An Accidental Mother

AN ACCIDENTAL MOTHER

Katherine Anne Kindred

Earlier versions of the essays “An Accidental Mother”
and “I Will Not Lie” were combined as one essay titled
“The Accidental Mother” and published in
the Spring 2008 issue of
Memoir (and)
.

Unbridled Books
Denver, Colorado

Copyright © 2011 by Katherine Anne Kindred

Drawings by Michael

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be
reproduced in any form without permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kindred, Katherine Anne.
An accidental mother / Katherine Anne Kindred.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-058-7
1. Motherhood. 2. Parenting. 3. Separation
(Psychology) I. Title.
HQ759.K543 2011
306.874'3—dc22
2011016104

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Book Design by SH • CV

First Printing

Dedicated to the little boy who
gave me the greatest gift of all—motherhood
.

Near or far, I will love you always
.

Kate! There's a monster in my room!”

Still mostly asleep, I notice that without the help of my conscious mind to direct them, my legs have somehow begun on their own, swinging over the side of the bed, moving me toward the door of the room as my arms reach out in the dark for the small boy I know is somewhere near. I take his hand as my pupils begin to dilate enough to allow me to see down the hallway toward the glow of his bedroom nightlight.

“Let's go see,” I whisper, and pull him gently along, reaching for the light switch the moment we pass
through the doorway. The room is suddenly filled with light, and my eyes squint as I look around. I see an unmade bed with a Spiderman pillow in the middle, tiny jeans lying on the floor next to the laundry basket, storybooks on the table beside the bed.

“I don't see a monster,” I say, and look down into the tear-filled eyes.

“It was in my dreams!” he tells me, and I notice he's been dragging his teddy bear along with him the whole time.

We're making progress, I think. For a long while he's been convinced that the monster is somewhere in his room. That he understands it's only in his dream is a giant step forward.

I pick him up to comfort him; he just turned five and is almost too big to hold, but he wraps his arms and legs around me and lays his head on my shoulder. I notice he is trembling. It only takes me a few minutes to get him snuggled back into bed, to reassure him that the monster dream is over, to tell him that
instead he can dream about Grandma and Papa's house and going to the movies with his cousins.

I return to our bedroom and climb back into bed, now wide awake.

“Thanks for getting up with him,” a voice whispers beside me.

“You're welcome,” I whisper back.

That's when I realize the boy called out for me, not his dad, to protect him from the monster.

Me. Kate. Not his real mother, his accidental one.

I've never made any apologies for the fact that my only “child” turned out to be a border collie named Annie. I adopted her when she was two years old. Having come from an abusive home, she was skittish and needy. She's been with me for more than a decade, and I'm certain it's because of my patient nurturing that she now feels so well loved and secure that she disobeys nearly every command I offer—unless, of
course, a biscuit is involved. She is smart and manipulative and I love her all the more for it. Yet she's well behaved enough that she travels with me everywhere and even comes to work with me every day.

We survived two failed relationships together, and after the second ended in divorce, I realized my opportunity to have children of the human kind had just passed me by. I accepted this fact without regret, content to consider Annie proof that
had I wanted to
, I could have raised a kind and loving child. Knowing my eggs weren't getting any younger, I opted for tubal ligation, certain that I could live a full life without experiencing the need to procreate or the pain of giving birth. This did not, however, mean I embraced a life of postdivorce solitude. Welcoming a barrage of blind dates, I soon learned that being childless at forty is a rarity. At my age nearly everyone single has at one point been married, and most of those marriages have resulted in a child or two. I joked to my girlfriends that surely I was meant to be a stepmother instead of a birth mother. Someday I would meet someone with
two teenagers on their way to college who did not need a new mother and whose father was financially and emotionally prepared for a long-term casual commitment.

Obviously, I hadn't fully evaluated other possible outcomes.

Welcome Michael, just months shy of four years old, with dark-blond hair and big blue eyes, in dire need of a
mother
. Oh, and did I mention Jim, the ever handsome and charming father of said boy? The first time this child tested me with the word “mom” and then looked up into my eyes with a little grin, waiting, waiting, waiting to see what my response was going to be, I knew I was in deep trouble. His inquiries have continued, albeit with modifications along the way. Once I was paging through a magazine while he sat beside me with a coloring book and crayons, and he stopped to ask me if he had come out of my stomach.

“No,” I told him, “you came out of your mother's stomach.”

“But I want you to be my mother!”

I hesitated, then pulled out the bottom of my sweatshirt to make myself look pregnant. “Okay, get in my stomach.”

Michael giggled. “Kate! You can't go backward!” And then, just as I begin to worry that the joke was improper, he asked, “What should I color next?”

As recommended by the family counselor, his father has provided Michael with a brief explanation, limited in detail. But it is nearly impossible to simplify such a complicated story.

Jim told me he received a phone call a little less than a year ago from a man who, unbeknownst to him, had been Michael's stepfather. Michael's mother, Jim's former girlfriend, was now married to another man—and addicted to prescription painkillers. She had been found unconscious in the backyard play-pool with Michael nearby. While she was hospitalized, state agencies intervened and mandated that she would not be allowed unsupervised contact with her child for the next two years.

Jim told me he had not known of the boy's existence
and was shocked to learn he was father to a two-year-old son. Michael's mother relinquished all parental rights to Jim, and he flew five states away to begin parenting a child he had just met. To complicate things further, all of this occurred near the end of his marriage to the mother of his daughter, Elizabeth, Michael's half-sister.

Fast-forward one year, and into the picture steps Kate, with rose-colored glasses, obliterated fallopian tubes, and a sixty-pound border collie at her side.

After we were set up by a mutual friend, Jim was honest regarding his state of affairs during our long introductory telephone call. It was a complex history, for sure, but the fact that he had taken on the responsibility of raising his son alone, no questions asked, revealed his character. And failed relationships? How could I, twice divorced and also having experienced an unplanned pregnancy (that, although welcome at the time, ended in a miscarriage), judge him? My personal philosophy held that I would rather be guilty of ending a relationship than staying in a bad one for the
sake of not being alone—or judged for what others might see as another failure. And so, while getting to know Jim, I kept an open mind.

After a week of telephone calls and a lunch date, I learned that we had a litany of common interests and an immediate attraction; we were soon inseparable. He seemed to be honest and ethical, was a committed father, and had a wit and sarcasm that challenged my own. To my surprise I was falling in love, even though this was a package deal. I was blissfully naive as to what that
really
meant.

As our relationship continued to develop, I tried to be as sensitive as possible to any long-term effects my presence might have on the children. Having given up on traditional commitment, I hadn't analyzed the consequences of this relationship lasting more than a few months. I was unprepared for how my role in Michael's life would become a primary one.

And then there was Elizabeth. I was careful to give her space and time to get to know me—she already had a mother. Yet every time she saw me she squealed
with joy and wrapped her arms around my neck as I bent down to greet her. “Who's my chica?” I would ask. She always smiled and yelled out, “Me!”

I cautiously embraced these developing bonds, but before I recognized the potential demands, I became aware that my extracurricular interests required modifications. Dating a man with children meant that some nights there were no babysitters—no dining out, no dancing, no overnight Vegas turnarounds. Some nights the date consisted of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, and a bedtime story after a bath. To some this might be cause to turn and run. But to my surprise, for me it became a toehold in a secret world, an exclusive club called “parenting,” a world into which I had thought I would never be granted a pass. At the time, I didn't realize that it is also something like a cult—easier to get into than out of.