, she saw clearly through time and mist of age. One night, she gripped my arm and told me, with pressure strong as the bars that locked her into bed at night, "My life passes as a dream."

I think of those words as I run to my daughter's room. I run fast, to outrace their fears, to provide the only comfort that I can, the eternal comfort of every parent in every time:

"Don't cry -- Mama's here."

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Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of a memoir, A Place in the Country, and Sleeping Arrangements and other novels. Copyright © 2000. The Hearst Corporation. Courtesy of Harper's Bazaar, from which this article was reprinted.

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