Kindred - 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
306.8743dc22
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 allmotherhood.

Near or far, I will love you always.

Kate! Theres 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.

Lets 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 dont see a monster, I say, and look down into the tear-filled eyes.

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

Were making progress, I think. For a long while hes been convinced that the monster is somewhere in his room. That he understands its 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 Papas 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.

Youre welcome, I whisper back.

Thats 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.

Ive 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. Shes been with me for more than a decade, and Im certain its because of my patient nurturing that she now feels so well loved and secure that she disobeys nearly every command I offerunless, of course, a biscuit is involved. She is smart and manipulative and I love her all the more for it. Yet shes 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 werent 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 hadnt 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 mothers 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 cant 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 Michaels stepfather. Michaels mother, Jims former girlfriend, was now married to another manand 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 boys existence and was shocked to learn he was father to a two-year-old son. Michaels 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, Michaels 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 aloneor judged for what others might see as another failure. And so, while getting to know Jim, I kept an open mind.