The Other McLaughlins
The accidental kinship that began with a phone glitch.
Mother’s Day does a funny thing.
It spotlights the women who gave us life. It reminds us of who we’ve been to others. It stirs up gratitude, grief, complicated histories, and the quiet math of time passing.
It also makes me think about the women who enter our lives sideways. Not by blood. Not by intention. Not even by introduction.
Sometimes they arrive by accident, a beautiful oops.
Here is the most beautiful oops of all.
While I like to think I am unmistakable, I have been mistaken for someone else more than once.
Several people have texted me, thinking I was their Aunt Judy. And in one particularly funny incident, someone mistook my phone number for their therapist—also named Judi—and began trying to reschedule their appointment with me. (Which was somewhat handy given I was in the market for a new therapist.)
But no one will ever surpass the great mistaken identity that went on for years, circled back most unexpectedly, and left me with an unofficial family I still think of fondly: The Other McLaughlins.
This whole tale of insanity begins in 1999, when my husband, now my wasbund, Mick, and I moved into our first home in Medford. What we didn’t know was that there was another couple in town who not only shared our last name but were also listed in the phone directory as Michael and Judy McLaughlin.
For you millennial folk who are stuck on the phrase phone directory, it was a different world. If you wanted to call someone, you either knew their number by heart or had it written down somewhere. As a last resort, you dialed 411, reached a directory assistance operator, and asked for the person by name and city.
Here’s where the glitch came in. If there were multiple people with the same name, the listings were ordered alphabetically by street. Unless you specified the street, you were typically connected to the first number the operator encountered.
We lived on Bonner Avenue. The other Michael and Judy lived on Osborne Road.
And that’s how we began receiving phone calls intended for the couple we immediately—and affectionately—referred to as The Other McLaughlins.
The first call came from a contractor, who left a message on our answering machine (another artifact of a bygone era) asking “Mike” to call him back about a leaky roof. When I played the message for Mick, he told me it wasn’t meant for us, but for the other Mike McLaughlin on Osborne Road.
As it turned out, Mick actually knew him. The Other Mike was a court officer and a neighbor of Mick’s boss. He’d met him a few times. Mystery solved.
Or so we thought.
A few weeks later, the phone rang again—this time, an attorney.
“Hi, Mike. This is Attorney Smith calling about X’s case. I need to talk with you.”
My first thought was, I swear to God, if this is a paternity suit, I’m going to need an attorney of my own, because I will be committing a felony.
Mick assured me—again—that the call was for The Other Mike. Still, paralegal instincts die hard, so I called the attorney back, explained the mix-up, and suggested he ask directory assistance for the McLaughlins on Osborne Road.
The attorney was grateful. I was relieved. Mick lived to see another day.
Still, the calls kept coming. Contractors. Lawyers. People who all opened with the same telltale line: “Hi, is Mike there?”
That part was easy. Mick rarely went by Mike.
What was harder were the calls for Judy. You don’t know the difference in spelling when you hear the name.
Sometimes all it took was my simple “hello” for someone to launch into a deeply personal story, at which point I’d have to interrupt and gently let them know they were sharing their innermost thoughts with a complete and utter stranger.
Friends were baffled by my composure.
“I can’t believe you haven’t lost your mind,” they’d say.
Trust me—no one was more surprised than I was.
While in many ways I am a patient person, repeating myself is not my love language. Under normal circumstances, I would have blown a gasket. Yet for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I was unfailingly kind.
Eventually, I decided to make things easier.
I called directory assistance, got the number for The Other McLaughlins, wrote it down, and taped it to the fridge—right next to the phone. (Yes, the house phone. On the wall. The land line.) That way, when someone inevitably called looking for Mike or Judy, I could give them the correct number immediately, like a human call transfer system with better manners.
These weren’t prank calls asking if I had Prince Albert in a can or if my refrigerator was running (look it up, young people). They genuinely thought they were calling someone they knew. They were pleasant. We laughed. And in some small, unexpected way, those conversations lifted me up.
Over time, I began to feel like I knew The Other McLaughlins.
For instance, I knew when Mike had knee surgery. How? I received a get-well card meant for him in the mail. I put it back in the envelope and sent it along to Osborne Road.
