She was just a senior in high school when she became pregnant with me. As happens far too often in such cases, she and her boyfriend, my father, fought a lot after she found out she was pregnant, and they broke up before I was born, never to marry. She tried to hide her pregnancy as long as possible from my grandparents, but eventually, she was just too large to keep it a secret. I was born two months after she graduated from high school.
She had been a star basketball player. There had even been people from the Redheads, a national women's basketball team, who had talked to her about joining the team. My grandparents, her mother and father, objected, of course, not wanting her to leave the small town in Mississippi where they lived. She never got to go to college on a basketball scholarship or on an academic scholarship, and as a result, she never had much of a chance to obtain the kind of high-paying job that her intelligence--she graduated fourth in her class--might have warranted. She worked most of her life as a secretary for an international pharmaceutical company.
She met another man and fell in love with him a couple of years after I was born. They married and had a son, my brother, three years younger than I am. The new husband wasn't overly fond of being a parent to someone else's son, so I wound up living with my grandparents, an arrangement that lasted for the rest of my childhood. My mother and this man (the anger is still there, yes) moved to Illinois, where they both found work, and she eventually realized he was not a good husband and father. They divorced, but she and my brother stayed in Illinois. She once told me that the hardest choice she ever made in her life was leaving me with my grandparents, and it really hurt her when she asked me while I was still just a child if I wanted to move up north with her and I said that I wanted to stay with my grandparents. I had known no other life at that point, and I was scared to leave what seemed so comfortable at the time.
It was almost a decade before she found another man to marry. He's a good man, this new stepfather, incredibly patient and funny and generous. He had three kids of his own from an earlier marriage, so we made an odd "Brady Bunch" with our three boys and two girls. Family trips in the summer were an experience with everyone piled into the back seat and then two motel rooms at night to keep the peace. For the most part, though, we got along well, and eventually, we all grew up and went to work or off to college. We became adults with lives and careers and issues of our own, and they became the people we call or visit every now and then.
Both of them are retired now. She loves going to the casinos to gamble away my inheritance. He loves to golf. She's become very enamored of the first great-grandchild. He's two and spends a lot of time with Papa and Gam Ma. He was there today, in fact, when I called to wish her a Happy Mother's Day. He was sleeping at the time, so we were able to talk uninterrupted.
I sent flowers, of course, two dozen pink roses, which she loved. She stopped our conversation a couple of times to smell them again. Her favorites are wild flowers, but I couldn't find a nice enough bouquet of those to send. I had also mailed two cards, one serious and one funny, our tradition for such events. We talked for more than an hour, with her telling me about the squirrels in the backyard and then about all of the people back home who are either ill or who have died. Our conversations are very stream-of-consciousness.
I only see her about once a year if I'm lucky. I try to go back to my grandfather's house for Thanksgiving when I can so that I can be with them all, but the trip is expensive and at a very bad time of year for travel, both airplane-wise and work-wise. I also try to call when I can, but she and my stepfather have been known to hop into the car and just drive to any place they might be interested in seeing. After they retired, they took a tour of the Great Plains. No one was really told they were doing this. They just loaded up the car and drove.
I love my mother, and I tell her this whenever I talk to her. I know she hasn't always understood me. She didn't quite fathom why I majored in journalism or later in English and history. She didn't truly understand what graduate school was or why I wanted to go to it. She doesn't quite get what all I do in my current job or perhaps even what a community college is. And she certainly didn't want to deal with her elder son being gay when I chose to come out to her at the age of 30.
But you know what she did? She grew and evolved. After six months of silence, she started to ask me questions. She met my Partner At The Time and really liked him. I think she might have been even more distraught over our break-up than I was. She still tries to ask me if I'm dating anyone, so hopeful is she about my love life, but I try to avoid that disaster of a topic if I can. And she called me the day after the election last November to tell me how sorry she was that Proposition 8 passed. She kept saying she couldn't understand why it was anyone's business who her son marries.
She still brags about me to all of her friends. She used to share my grade reports with the other people at her job, and she kept pictures of my college graduation up for years after I started to get gray hair. She was so excited when I was chosen Teacher of the Year for my school that she took the program from the event to everyone's house for months after that. She asks me about events on campus that she has never attended but which she knows are important to me. She makes it clear that she supports me.
She won't read this, by the way. She and my stepfather are pretty serious technophobes, particularly him. She just knows that I did a son's duty today and called to say hello and catch up. She got her flowers and her cards, and she's happy because I remembered. She will tell my stepfather what we talked about, and she'll even share the conversation with the two-year-old great-grandchild, who only knows me by the picture that I gave her for Christmas five years ago. I hope she knows, though, that my love for her goes deeper than just the flowers and cards and phone calls. I'd see her more often if either one of us were able to do so, but I think she understands that we each have lives to lead. That's one of the most dear of lessons I learned from her and her confidence in me all these years.
The picture above is one of my favorites of her. She must have been in high school when it was taken. I have no idea whose car it was. I just look at her face and see a young girl with all of the promise of the future ahead of her. I like to think that there's still some of that optimistic young girl in her.
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