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“Why did you lie to me?” I whisper, knowing if I don’t ask my mom this question now, I’ll never build up the nerve.
She sighs and pulls back, her hands on either side of my face.
“I made a mistake,” she tells me. “When you were little, I didn’t know how to explain to you who I had been. You were too young for me to share the fact that I’d had an affair with a married man but old enough to remember your dad and ask questions during the periods of time when he was gone.”
Her thumb wipes away a stray tear from my cheek.
“So I told you he’d left us, and then as you got older, I didn’t want to change how you saw me. You always said I was this amazing mom who worked so hard for us, and how could I tear that image down and tell you I wasn’t the woman you thought I was?”
Maybe Boyd was right, that day on the plane. He told me fear is about a lack of understanding, a fear of the unknown.
My mother lied because she was afraid of what my response would be to her actions. She was afraid of how I might see her, how that might change.
But I was right too. Her fear was also about love.
My mother loves me, more than anything in this world. I’m the most important thing in her life, and she was afraid that by telling me the truth, she might lose me.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says, wiping away another tear from my cheek.
In that moment, my forgiveness is immediate.
This woman has proven to me time and time again that I can count on her, that I can believe in her, that her love is everlasting.
She will always be the same person I’ve known my entire life, the same hardworking, loving, loyal badass who took care of me all by herself.
Having a shameful part of her past is her own patch of weeds to work through, not mine, and I could never let something like this come between us.
* * *
As we sit at her small kitchen table, she tells me the truth about what happened between her and Ken. About the young college guy in Boston for a summer internship that she had an affair with, even knowing that he had a girlfriend back home. He’d been an escape for her from the hard life she’d been living, and that she knew she would continue to live once he was gone.
But then a baby happened—me. She thought maybe he’d stick around, or that he’d want to be involved. And for a few years, he gave a half-hearted effort by coming to visit and giving empty promises that went unfulfilled.
Eventually, he finally told Linda the truth. That he’d had a child in an affair. My mom doesn’t know all of the details, but according to what Ken told her all those years ago, Linda demanded that he choose. Her or us.
So he chose.
It’s a hard story to hear, and I’m thankful my mom chose to gloss over a lot of it when I was younger, the brutality of my own father choosing a love interest over his daughter even harder to handle than all the made-up reasons he left us behind.
But I don’t cry. I’ve cried enough tears over a man who doesn’t love me enough to choose me.
* * *
After dinner, we sit out on her little fire escape, legs crossed and looking out at the sea of houses surrounding us. My mother lives on the fourth floor of one of the few apartment complexes above two stories in this neighborhood, so she actually has a pretty decent view, even though she’s in a struggling area.
“So, tell me more about this…Boyd,” my mom says.
I snort. “What more do you want to know? I feel like I already told you everything.”
She shakes her head, grinning at me. “Nah, you haven’t told me what I want to know.”
“And what’s that?”
My mom bounces her shoulder against mine, slipping from mother mode into girlfriend mode with a flick of the wrist.
“Ugh,” I say, covering my face with my hands. “I’m not talking to you about sex.”
The sound of her cackling laughter echoes across the parking lot and through the open air.
