Moms

I face this Mothers’ Day as a full blown orphan for the first time in 15 years. It’s a situation I thought I’d be facing for the rest of my life after May 17, 1963 the day I found my mom stretched out and dead on the couch when I came home for lunch. My parents never made any secret I was adopted, so I realized I might have another family somewhere. Several years after my dad died, I got up courage to ask a private investigator to transform my adoption papers into a real contact. His quick success found me with a living mother and father and 10 half sisters and brothers. But having. a mother again, especially one with whom shared with me so many traits, and who quickly became interested in my life, was the supreme joy. I thought I’d have her a little longer, as her own mom beat 104. Mom missed that by 13 years. While her spirit never wavered, consequences of aortic stenosis (a heart valve malady) and measures to manage it left her ever more frail. It turns out I have aortic stenosis, too, but my cardiologist says I’ll die with it and not of it.

Let’s go back to the time when Little Bobby was but a “clump of cells”, two beautiful ladies in waiting.

As Mom awaited her adopted child, she and my Dad had a plenty good time. She, like my dad, was quite the athlete. They tore ’em up on the golf course. To support herself, she sold real estate. It turned our the last development her firm pushed was a property in Wyoming (10 miles from GR) available for development when the spring feeding a gypsum quarry burst, so there was our house on Big Spring Drive!

Mom Marlene was in sales, too. When she learned she was pregnant with me, she took a job selling magazines in Philadelphia, getting out of Dodge while in tow. This handsome picture of my ever classy mom likely includes me in there somewhere.

The golfer got me to about 10, leaving me with only memories, all I had to late middle age when it exploded on me again with real relationships with real live people. That may be it, but another gift of reconnection is all those people who loved the same people you did, and with those memories, with which the lost shall never really be.

So, to many how many mothers you’ve know, Happy Mothers’ Day to them all.