Love and Lovers

Mama’s greatest love was not with either of my fathers. I’m not exactly shocked by that discovery, but the details of the 35-year-long (and counting) love story did still manage to expose a few secrets and surprises.

I always knew that my biological father was “a great guy who was just in a completely different phase of life” than Mama, and I mostly understood. Mama always saw the best in people because she believed that everyone had a story – a history of people and events - that molded them over time. If you knew their story, you could usually see, even if the choices they made seemed questionable or even sometimes just downright wrong, they were probably just doing the best they could and not trying to hurt anyone.

I’m 27 and I’ve never met “the man who helped Mama make me.” She told him that she was open to whatever level of engagement he wanted to have with me, and she meant it, but she also moved halfway across the country before even getting up the nerve to tell him. So, while I’ve occasionally wondered why he never wanted to meet me, even just once, I did understand I was already 1200 miles away when he learned of my existence and that part was technically Mama’s fault.

I’m lucky that Mama is so darn sentimental that she saves just about anything that may hold some delicate connection to a significant time or person because I was able to read, in his own words, that my bio dad didn’t just abandon me to the unknown without a thought or care, and he was thrilled for Mama to get to be a mom. In the first email he sent to her after she sprang the big news on him, he wrote, “First, let me say that I am excited for you. You will make a great mother…I think you will find that all the plans in the world don’t hold a candle to the gift of motherhood.”

So, I know he cared, and he thoughtfully chose what he believed to be the best way to support me and Mama. I also understand, now that I’m a parent myself, that his choice was not made without sacrifice because there’s a certain amount of guilt that he has to shoulder for the rest of his life by being absent from mine.

Mama assured me that my biological father deserved my respect, and she always believed in Papa, too, even when he made her cry a million tears when he moved out when I was 9.

Papa and I have never been especially close simply because it’s hard for him to get close to anyone. Thanks to Mama, I understood from the day Papa left that, no matter how much he made her cry, it was never his intention to hurt her. Believing in the power of intention has helped me become the kind of person who possesses the ability to forgive and it created the framework of peace that I’m so thankful is the foundation of my life.

I do know Papa has loved me since I was two-and-a-half years old. Our relationship has consisted mainly of silly banter and good-natured teasing, but that’s ok. That’s just what Papa is capable of giving to me and Allison, but it’s not necessarily all that he thinks we deserve. And it’s not like he never talks to me about important stuff. It just doesn’t flow easily for him. Honestly, it’s more meaningful when he does muster the courage to open himself up to me.

So, neither of my fathers, it turns out, was the singular love of Mama’s life. I certainly never expected to discover the truth between the covers of a small, plain black Moleskine notebook. The ultimate lesson of my life was documented and then discovered in a nondescript little journal that turned out to be Mama’s old-fashioned diary.

Mama met Gerald more than 35 years ago when she moved to Oklahoma from where she grew up in Pennsylvania. It was about as close to love at first sight for her as I think is probably actually possible in the real world. She had a good feeling about him immediately, describing his aura of warmth and tenderness that she felt even as “just friends” who worked together. Apparently, he also happened to be quite attractive, with his intense eyes, noticed instantly by every single person, man or woman, who ever locked gazes with him, and his slouchy too-cool, early-2000s-rebel style, and she quickly developed a pretty feverish crush on him, which was unfortunate because he was married.

Believing that her life was better with him in it in any capacity, their friendship grew, as did her connection to his sweet wife Sally. As she and Sally grew closer, her romantic attraction to Gerald shrunk to only the faintest glimmer, and only managed to exist at all because, apparently, he was just that hot. Tragically - truly heartbreaking to Mama - Sally died in a car accident a couple years later. In the grief that followed, she and Gerald fumbled through trying to maintain their friendship, and even took a few ill-fated steps too soon into a romantic relationship that ended up hurting Mama so deeply that it consumed her heart for the next few years.

With the missteps and hurt, she and Gerald lost contact almost completely for a year or so, and by the time they finally found their way back to each other, he had met someone else, and soon dropped the bombshell that his girlfriend was pregnant, and soon to be his second wife.

Reading Mama’s diary covering the next six long years was equal parts sad, happy, and sometimes deliciously exciting, as she and Gerald navigated their renewed friendship that still - always - buzzed with an undercurrent of chemistry, although neither of them ever acknowledged it aloud.

