It’s two days before Christmas. I haven’t seen Janie, my birth mother, in nearly two years. Since I found her twenty years ago, we’ve struck up a pleasant, if lukewarm, relationship, though it didn’t start that way. We’ve melded, through the years, like seasoning blends into aging meat. We talk on the phone every so often. She’ll tell me about the neighbors in her apartment complex, who had what surgery or who had their car taken by which children and why, and what her tiny dog Daisy is up to—“Being a good girl,” she says—and then asking what I’ve been up to, without waiting for the answer. I’m in Little Rock, her latest hometown, to see her and my brother Jimmy (her oldest child until I learned her identity and appeared in her life) for a quick stop on the way out for a catch-up visit. I’ve brought her a blossoming pink orchid, a gift that says I’m thinking about you, and I care about you, but I don’t really know you. Not really.
She knows I’m coming. We made a plan a week ago. “Good,” she’d said. “Come by the apartment, pick me up, and we’ll run over to that little Greek restaurant for lunch.”
I send a text announcing my impending arrival. Be there in ten minutes.
I’m ready! she responds.
I pull up to her apartment, a small two-bedroom in a complex that qualifies for lower-income senior-citizen rent subsidies. I do math in my head, calculating her age. I was born in 1965 when she was eighteen. It’s 2020, which means she’s seventy-three. Young, considering she’s a great-grandmother.
I look up. She’s in front of the car, wearing a white satin blouse and cream dress pants like she’s headed to lunch at the country club, and waving like I’ve arrived on the Queen Elizabeth after sailing across the ocean to get here. I open the car door.
“I saw you pull up,” Janie shouts. “Merry Christmas!”
We’ve never spent Christmas together, and rarely more than two, maybe three hours together on any day since I found her more than two decades ago, but I can tell the last few times we’ve talked on the phone that she’s aging, repeating lines, forgetting what I’ve said fifteen minutes before, and sharing overly ambitious plans for the future that seem untethered to reality. I suppose.
“I’m getting my new house,” she’ll say, for instance, “and it’s so beautiful, with rooms for everyone and a pool for the children.”
She’ll name a specific address. I’ll look it up. Not for sale. Estimated value: $2.1 million. She’s on a fixed income, relying upon the monthly social security deposit and help from family for rent, utilities, groceries, and vet bills.
“How do you plan to get this house?” I’ll ask, not to make her feel silly, but wondering, honestly, if I’m missing something.
“Oh,” she’ll say, “I’ve got a big check coming. It’s on the way. Any day now.”
And I’ll think—No. I don’t think so.
Somehow, though, I don’t feel bad for her, that no big check is coming, I don’t think, or that she’s clinging to the illusion. I feel her excitement when she says these things, like she’s a little girl planning her dream birthday party: “There’ll be a cake this big, and all my friends, and a pony giving rides, and a magician, and . . .” And if that takes her away from the rent-subsidized apartment, if only in her mind, is that a problem?
When she speaks these plans of big checks coming and a new lavish home in the Heights neighborhood she can’t afford on her monthly retirement check, I’m inclined to roll my eyes. But, I remember, that’s the same language and thought process that gave me something to shoot for when the Dreamer picked me up and gave me a vision that I’d taken to Kent, when I’d told her I’d write a faith book about family and help others when I couldn’t yet help myself. I wasn’t seventy-three years old and displaying signs of dementia, though. Still, I can’t help but think, regardless of whatever diagnosis may come for Janie’s delusion, that there’s some commonality in our thinking. Maybe this should scare me, this disconnection with reality, which I once had, though time is proving that I wasn’t so disconnected after all. But it doesn’t. Knowing Janie, and how her mind works, even in this later stage of her life, helps me make sense of myself, something all of us need—a map of who we are, via who we came from, bumps and all.
I open the car door, step out with a broad smile, and open my arms. She comes in like a largemouth bass snapping up a snack on the surface, wrapping her arms around my neck hard and fast and strong, the way I’d wanted her to the first time we’d met twenty years ago, like I was her baby. Still, here I am now, a smiling man wanting nothing more than his mother’s unbridled embrace.
We say hi, hello, so good to see you, and my, don’t you look good, and I walk toward her apartment door. She doesn’t move.
“I have a surprise for you!” she says.
