A Past Illuminated

I can't begin to describe the emotions involved when meeting a parent for the first time, especially across a divide as deep and wide as separated my mother and I. When I received the notification that someone was trying to locate their son, with the specifications alluding to me, I was dumbstruck. It was as hard to believe as anything I've found hard to believe in life. For years, my father had tried. Then a little under a year ago, I, too, began looking for her. I consider myself a sleuth, but the task was herculean to an amateur like me. I tried different names and tried contacting the university I was told she had attended a quarter century ago, but it was all to no avail.
A parent at a school I worked at happened to work for CNN and he offered to help. I gave him as much information as I had and it didn't work. Information had reached us in Rwanda that she was married and living in Moscow. I passed on that information to the parent. I was told that her parents had been KGB, which I passed on, too. Months later, still no success.
Then came a Sunday afternoon in September, a mild day in upstate New York at an outdoor festival when I received that notification. My first action was to show my girlfriend Nadia the message. She asked me if I thought it was my mother and I said I wasn't sure. Maybe, maybe not. I called my uncle (my dad's younger brother) but he did not pick up. I tried again, but the phone kept ringing, even denying me the opportunity to leave a message.
I holstered the phone, put it in my jeans pocket, and tried to walk as calmly as I could through the street perusing the different festival booths and attractions. I held Nadia's hand and tried to carry on a conversation with her without seeming as excited and in upheaval externally as I was internally. A few minutes later, while browsing a selection of LPs, I removed the phone and looked at the message again.
This time I called a friend of mine in Atlanta. I told him what the message was and he asked me the same question Nadia had asked me; do I think that it's really her? I gave the same reply; I don't know.
After we finished talking, I responded to the message telling her I had a different name for my father. She must have thought I was referring to a step mother, for she apologized for not being there. With that second message, my walls of doubt crumbled.
I still did not fully understand what was taking place, but I knew a new era had been ushered in. I was ecstatic, but a lifelong of keeping emotions in check prevailed. I wanted most of all to ask her what had happened. I had never asked my father much about their situation, so I wanted to know the full story from the only woman who could tell me that she did not give me away because it was a shame for her to raise a half-black child in her society. I wanted to know why she had let my father take me, or if she had known whether he was planning to take me. I wanted to know why she did not come to Rwanda when so many other soviet women who had married Rwandans had left and come to Rwanda to live with their husbands.
I waited until I reached home and traded messages with her. The next day we talked on the phone and I could feel emotions rising on her end when I asked her what had happened. I suspect I moved too fast, and I was sorry I did, because I wanted to talk to her a little longer.
However, later that evening we chatted for four hours. She told me about her and my dad. About the relationship with her parents, and their fear of her marrying a foreigner. She told me about years searching for me and the failure of her actions. She told me enough about herself to make me understand myself. Then it dawned upon me.
Throughout my 26 years of life, there had been part of me I could never fully identify. A part that was mischievous and hard-headed. A part that reinforced my belief in following my heart no matter what others thought. That part that made me right even when all evidence pointed to my being wrong. It was that very same part that helped me set, if not come close to setting, the record for how many times one can get beatings for a repeated offense. It made me scoff at the old proverb of "a hard head makes for a soft behind."
Talking to her made me realize what that part was and its origin. That was my mother in me. When I constantly climbed trees in spite of the forbiddings against that, pocketed the money and ran home instead of riding the bus, constantly lied about my whereabouts and did a myriad of other such acts, it was my mother in me. The hardheadedness, untamed and in the face of the man who loved her most. It must have hurt him to know that his son carried so much of the same qualities that he admired in her. A constant reminder of the forbidden love he gambled on and lost. But, like her father towards her, he did his best to exorcise those very same qualities from his son.
Now, I know that she was always with me as much as I was with her in her thoughts. Time and distance have done little to erode the bond between mother and child, and existence is a little brighter in a secluded corner of the universe because of this. An immortal quality of a mortal soul at its most apparent, and we, who are witnessing it, now rejoice at this reunion.
I have not learned all I want to learn yet, and her heavy heart has not laid its heavy load off yet, but destiny, at least, is on our side.