Over the past few years I have grown accustomed to Kate’s saying something to me as though she is responding to something I have just said. It puzzled me when it happened the first time. Out of the blue she said, “I can’t believe they would say that about my mother.” I responded with, “Who are you talking about?” She told me and then said, “You’re the one who told me what they said.” She has repeated variations of this as many as five or six times although I haven’t heard her say anything in quite a while. The issue has always involved someone’s saying something about her mother.
Today at Panera, I had just put a sandwich on the table in front of her. When I sat down, I noticed that she had a strange look on her face. She seemed puzzled. She could tell I was puzzled and said, “I think of both of them as mothers.” Although I quickly understood that she thought I had told her something, I couldn’t imagine what. I asked what she meant. She said, “I’m shocked.” I explained that I was confused. She said she was as well.
Then she said, “Stop. Just tell me slowly what happened.” I explained from my point of view and asked who she was talking about when she mentioned thinking of “both of them as mothers.” She told me she was talking about her mother and the youth director at her church when she was a teenager. The big surprise was that she thought I had told her that the youth director was her real mother. I explained that I hadn’t said that. As I did, I was prepared for her to dispute me because that is what she has done in the other situations. I was quite relieved when she believed me. She continued to talk about the emotion she felt before I straightened things out.
As we walked to the car to go back to the house, she brought it up again. When she got in the car, she said, “Well, we’ll look back on this and laugh, but it wasn’t funny at the time.” She brought it up again when we got home. This must have been a full thirty minutes after this episode occurred. The fact that she remembered for that long is a sign of the intensity of this experience.
