A few days after we met, Zachary proposed. This was a problem. Zachary was 5. I was the 37-year-old girlfriend of his widowed father.
After I gently declined, Zach's proposal took various permutations. Most of his ideas involved my waiting for him to grow up. Once, he suggested that I marry his dad, and then divorce him when he, Zachary, got big enough to marry me himself.
Over time, Zach and I grew more attached to each other. He thrived at having a female (and often simply a practical) presence in his life -- someone, as he put it, who knew that vegetables did not have to come out of freezers. In the meantime, his dad and I had been blessed with a certainty about our shared future. We met in September, were ring shopping by April, and planned a wedding in July.
To our surprise, Zach was upset when we told him about our plans. His mother had been diagnosed with colon cancer when he was 3 months old, and she died a month after his first birthday. He clung fiercely to the images he held of her, images drawn not from memory but from videos, stories, and bedside photos. When Ken and I mentioned marriage, his response was a heart-wrenching torrent of tears. Zach understood that nothing would bring his mother back, yet he hoped -- and hope is painful to surrender. Seeing the grief etched on his face, we decided to put a halt to our plans and give him time.
He didn't need much, only a few weeks. One evening, as I was toweling him off after a bath, he extended his arm and tapped my shoulder with his toothbrush, "dubbing" me a member of his family. "You are now a Cohen," he intoned, mimicking a king. As I tucked him into bed that night, he looked at me a little slyly. "What member of the family are you going to be?" he said. "You're too big to be the sister. I guess you'll have to be the mommy."
Ken and I got formally engaged soon after, and we asked Zach not to tell anyone until we could tell our families. Fat chance. The next morning, Zach burst into his classroom shouting, "I'm getting a mommy!" He came home that afternoon glowing, with a book of crayoned drawings by his classmates all about his new mom.
Zach found his own ways to deal with his conflicting feelings about his biological mom and me. We taught him from the start that he would always have two mommies, Mommy Gillian and me. I would live in his house, but Mommy Gillian would live in his heart.
One day, while we were walking across the parking lot at the mall, he described the castle he was building in his heart for her, complete with chandeliers and Oriental carpet. Then he began constructing a guest cottage in my heart so she could visit me and we could become friends. I'm not sure how I managed to drive us home safely through my tears.
Joanne Kenen is coauthor of Good Night, Sleep Tight, a book about getting kids to sleep.
