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My Late Mom and I Shared a Christmas Hershey’s Tradition – She Died This Year, but It Led Me to a Truth I Never Expected
“I’ve been waiting here since sunrise. I feared I had missed you.”
I stopped a few feet away, clutching my coffees.
But this stranger was sitting there like he belonged.
“I’m sorry, have we met?”
This stranger was
sitting there like
he belonged.
“No,” he replied. “But I knew your mother.”
The fact that he was there, waiting for me, added a weight to the words that made me uneasy.
“How did you know my mom?”
“Your mom kept a secret from you. She made me promise to reveal it when the moment was right. And now it’s time.”
“Your mom kept
a secret from you.”
Mom’s words came back to me then, how she’d asked me to promise that I’d listen to my heart when the time came, that I’d do what I thought was right…
Was this the moment she’d been preparing me for?
The coffee cups were getting hot in my hands. I wanted to set them down, but I couldn’t move.
What secret had Mom kept from me?
had Mom kept
from me?
“Your mother and I had a child together,” he said. “You.”
I stared at him. “No…”
“I’m your father.”
“My dad died. That’s what my mom told me.”
He nodded solemnly. “She lied to protect you from the truth. I left when you were a baby, just a few months old, and regretted it every day since.”
“Then why did you leave?”
“She lied to protect
you from the truth.”
He looked down at the chocolate in his lap. “I fell in love with someone else while your mom was pregnant. A colleague… she led me astray.”
“Led you astray?” The way he was talking gave me a bad feeling.
“Exactly. By the time you were born, I’d lost my way. I couldn’t handle the pressure of being a father while trying to resist that woman. I never cheated on your mother. I walked away instead.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “Congratulations.”
“Congratulations.”
“My life never really worked after that,” he said. “Nothing lasted. Jobs. Relationships. I was cursed. I tried to come back a few times to make things right.”
That got my attention. “You what? When?”
“Every couple of years, when I felt things were starting to go badly again, I tried to make penance with your mom.”
Every time things started going badly.
“My life never really
worked after that.”
Not because he missed me or regretted leaving, but because his life wasn’t working out and he thought we could fix his bad karma.
