ninanevermore | Friday – The Best Mother a Boy Could Never Know

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Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about how my friend the Cajun Queen always gets depressed on Mother's Day, which is this Sunday. She is a mother, but she won't get a card or flowers for being one. Her son has another woman's name is on his birth certificate, and that woman will get his kisses and the card he made at school this week. That is his real mother, and the only mother he knows. The Cajun Queen is only his birth mother, and not real to him at all.

"Look," The Queen told me one day shortly after we met, and handed me a photo. It was of a dark-haired little boy about 4 years old.

"Cute! Who is it?"

"He's my son."

My eyebrows must have gone up, and I opened my mouth to ask a question that I couldn't quite find the words for. I knew she didn't have a child in her life; her lifestyle was quintessentially, even stereotypically, that of a single, childless adult.

"He doesn't live with me, he lives in [another state] with his adoptive parents. But I get pictures and letters from time to time, if I ask for them."

I looked at the picture a little closer.

"He's adorable," I told her, "He looks just like you."

"Doesn't he? He's even got my ears, poor kid." The little boy's ears stuck out a little, just like her own ears. She kept her hair long to hide them, though they weren't near as bad as she thought they were.

She told about her son, and her ex husband, and how both of them came into her life, and then left. Her husband was another Cajun from her hometown. She claims she married him only so she could later divorce him and make him quit following her around. I think she did it to tick off her mom, who hated the man with a passion.

"She couldn't stand him, then I told her, ha! You have to invite him in the house, he's family, now! She still hasn't forgiven me," the Queen said.

The marriage was rocky from the start, and had reached a level of mutual loathing by the time the Queen learned she was pregnant. Her husband claimed the baby wasn't his, probably because he had told his girlfriend that he and his wife were no longer having sex, and this evidence to the contrary was very inconvenient. Estranged from family, despised by her husband (who she couldn't divorce until after the baby was born), and financially in ruins, she made the decision to give the baby up.

"At the time, I couldn't even take care of myself," she told me, "How could I take care of a baby, too?"

She contacted a local adoption agency, who picked up her medical expenses and allowed her to handpick the couple that would raise her son. Prospective parents make scrapbooks of themselves and their lives for prospective birth mother to look through, and the Queen found a family she thought would be perfect. She only had one stipulation for them, and they agreed to it: the little boy must be named after the Queen's grandfather, who had died recently.

When she went to the hospital to give birth, her son's new mother and father were there. None of the Queen's family knew about the pregnancy, so it was the adoptive mother who sat with her and held her hand through her labor. When the baby was born and the doctor tried to hand it to the Queen, she shook her head and pointed to the other woman.

"Give him to her," she told the doctor, "she's his mother, not me."

The adoptive mother broke down in tears and accepted her newborn son from the doctor's hands.

The Queen's husband visited her at the hospital, and saw his son one time before he signed over his rights. Seeing the baby softened him, and he told the Queen that he'd changed his mind, and she and he could keep the baby and raise him, if she wanted to.

"He's not a puppy," she told him, "you can't just walk in here, take a look, and go awww, he's cute, I think we'll keep him. I've already told them they can have him, and I'm not backing out on them at this point."

So her son went home with a different set of parents than the ones who brought him into the world. She divorced her husband, who married his girlfriend a few months later when she told him she was pregnant (an irony that still irks the Cajun Queen to this day).

Everywhere she goes, the Queen carries a picture of this little boy who looks just like her, and she shows it to people once she decides she likes them enough to share this treasure with. She still has the scrapbook with pictures of his parents and the house he is growing up in. She keeps a teddy bear in her room that wears the t-shirt her baby boy wore at the hospital (one of her single, childless friends once told her this was creepy).

Every Mother's Day, she told me she cries a little. She is reluctant to have another child, fearing it will make her re-live the nightmare that first pregnancy. She told me she doesn't think she deserves a baby, since she was such a pathetic mother that she couldn't take care of the one she already had. She thinks maybe she is being punished by God, for being such an awful mother.

"You have to forgive yourself," I told her, "God has never held this against you, not even for a minute. You did the best thing for you and your son, and you have nothing to be ashamed of. Your ex is the one God thinks is a jerk." I don't think she believed me.

I hope this year, she will finally have a happy Mother's Day. She deserves it more than anyone I know.

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Current Mood: drunk
Current Music: Saber Dance by Khachaturian