The first comma is more-or-less required. It either means, "my mother, who is ayn rand", or it is a serial comma to indicate three people, the speaker's mother,

The first comma is more-or-less required. It either means, "my mother, who is ayn rand", or it is a serial comma to indicate three people, the speaker's mother, ayn rand and god. There is no construction where there's no comma between 'mother' and 'ayn' AFAIK, it's just either appositive or serial. One could reconstruct the sentence: I would like to thank my mother (who is ayn rand), and god. I would like to thank god and my mother, ayn rand. The problem isn't that other, less-ambiguous constructions exist, it is that the construction as written is ambiguous but grammatically correct. It's an operator overloading issue.