That’s what prompted my first call from The Other Judy.
“Hey, Judi, how’s Mike’s knee?”
“I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number. You need the McLaughlins on Osborne Road.”
“Judi! It’s the other Judy, silly! I can’t believe you’re as nice on the phone as everyone says you are.”
“Join the club,” I said.
We laughed, chatted, and officially christened them The Other Mike and Judy.
I like to think they learned about our family milestones, too—like after the birth of my younger daughter, Ivy, when I answered the phone and heard:
“Oh, Judi, how are you feeling?”
Not sure who it was, I simply answered, thinking I would eventually figure it out, “Good. The baby’s sleeping, and I’m getting some rest.”
“What?”
“I had a baby. That’s why you’re calling, right?”
“Judi, stop joking around. You can’t have a baby at your age.”
“I’m in my thirties.”
“What?”
“Oh. You’re looking for the Other Judy.”
“I guess I am.”
Eventually, I learned that Judy was sick. The details weren’t mine to know, and I didn’t ask. I kept answering the phone, passing along numbers, and holding space for conversations that weren’t meant for me but were entrusted to me anyway.
Around that time, the mistaken identity began spilling out into the world.
I went to pick up a friend’s child from their after-school program and gave my name at the desk. The woman looked up, paused, and said, “Oh—do you know the other Judy McLaughlin?”
“Yes,” I said, surprising myself with how easily the answer came. “I do.”
Around that same time, I actually met The Other Mike McLaughlin.
Naturally, I met him through my hairdresser, Dolores—the community’s official connector, while I was the accidental one.
One afternoon, while I was in the chair, Dolores leaned over and said, in a tone that suggested she was about to deliver something important, “You know that Mike McLaughlin you’re always talking about? He’s here.”
I looked up in the mirror.
“He’s the guy who looks like Kenny Rogers,” she added.
And by golly, she was right.
Once I had a face to go with the name, something shifted. The Other Mike was no longer just a voice on a message meant for someone else or a story attached to Osborne Road. He was real. Present. Standing ten feet away from me while I sat under a dryer.
When my appointment was over, I walked over, stuck out my hand, and said, “Hi. I’m Judi McLaughlin.”
The look on his face was instant recognition.
“Oh,” he said. “You’re the Other Judi.”
After that, it was as if a switch flipped. In the same way you start seeing Volkswagen Bugs everywhere once you own one, I began spotting The Other Mike all over town.
At the grocery store. Around Medford Square. In places I was certain he must have always been, but I had somehow never noticed before.
And then—because this story clearly wasn’t done with me—I learned that he had connections to Mick’s hometown of Clonmany, Donegal, Ireland.
Of course he did.
By then, it no longer felt like a coincidence. It felt like fate. Like these people, who had entered my life by mistake, had quietly become part of it.
Which is why, when the moment came, it didn’t feel like a mistake at all.
I didn’t learn that Judi died by phone call. I didn’t learn from a delivery person.
I learned she died when a beautiful bouquet of flowers arrived at my house, delivered on my birthday.
I quietly accepted them. Then I carried them to Osborne Road and handed them to her son, who likely thought I was the delivery person. And that was fine by me.
It felt disingenuous to say anything other than, “My condolences.”
I thought about attending the services, but it felt like I was trying to make the moment about me rather than about The Other Judy, so I refrained. I might have sent a card, but I’m not entirely sure that I did, for the same reason.
Naturally, the calls began to taper off.
Not all at once. I’d still get the occasional caller looking for Mike. About a year after The Other Judy died, I even managed to terrify the local priest.
Father Toomey called to arrange her memorial Mass. When he asked for Michael, I said, “Oh, this is his wife, Judi. Can I help you?”
There was a pause.
To be fair, Father Toomey knew our family well—he had christened our children—but for a brief moment, he was reasonably sure he had spoken to the dead. The man may have needed a particular kind of pastoral care after that call.
After that, the silence settled in more decisively.
Days slipped by. Then weeks.
The phone still rang—but not for them.
Until one day, there were no calls for them at all.
It took me longer than I expected to notice. Life has a way of moving forward, even when something small and steady disappears.
Then it hit me.
I missed getting those calls.
Years passed.
