The worst thing my mother heard from me

I had a previous post in which I detailed the worst thing that my mother ever said to me. However, that issue can go both ways and I've found that very often, it will with no realization of it at the time.

One thing I have not mentioned is how Mom wanted a daughter so much. After I was born, she thought the next child would be a girl. When she was pregnant, she was expecting one the entire time. (This was in the days before ultrasound.) After she delivered, she was told that the baby was a boy. Mom then went into a state of denial and told the doctor he was wrong, that it was a girl. She eventually had to come to terms with Loyd being a boy and thought she would get a daughter on the third try. As mentioned before, Loyd turned out to be a very difficult baby, crying all night long sometimes. My Mom probably felt that she could endure it a lot better if Loyd had been a girl. Later, Mom decided that Loyd was God's way of telling her she should not have any more children.

Mom maintained this state of depression through our school years. Then, one of Mom's teacher friends did something interesting. She adopted a Hispanic boy who was about six years old. When my Mom was hanging out with them, they appeared to be having a good time and had bonded as mother and son.

One day, Mom called Loyd and me downstairs into the living room. Dad was there. Mom said outright, "I'm going to adopt a little Mexican girl. What do you boys think?"

We both immediately started laughing. I said, "Mom, you're kidding, right?" After all, this was the same woman who had us believing she had fed us dog food a few years ago.

Mom seemed really upset and left the room. Dad never said anything. Loyd and I went back upstairs. I started thinking about the possiblity of having a younger sister living with us. It really didn't seem like it would be that bad. Some time later, Mom left the house. Loyd came into my room and told me Mom had gone out to meet a girl that she might adopt. He said he felt bad about us laughing at Mom. I told him I felt bad, too. He said it would be nice to have a sister, but he was a little bit concerned about what other people would say about us having a Hispanic sister.

With Mom having gone to see a girl to adopt, I started mentally preparing for the presence of another child in the house. I didn't know if this meant that Loyd and I were going to have to be in the same room again or if Mom was going to turn the sewing room at the end of the hall into a bedroom, which would have been large enough for a six-year-old girl. She would have moved into my room after I left for college. (That means I would have had to stay in the little room on those occasions when I returned home from college.

But we never did get that little sister. Mom never talked about adoption again and I never knew what happened when she met the girl. Years later, after my parents divorced, Dad actually expressed gratitude at our initial reaction. He really did not want to have to take care of another child for the next 12 years, especially with Loyd and me about to leave the house in a few short years. He was afraid that while things would improve for a little while, Mom would go back to being her old self, in need of anti-depressants, which she never took before my Dad left her. He really did not want to subject another child to her erratic behavior.

Looking back, I think if Mom had approached Loyd and me a little differently, we would have responded a lot more positively. As I said, she just came right out and said it. If she had finessed it with a preamble, like "I've always wanted to raise a daughter. I have an opportunity to do that by adopting a six-year-old Mexican girl, and I hope you two boys will be supportive." We would have been a lot less likely to laugh because it wasn't so abrupt.

But there's no telling how things would have turned out if we hadn't laughed. She appeared to be prepared to go through with it even without our blessing, but I guess our attitude kept her from actually bringing someone home to stay with us. I will always feel bad for laughing at Mom over something that meant so much to her at the time.