I think another big check and dream house is on the way, and I’ll unwrap that over our impending hour or hour and a half of discussion, engaging in a detailed conversation over the fictional thing that brings her real joy. And I should explain, in fairness to Janie, her fiction corresponds in part to her onetime reality. She loves houses. She’s got good taste—previously owning a redo in Little Rock’s Heights, a golf villa in Plano with seats on the patio to watch the second shots to a green, with a view of the green. And, for a season of her life, she was wealthy, with multiple homes, a new full-size Mercedes, and a wardrobe that landed somewhere in taste and quantity between Imelda Marcos and Diane Sawyer. She was a schoolteacher who married a lawyer with an aggressive entrepreneurial bent who led them to cellular and real estate investments. Their net worth exploded, along with their marriage. She ended up with the smaller end of the settlement and spent a decade on expensive attorneys without changing her spending. By the time it all ended, she was left in a rent subsidy, a used Kia, clothes from Goodwill, and a lavish imagination.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I say, looking around for a clue.
“I’m coming to your house for Christmas!”
“What?”
Dad! William says.
I know. It’s everything I’ve wanted, but.
Kent has everything planned out. William Wilder, our firstborn grandson, is celebrating his second Christmas, and it’ll be our first spent with him and our first with him in Oxford. Kent has it all planned, down to when we’ll go to church together (the 5 PM service, which has a nursery for children), what time we’ll eat (7:30 PM, once William Wilder’s down for the night), and how present opening will go (one each on Christmas Eve, the rest early the next morning over coffee).
I send Kent a message.
Janie says she’s coming for Christmas.
What??!! This Christmas??? That’s great, but I’m not prepared.
Janie has never been to our house. She’s only met Hudson, her grandson, once.
As in, she’s coming today, I message back.
Janie instructs me to wait there.
“Don’t you want me to come in?” I ask.
“No. I’ve got my bag ready at the door.”
She walks to the door, opens it, and wheels out a hard-shell, cream-colored suitcase big enough to fit an entire dresser of clothes, plus a pillow or two. Daisy, her tiny Yorkshire Terrier, starts yap-yap-yapping at the door, saying, don’t forget me.
She doesn’t, scooping the dog into her arms, instructing me to load up the suitcase. “Let’s go,” she declares.
She sees my concern.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m dropping Daisy off at the groomer.”
“You mean kennel?”
“No. The groomer. I know the lady who owns it, and I’m sure she won’t mind.”
We load up, and I follow her directions. We pull in, and Janie clutches Daisy in her arms as she walks inside. She’s gone for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Kent and I furiously text in the meantime. Will she go to church with us?? We don’t have presents for her!!!! Don’t let her bring the dog!!! Milly and Bea will pee in the house if she does!
Janie’s back, still holding Daisy in her arms.
“Well,” she says, “that won’t work.”
No. And we’re off to my house—my birth mother, whom I barely know, and her dog, to spend Christmas together, the only present I’d wanted for so many years, the one I’d dreamed about since I was a little boy, asking for my biological mother under hypnosis. But I’m not a little boy any longer. I’m in my mid-fifties now, afraid I’ve let another of Kent’s Christmases take a wrong turn. Because she’s not prepared.
A car ride for two across two hundred miles or more without the distraction of music is a truth serum of sorts—you are close, side-by-side, arms sometimes touching in the center console, yet slightly removed, looking into the roadway ahead, and back-and-forthed by the clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Janie talks with a frankness and clarity in repetitive sound that I’ve not heard from her before, explaining how she met Lloyd, my birth father. It was a blind date for a fraternity party. She was a senior in high school, visiting a university. There was a party, too much alcohol, too much youthfulness, and too much foolishness, in every direction. She talks about what it felt like leaving me at the adoption home at the age of three days old. “It was like a part of me died,” she says, “a part I can never get back, even knowing you now.” She talks about how it felt denying the birth and adoption for decades. “It was like it never really happened in the first place,” she says. She talks about what it feels like having made money and lost it all. “I’m just thankful for what I have,” she says. “Besides, I’m getting a new house soon, anyway—didn’t I tell you?”
I blink in concern, with no response. I wonder if she’s all there. I wonder if that’s how I sound—thinking I can help solve America’s student mental-health crisis. I wonder if that’s how I sounded when I crawled back to Kent, begging for forgiveness, explaining how I’d write books that read like contemporary Scripture and appear in a TV show that helps others. I wonder if I shouldn’t sell Janie short on her new-house dream, since, even if she’s wrong about the literalness of it, the truth is that the odds are high she’ll live somewhere else in her lifetime. It will be a new home, and we’ll all be together, one way or another, since such hope is the foundation of family and faith. Perhaps I should concern myself less with assessing her sanity and more with assessing mine, understanding that I’m living in the moment I’d dreamt of as a child—Christmas with my mother.
The serious talk ends once we pull in to my house, but it was enough, more than enough. How much of a lifetime can one take in over several hours? Also, the conversation felt like the present of a lifetime, one I never thought I’d get.
