"Oh, yes! Three beautiful boys! My oldest is six, and he's
quite a character. I promise my sister will be missing the oddest items when
they get home. He steals spatulas and shoe laces--anything he wants to use in
some creation he's got going on in his head. And my three-year-old, what a
cutie! He's probably sleeping in his black rubber boots and Robin costume. How
else can he fight crime in his dreams? And my baby, oh how I miss him! He's
just one and a half and the best-behaved little snuggle bug in the world! He
almost never cries and when it's time to go to sleep I just put him in his crib
and start to sing, any song, and he'll lie down and smile. Sucking on his two
fingers like this..." I showed this mechanic how my baby would suck his fingers
and realized suddenly that I was making a total dork of myself! I'm sure this
man asked me about my kids to be polite, but he had started a flood of emotion
and missing and sharing. If you want me to talk your ear off, ask me about my
kids, or parenting in general.
However, when I looked at the mechanic, he was looking at me
and smiling. And for a moment we actually made true eye contact!
"How old are you?" he asked.
"I'm twenty-three."
"Oh! I thought you were about seventeen. You don't look
twenty-three." He responded. Well, no wonder he hadn't flirted with me!
"I get that a lot. How old are you?" I asked. Now that we
were actually talking, I didn't want to stop.
"I'm forty-six." He answered.
"Well, you sure don't look forty-six!" It was my turn to be
surprised.
And as he cleared the fuel filter we chatted, and we
flirted. Both of us! His arms were so distractingly sexy to me that I had to
hold back a strong urge to grab them, but aside from that bit of excitement in
my gut our chatter was banal, just getting-to-know-each-other stuff.
Until he started talking about the death of his mother, whom
he had lost only a year before, and he began to cry. I didn't know what to say.
I listened as he explained that he and his sister had taken her to the hospital
for bypass surgery. She hadn't wanted to go, but the kids thought it was the
best thing for her. "If you kids think I need to get this done, then I'll do
it." Those were her last living words.
I stepped forward and hugged the mechanic. His pain was
real. He allowed me to hug him for a minute, and even brought those sexy arms
up to hug me back a little.
According to him, that was the moment he fell for me. That
hug.
For me, back in those days, it was still his absolute
sexiness that I was attracted to. I didn't fall in love with him in a moment,
but over time. Today we have been happily married for twelve years, and
together we've added another adorable boy to our bevy of sons. But when we talk
about those beginning days, I'm surprised by how many lessons were offered in
those first few months of dating.
He explained to me that his lack of eye contact had to do
with the fact that he is black and I am white. According to him, he grew up
being taught that it is absolutely not okay to look a white person in the eyes.
So what I had perceived as disinterest was actually him being politically
correct. And when I had told him how much I missed my kids, and he had
heard--even felt--my love for them in my stories and missing of them, he realized
that there was more to me than a chick getting pregnant and living with her
mom. During that first conversation, surrounded by broken-down cars and the
smell of gasoline, two very different people from very different backgrounds
had found each other appealing. Sexy. Fascinating.
My husband often says that when I hugged him that day, he
felt more accepted than he ever had before. I had surprised him at first,
because he had never known a white girl who would comfortably hug a black man,
on his property, for no reason other than empathy. And I, a young mom from Canada, had never met
a man who would be so moved by my affection, without wanting to turn it into
something more, and I too, had felt accepted.
Our ages, our colors, our upbringings and environments (him
a non-traveler from small-town Texas, and me a travel loving wanna-be hippy
type from Canada) beg us to wonder how it is that we have loved and connected
so much over the years. Yet it is exactly that which has gifted us with so much
to learn from each other, and which has given us so much to offer our kids
regarding the importance of acceptance, not judging others or yourself harshly,
and being willing to re-examine perceptions.
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