by Nick Taylor

I know a man who believes his mother hated him. He tells me his story piece by piece when we sit down to work on a book proposal about his life. But I wonder if he’s wrong about his mother. 

His father died before he was born and she shunted him into an orphanage where he spent his childhood and graduated high school. He saw her seldom, but he told me she showed up twice on Mothers’ Day, drunk the first time, argumentative the next.

And then on another Mothers’ Day, years later, he called the hospital where he had seen her just two days earlier to learn that she had died.  His fiancée at the time said, “She must have really hated you, to die on Mothers’ Day.”

I’m not so sure.  Only mothers can know what they will do for their children and how they will do it.  My subject’s father was either a machinist’s helper or a fruit and produce seller, according to his death certificate and other documents, and his death at 33 left his pregnant widow with few resources.  She had no job skills.  No doubt she had problems, too, as he’s described.

But getting him into Girard College, the orphanage that shaped and educated him, was a significant feat.  

They had to test him and for that she had to get him from the shabby apartment she shared with her father to Girard’s walled 40-acre campus west of center city Philadelphia.  Before that, she had to convince him that his first months of public school before he could enter the orphanage at six could not be wasted.  And when he passed the tests and was admitted, she had to take him there and give him up.

It cannot have been as easy for her as his memory makes it seem. She turned him over to a governess and walked away without a word, he said.  Maybe that was the only way that wasn’t too hard.

This man bears scars from his mother’s absence.  He didn’t have what the luckiest children have, parental love that they can trust beyond all doubt. But what she gave him was a chance at an education and security she couldn’t provide. Almost as soon as he left the orphanage at 17, he began to use the lessons he learned there to build a rich and accomplished life.

I don’t think his mother hated him at all.

Read Barbara’s story about Lunch with Mom.