My children were little—elementary-school age, give or take—and one afternoon, we were all at my friend Melissa’s house. She was watching her friend Erin’s kids: Justin, Lia, and the most impossibly adorable baby brother, Dylan.
I remember commenting on how sweet they were. Polite. Kind. The kind of kids who said please and thank you without being prompted and played easily with other children, the way parents secretly hope their kids will when they aren’t around.
Erin arrived a little while later, and we fell into the familiar rhythm of a playdate—small talk, kid-wrangling, half-finished sentences. This was the early Facebook era, when connecting online still felt novel and mildly intimate, so Erin and I found each other there and became “friends.”
A few weeks later, Erin posted a photo.
It was a picture of her and her father, wishing him a happy birthday.
And that’s when I saw it.
Her father was The Other Mike McLaughlin.
I immediately texted Melissa.
“Is Erin Marino’s maiden name McLaughlin?”
“Yes. How funny. Her mom’s name was Judy.”
Reader, I stopped breathing.
For a long moment, the world narrowed to the screen in my hand. I could not believe that this—after years of wrong numbers, crossed wires, and near-misses—was how our lives found each other again.
“Well,” I texted Melissa, “you are not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.”
And then I did. I regaled her with the stories—the wrong numbers, the fridge note, Osborne Road, The Other Mike and Judy—ending with the part that mattered most.
“Do you think telling Erin that story would be a comfort,” I asked, “or is it too soon?”
Melissa didn’t hesitate.
“OMG, Judi. You have to tell her. Here’s her number.”
So I texted Erin.
And I told her the story.
I honestly don’t remember exactly what she said, but there was a familiarity to it. Then she told her dad, and he was ecstatic.
As luck would have it, Erin lived not only around the corner from me, but two doors down from my friend Stacia—whose house was my kids’ home away from home.
For a while, that felt like enough. Another quiet layering of proximity in a story already full of it.
Until one day, I found myself driving down the street and spotted Erin and her dad.
I didn’t announce myself. I didn’t have a plan. I just pulled over, got out of the car, and walked toward them.
Erin and her dad were outside, mid-conversation, the way people are when they’re fully inside a moment. Erin looked up first.
She saw me, her eyes widened, and she said, “Oh my goodness!”
Mike turned around
We didn’t need introductions. We didn’t need words.
He opened his arms and hugged me.
And when I tell you I was hugged like I’ve never been hugged before, I mean it. Not a polite hug. Not a careful one. A full-body, hold-you-up, don’t-let-go kind of hug—the kind that carries years of something unnamed and finally gives it a place and person to share it with.
Over the years, I’ve made appearances at different McLaughlin-Marino Family events. Erin, like me, is an imp, and gathered her whole family around the kitchen island to introduce me by interviewing me:
What’s your name? Judi McLaughlin.
What’s your husband’s name? Michael McLaughlin.
The look on people’s faces was priceless.
Then, because Erin really knows how to put on a show, she said, “Now wait…hey, Dad! Come in here!”
And Mike walked in from the other room and said, “Oh, look! The Other Judi!” and hugged me.
For years, whenever I drove by Erin’s house and saw her dad, I made a point of stopping to say hello. He has since found new love. Another Judy.
I divorced my counterpart years ago and resumed my birth name. I am Judi Harrington now. I am clear about that. Names matter. They mark who we are and who we’ve chosen to become.
But to the Other McLaughlins, I will always be The Other Judi McLaughlin.
And that is one of the very few exceptions I will ever make.
Because that name doesn’t belong to a marriage or a man or a chapter that ended. It belongs to a shared history that arrived by mistake and stayed by grace.
It belongs to wrong numbers, fridge notes, quiet kindness, and a family that started on Osborne Road and has grown and moved in and around Medford, Massachusetts.
Some names you shed.
Others you earn by accident—and keep.
Here’s what I know after years of writing and coaching writers: everyone has an “Other McLaughlins” story. Most people never tell it well.
Not because it isn’t meaningful, but because they don’t know where to start, where to end, or what actually matters.
That’s where I come in.
I coach writers who want to move beyond anecdotes and create work with shape, substance, and staying power. If you’ve been circling a story and you’re ready to do something serious with it, let’s talk.