Voices
Meeting My Son's Mother For The First Time
Recently, I met my son's mother for the first time.
You have no idea how long I've waited to use that line. (OK, 33 years.) My older son, Rory – the blond blue-eyed one who looks like me as opposed to my biological son who bears no resemblance to me at all – was finally able to find his birth mother, Erika, and introduced her to the rest of the family soon after.
This was definitely a Locator moment. Erika cried, I cried. Erika is a lovely, warm, sweet person, the long-awaited missing link. She also comes with a duplicate in the form of an identical twin. Our grandson, Elliott, is trying to sort out this Guinness Book of World Records of grandmas: me, Nana (his maternal grandmother), Grandma Jean (my former husband's wife), and now Oma Erika and Oma Twin. Even Rory says he's going into hiding on Mother's Day. Hopefully, 1-800-Flowers has a multi-mother discount.
I know this was closure for Rory to finally meet Erika but it was for me as well. I've always felt a strong connection to Erika, my forever-16-year-old silent partner and sine qua non co-mom. I've thought about her thousands of times, although I have to confess that the first 950 were in the form of "Who spawned this child?????" From his earliest days, Rory was a handful, an 11 on a scale of 10.
The Rory stories are so plentiful and varied – he never repeated anything twice – that they are just referred to in family shorthand: "The Cleveland Airport crisis" (he was just faking the seizure), "the Mom's office fiasco" (the campus police dropped charges), "the Chinese restaurant disaster" (we left a 70 percent tip), and yes, even "the Bomb Squad incident." (In Rory's defense, the HazMat guys should have realized before they cordoned off the area that it wasn't a real bomb.)
If I sent Rory to his room for a time-out, he'd open up both his windows and whack on his bed with a tennis racket howling "Please don't beat me, Mommy!" Or worse: "No, no, don't touch me there!" (Those stranger awareness classes in grade school were perfect fodder for someone of Rory's diabolical creativity.)
His handmade Mother's Day card the year he was 10 read: "You've been like a mother to me."
Several years ago, I amassed the collected Rory stories, X-rated postcards that he'd sent from his travels, assorted email communications, and other unique Rory-abilia that I'd found scattered through my file cabinets into a volume called The Book of Rory. It ran 200 pages. Unfortunately, I keep thinking of stories that I missed which are now being amassed in The Book of Rory II.
Of course, I didn't tell Erika any of this.
INGA
Voices
Exit
Enter
Nancy Kirkwood
Nancy Kirkwood
Nancy Kirkwood
But among my burning questions to her were: "Were you into practical jokes? Embarrassing your family in public? Siccing social services on your parents?"
No, she said, puzzled. Why? She did admit, however, to being a "total handful," the despair of her mother. Okay, so there's definitely a "handful" gene going on here.
Rory is now a happily married successful professional and a genuine love. I'm glad I didn't kill him. He still likes to keep his hand in the pranks just for old time's sake, most recently appropriating the library card number taped to my computer and ordering me up a long list of books including Coping with your colitis and hemorrhoids, The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, and The Book of the Penis, which sported its own convenient eight-inch ruler on the binding. Actually, they all turned out to be really educational reading. I sent him a book report on every one.
I made it one of my life goals to live long enough for Rory to have a son. And he does. But Elliott (already of an age by which Rory had long exhibited holy terror tendencies) is the sweetest, easiest kid imaginable. Life is sometimes so unfair.
Erika and I have had several lunches since that first meeting when both of us cried as she recounted handing over to a social worker the baby that she thought she'd never see or hear about again. I can't even imagine the pain. Her mother told her to forget the child ever existed.
Will I ever tell Erika the full story about Rory? Probably not. She says it fills her heart with such joy to know that he was able to have the life and educational possibilities that she knew she could never give him. That's enough for me. She really doesn't need to know about the chainsaw thing.
Opener: Monkey Business Images Ltd via Getty Images