by Louisa C. Brinsmade

"Thank goodness," she breathes, "although you do resemble him more than I'd hoped. In fact, none of my children look like me." We are quiet then. She looks up for a moment. "Your father was blond," she explains, and apparently a waste of her good tutoring. This is our seventh, or eight meeting over the last two years. It is the first time we have traveled together. She picked the place - Santa Fe, New Mexico--a favored vacation spot for her and her husband of seven years, and a place I once lived. We have become, as I told her there, as distant cousins who often meet accidentally, or siblings who have made up after a lifetime of withholding.

The first time I met her, she and I had agreed to lunch at a swank restaurant in Houston. She flew in for the occasion of finally meeting her daughter and I drove in from Austin after getting a call from her two days before, and then broke down on U.S. 290 along the way in my VW Vanagon. Despite my long delay on the road, she was the one who was late, and that's when I knew there was no mistake. We were definitely related.

She had sent me photos of herself in two letters prior to her phone call, and yet I still imagined her differently than the woman who walked toward me through the noisy dining room that first time. The fantasies I had developed never looked like this. Through blades of grass in my green, green yard everything was about her. She was the reason I could never do backbends at nine, could run faster than the boys in 6th grade, why my hands were too big and my ears too small, why I was really hatched from an egg, why I fought so bitterly to get my way and held a mile-long grudge when I didn't. At sixteen, and from then on, I dreamed about the way she sat at a fountain of startled horses in a piazza in Rome, inconsolable and apart. She let her hair grow long there by the circular water streams and wore a distant green shirt and black pants as if she had borrowed her clothes from a brief friend. And when, in my dreams, she finally stood and walked toward me across that piazza in Budapest, or Paris, or Belgrade, but mostly Rome, her dark hair and watery innocence swayed slightly before her like a gift. For my hand that is held out to take hold of her as she walks past me, she is unwilling at the last moment to meet. And she passes by without ever seeing, and the first and last thing shared between us is a melancholy disappointment that we may never meet at all.

We are driving in the rental car to Chimayo. It's him she wants to talk about. He was her first. He won a track scholarship to a Baptist junior college in Oklahoma, yet he never quite lived up to the state's, or the religion's, good name. He eventually died in a drug deal in an alley somewhere in Colorado when he was 35 years old after bilking hundreds of thousands from hapless investors in a land speculation scheme in Dallas. He left a wife and two children behind. That was the last she heard of him, apparently. She loved him once, she imagined, but never really knew him at all. I thought as much, but mostly because I kept the father I grew up with in the same unfamiliar territory. It did not surprise me, or disappoint me overmuch, that I would never meet the man who could never succeed my expectations.

Walking out to the plaza in Taos, she tells me about when she was seventeen and met him at an ice cream stand in Dallas on a Saturday afternoon. Over the roar of a 1961 Ford Galaxy's 8-valve engine, she was introduced to a handsome boy from another high school across town. She didn't recognize him from around town. She was in the first team of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and despite upcoming practice, she had an ice cream. Her boyfriend-to-be had nothing. He didn't talk much, and that reminded her of Steve McQueen. When he later told her about the football injury that left him unable to father children, she believed him. When she didn't have her period for four months, she believed him still. And when her mother, who was eight months pregnant, and one month farther along than her own daughter, told her she needed to have an abortion in Mexico, she no longer believed him.

She gave birth on Thanksgiving Day, and pouted to have missed the turkey and dressing the other girls in the unwed mothers' home were enjoying in the dining hall. The birth was uneventful; she never saw me at all. Her friends and relatives were told she was in California visiting someone. And so, when it was time to move on, her mother told her she could not attend SMU, her biggest dream of the time, and the place where all her friends had already matriculated. She turned in her cheerleading uniform, and headed out to Texas Tech in Lubbock where she married the favored man on campus, a 6'4" tall basketball player with strong hands and a weak character. And they had four children. And they divorced twenty years later following eleven years of wrangling over her revelation to him during the long death of one of their children that she had "lost" another child before marrying him.

This is yet another lesson for both of us. And it will go on from here. I now know something her own children do not fully know. She doesn't warn me at all, but lets it stand as something shared. This is what we now have, and it is our mutual gift for this Mother's Day, as it is for every other meeting in the future. That we will have a life together in truth telling. That all fantasies must give way to an end, and that the piazza where she remains beautifully 18 and torn with indecision amid a surge of dark air filled with horses stamping out of the dark waters will give way to this dry, blue-skied plaza in Taos where she is 54 years old and is my mother after all. I believe we are both grateful.

Happy mother's day to my mother, Patty…