It wasn’t until Mama discovered she was pregnant with me and decided essentially to run home to her own mom, halfway across the country, that something happened that redefined their relationship forever.

Right before she left Oklahoma, Gerald skipped her going away party and Mama was devastated. The news Gerald broke to her the next day is, quite frankly, just ridiculous, as it was the next obvious plot point in the quintessential story about star-crossed lovers.

Gerald missed the party because he had just discovered his wife had been cheating on him for more than two years, and he was getting divorced. He and Mama had one last heart-to-heart before she left where he tried to finally set to rest the pain caused by their earlier “missed connection” though he stopped short of expressing any sort of current romantic feelings toward her.

That declaration came a few months later. Mama wrote to her friend Meg, “He's actually been kinda freaking me out with the frequency and intensity of his expressions of feeling toward me. I have been being extremely cautious…I have to make sure I am present and engaged with the one person who matters more than any others, the little monkey in my belly who will be emerging into the world in a freaking month!”

Over the next two years, their relationship deepened, as she learned to trust his expressions of love, and we went to visit him a couple times and he came to see us once, too. Discovering what happened after his visit, I finally began to grasp the true depth of Mama’s love, and of Gerald’s matching devotion.

His visit was near-perfect, and it was excruciating for both of them when he had to leave. The moment his plane landed, he called to share the decision he had made. He was moving to Pennsylvania to be with Mama (and me!) He ran through all the preliminary plans he had devised on the long, sad flight home, including the schedule he was going to propose for sharing custody of his boys with his ex-wife. Mama was overjoyed and a bit overwhelmed, likely because part of her already knew what was going to happen next.

Gerald called her the next day, and tearfully explained that his love for Mama was so great that, for a few hours he got carried away with the idea of finally being together, but ultimately, there was no way he could move far enough away from his kids that seeing them involved complicated negotiations and expensive plane tickets. Mama was devastated, but she understood, even telling him that, if he was the kind of guy who could leave his kids, then he wasn’t the kind of guy that she could love as much as she loved him.

In Gerald’s mind though, there was nothing stopping me and Mama from moving back to Oklahoma. But there was… Mama had spent the past few years helping Grandma open a shop, and Grandma had just lost her husband to cancer. The love of a daughter is almost as strong as the love of a parent, plus she was also a mom, and she believed that raising me surrounded by our big, crazy family would make me happiest.

In the end, Gerald loved his kids too much to leave them. And Mama loved me and Grandma too much to go to him. They soon realized there was nothing more that could be calculated or figured, and there just wasn’t a solution that was going to allow the two of them to get their happily ever after. The greatest love, the one that ended up standing the test of time, wasn’t between Mama and Gerald, even after a decade of working so damn hard for it. It was the love that these two parents had for their children.

When I returned her diary, she accepted it with one hand, while offering me a slip of paper with the other. It was a check payable to me for $20,000, and there was another one for Allison. She explained that, thanks to Papa’s hard work and his financial support while we were growing up, even after they split up, Mama had managed to put aside a bit of money here and there, and these checks were the result of that saving. She didn’t need the money, and seeing it as tangible evidence of the love they both have for us, she thought Allison and I should share it. I didn’t even have to wait for the shock to wear off to know the first thing I was going to do with my portion.

Papa and I have very little in common, which makes complete sense since I’m my mother through and through, and he and Mama are polar opposites. One of the few things we do share is a lifelong curiosity about Japanese culture. For me, it began with my discovery of anime right around the time Papa moved out. For Papa, it was borne from his love of classic Nintendo video games. We had always dreamed of taking our “trip of a lifetime” to Japan, but Papa has never been much of a traveler, and the undertaking of such a big trip ended up being one of those things that just never happened.

That was going to change. Mama loved to travel and, though we rarely managed big vacations, she made sure we took plenty of trips to the beach, and a couple cruises. Papa and I needed to make some memories. I knew traveling together in a foreign country would bring us closer than we’d ever been, and would give me the chance to show him how much I value the love he’s given to me, just as much as I’ve appreciated Mama’s devotion. Mama will understand why I chose this, and she will think it’s worth every penny as she gleefully imagines her “mini me” trapping poor Papa in a foreign country with no choice but to talk and to share and to connect!