By the time we arrive, Kent is more than happy to have adjusted plans for the historic moment: the birth mother I’d long sought and coveted, now spending—Wait, how many nights?—in our home for the holidays. Hudson, Lo, and William Wilder spend several hours each day at the house, visiting and hanging around with Janie, the grandmother Hudson barely knew who’s now sharing stories about fishing with her father and sisters and having big dreams in high school of who she’d marry, and where she’d live, the parties and all the neighbors she would have, spreading joy to all like a wealth she’d share liberally. She delights in watching William Wilder, her firstborn great-grandson, toddle around, asking me to take videos and pictures to send her when she gets home so she can replay, smile, and remember.
“I love him so much,” she says.
“David!” Kent shouts.
We’ve forgotten about Daisy.
“She’s peed in the library,” Kent says, shouting from the front room of our new house, easily our favorite, decorated with a soft wooly carpet, which now has a prominent yellow stain. By the day after Christmas, Daisy has transformed the library into a public toilet, as Milly and Bea have decided to come one, come all, joining in because Daisy’s scent leads the way. We want to get annoyed. The new carpet.
Funny how quickly we forget, how easily we lose perspective.
For most of a lifetime, I’d needed my birth mother, wanted my birth mother. Now, she’s here, a miracle, for someone like me who didn’t know an ounce of related blood on this earth until William was born when I was twenty-four years old. And I’m worried about a dog named Daisy and a rug.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kent says, and I know she’s right.
Christmas morning is slightly awkward, us opening presents while Janie watches, though she doesn’t mind. We share our Christmas dinner with her, this woman who passed along half of her being to me, yet who knows none of our inside jokes or our misty-eyed memories because she wasn’t there. Still, we are trying to make her family, with new memories, one bite of green bean casserole at a time.
“Remember that one year it was seventy-five degrees for a high on Christmas Day, a North Mississippi record, but three days later it snowed five inches?” I ask, and for Janie, it is as if I’ve bolted out the chorus to “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and she can’t help but join in, humming with specific details of that very winter with differences of adjustment for Arkansas, where she was living at the time. “We had seventy-eight degrees and three inches of snow.”
“That’s right! I remember that Arkansas got less snow from the system because the low pressure took a track farther south, across the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which placed us in the deeper band of snow where it crossed over from rain.”
“My Daddy would have talked to you all day,” she says. “He was the weather this, weather that. All he thought about and talked about was the weather. So unpredictable, he’d say.”
Her father. My grandfather, I never knew.
Three days go fast spent with a mother you barely know, especially when you are getting to know her. But the time comes for me to drive her home, and as we load up, she is already looking past the holiday just concluded to the next, with big plans she talks about with excitement, like she won’t think about anything else. Until.
“I can’t wait,” she says. “I’m going to have you all come to my new house. Wait and see. It’ll have room for everyone, and I’ll have toys for the children, and we’ll have a dining room with a seat for everyone, and a big spread. I love to do a big spread.”
I load Daisy into Janie’s arms in the front seat, and we’re off. “It’s supposed to be a nice, clear day for the drive,” she says.
“High pressure in place over Texas,” I say, and she smiles.
We’re on the highway, clickety-clack, and I’m thinking about what question to ask to get the conversation started, but I look to the right, and Janie has fallen asleep—Daisy curled up in her lap, head leaning against the door, with a faint snore joining the highway’s rhythm.
“We’re here,” I say, pulling up at her apartment, and she opens her eyes.
I help her and Daisy from the car, unload her bags, and walk to them to her apartment door.
“Can’t you come in?” she says. “I’ve not yet seen you enough so that saying goodbye doesn’t always hurt.”
“I know,” I say. “I feel the same. It always hurts. This will hurt more. But I need to get back home.”
“I know,” she says. “What a wonderful family you have. I’ll be working on next Christmas. Okay? I’ll have the house. We’ll all be there.”
“I can’t wait,” I say, and she takes Daisy and her suitcase into the apartment, and I head home. An hour into the drive, I get a message. From Janie.
Had much fun, she says, with a smiley face emoji.
Following line: Might snow next week!
I click over to the forecast—she’s right, about the snow potential. Of course.
I text Kent, eagerly passing along my inherited information. Be home by six. And, yay—it might snow next week.
I smile, not because of the forecast, but because of the current conditions instead. I’ve received the greatest gift. I have a mother, who’s real, and who’s mine, really. It’s been a missing piece of my life and, therefore, a missing piece in the memoir I’ve been writing, since I knew her, and myself, but not completely. Now, I can better finish—my life, and my life’s story.