If I forget
I drove my daughter to a clothing store this afternoon. Let's shop, I said! We chose flirty and unusual dresses, all with sequins and asymmetrical hemlines, the kinds of things we both love to wear, and we hogged the largest fitting room and laughed as the florescent lighting brought out forgotten flaws in the scratched mirror. I bought her every dress she wanted, six party dresses in colors of ocean green and poppy red, all low cut, snug, the dresses you wear in your best dreams. Two decades is a long time to think about buying dresses for a daughter.
We drove the backroads home, past the polluted marshy lagoon bordering Wal-Mart, and we considered which party dress she should wear tomorrow when I prepare a gourmet lunch for a friend. And as we talked and watched a flock of gulls nest in the reeds, her cell phone rang, jangle echoed inside her simple cloth purse. She rummaged around, found her phone, flipped it open, held it to the side of her face. Her hair look just like mine - dark and wild and layered with a patch of bangs hanging over her left eye.
"Hey, it's my mom. Say hi." She handed the phone to me, and I took it, left hand still on the wheel, shaking, unsure what to say to the woman who became my daughter's mother when I gave her up for adoption.
It was just a few hours ago, but I only remember small parts of the conversation. I remember letting tears fall across my nose, not wiping my eyes, as I steered around the sage-infused bend marking the transition from inland to coast. I drove with one hand to my ear, past a row of queen palms, listening to the grateful Thank Yous of a mom who loved and cherished the young woman sitting beside me. She didn't sound like my daughter. I sound like her. But she is her mother, I thought. And I am something else. A bio-mother with only wistful memory of a tiny baby and a cold hospital bed and two decades of heartache.
"I told her that you thought of her every night of her life, and especially on holidays and birthdays. I knew that you must have a special connection to her." Her mom spoke with unguarded emotion. She didn't try to tell me how much she did for my daughter. She didn't try to assert her right as the Real Mom. She thanked me. She thanked me, and welcomed me as her daughter's Other Mother.
10:45:44 PM 
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