Belated Motherhood--First Appeared in the San Francisco Examiner

      Gertrude was not my cup of tea, but she was lonely and a fellow writer.

      And adhesive. 

If you’d allow it, she would attach herself and never let go.  I made duty calls as infrequently as possible.

One afternoon, more than a year before she died, she stared at me over the top of her glasses.

“I’ve decided to tell you something.”

I nodded and wondered how soon I could escape.

“I had a child out of wedlock.”

I hid my surprise as she told the story -- although I couldn’t imagine why she would want to at this late date.

“I was 16 years old, living at home.  And because I was overweight, no one seemed to notice the change in my waistline.  My mother kept making me larger clothes but said nothing.

“I was in my room one evening when the baby was born. My parents came in and Father asked if I wanted to marry Tom.

“I said no, and that very night my daughter went to a childless couple in our community.  My (younger) sister never even knew about it.”

I was flabbergasted.

“Did you see your daughter again?”

“We moved to Florida soon after, but I had a good friend who kept tabs on her for me,” the old woman said.  “A couple of months ago she wrote that both adoptive parents were dead.  I felt that I could now make contact.  I got up my courage and made the call.

“My daughter answered the telephone.  I asked if she was aware of her adoption, and she said ‘yes.’  I told her that I was in a position to put her in touch with her mother should she wish it.

“There was along pause. Then she asked in a quiet voice, ‘Are you my mother?’

“I swallowed hard, trying not to cry, and said ‘yes.’”

The daughter was by now 63 years old.

“What took you so long?” she asked, and I could hear the tears in her voice.”

As the months went by, the saga continued.  It made visiting Gert a lot more interesting.  Mother and daughter –- one 80 years old, the other 64 -– began telephoning each other and became friends of sorts.

Gertrude had been a teacher of creative writing.  Oddly, so had her daughter.

After a year of calls and letters, the daughter asked if she might travel west to see her.

I happened to drop by that afternoon and found Gert in a quandary.

I asked, “Don’t you want to meet her?”

“Of course,” she said. “But then I’ll have to tell my son about her.”

She eventually told her son.  The daughter finally arrived.

The visit was not a success.  She supposed her daughter was nice enough, But Gert wasn’t jumping up and down. 

Gert at long last told her younger sister about the existence of the daughter.  The sister, who had two unmarried children living with partners, was furious.  She said that Gert had done a terrible thing six decades ago to their parents.

But Gert said that what really miffed her sister was being left out of the secret all those years.

On the other hand, Gert’s son and his new sister hit it off.

After she returned to her life in the Midwest, the daughter would call her elderly birth mother occasionally, but Gert suspected that her daughter and her son were talking more often.

She was jealous.