The Drama of Mother

I used to wonder about the possibility of other siblings "out there" and always in my imagination I pictured this brother or sister as the product of some indiscretion of Dad's.  I never expressed this fantasy to anyone in my family and then one day it happened.

Mom and Dad -- retired at 55 and traveling in an RV worth more than any house I ever grew up in -- were visiting from up North and we had just finished our Tex-Mex.  My then-boyfriend (now husband) and I prepared to leave when Mom said, "Before you leave there's something we want to talk about with you."

My stomach dropped and I returned my bag to the floor.  I waited to hear one of them say the word cancer.

"Go ahead and have a seat," Dad said.  I looked at Mom.  Was there a grin playing at the corner of her mouth? 

"Do you remember me talking about Roger?"  Yes, he was that one that Mom let get away.  He was the one Dad always referred to with great disdain, you could've chosen Roger.  Roger ~ eternal man of mystery to my sister and me.  He lived in Minnesota or Montana or somewhere up there.

"Well, before you were born..."

Holy crap!  "Are you getting ready to tell me that I have a sibling other than Kim?"  I looked for hidden cameras, sure this moment was being taped for Oprah or Jerry Springer. 

Sure enough, that goofy grin on her face grew to a full-blown smile as she recounted the conception and delivery of her only son.  The birth my Grandma forced her to experience alone, dropping her off at the hospital with a parting comment, "call me when you're done and ready to come home."  Yikes.

He was born five years before me and one of my mother's greatest concerns over the years was that I would come home with a new boyfriend only to discover I'd slept with my brother! 

Fortunately, that storyline was left to the writers of daytime soap drama.  She disclosed the details of Stephen's entrance into the world and Roger's return to Vietnam, asking me whether I recalled her increased moodiness each autumn.  Did I notice it?  Was she kidding?  My mom was a moody rag every season of the year.  There was no way the month of October stood out separately from the others.

The evening grew surreal as her story unfolded.  It wasn't that I was no longer the all-important oldest, but that everyone all around me (except for Kim) had known I wasn't the oldest.  I felt - if only for a 24-hour window - that I had lived this lie, perfectly fostered by my grandparents, aunts and uncles.  Then the surreal window closed and I realized that no change in birth order could alter who I was - even if I learned the truth at 31.

Ah, but something shifted that night.  I watched and listened to Mom and for the first time in my life I began to see her as more than just this bitchy woman who nagged at me to empty the dishwasher and compared me to my father when she was particularly pissed.

She was more than a mom, she was more than my keeper... she was a woman who'd experienced more than the caress of one lover.  She was a sexual being with a colorful past, more interesting than she had been the day before.  The box I'd put her in was too small and I delighted not only in meeting my newly-found brother but in connecting with this other person I thought I'd always known but was meeting for the very first time.