KATHERINE KINDRED
AN ACCIDENTAL MOTHER
Please note that names have been changed
After her divorce, Kate Kindred decided that she would live her life without children. But then she fell in love with Jim, a handsome, caring man who had custody of his two-year-old son, Michael. And she fell in love with the boy, too. During the six years they all lived together, Kate learned the deep joys of motherhood—that was the gift that Michael gave her. But when her relationship with Jim ended, he denied her any contact with Michael.
And her heart was broken.
An Accidental Mother beautifully describes the joys of mothering a young boy through complicated times. With sweet simple anecdotes and complex emotions, Kate Kindred marks every page with tears, including those that the most loving laughter can bring to any parent.
$23.95 - $24,95 CAN | Hardcover | 5x7 1/4 | 224 pages
September 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60953-058-7 | Carton Quantity: 36
EISBN: 978-1-60953-059-4
Welcoming a barrage of blind dates, I soon learned that being childless at forty is a rarity. At my age nearly everyone single has at one point been married, and most of those marriages have resulted in a child or two. I joked to my girlfriends that surely I was meant to be a stepmother instead of a birth mother. Someday I would meet someone with two teenagers on their way to college who did not need a new mother and whose father was financially and emotionally prepared for a long-term casual commitment.
Obviously, I hadn’t fully evaluated other possible outcomes.
Welcome Michael, just months shy of four years old, with dark-blond hair and big blue eyes, in dire need of a mother. Oh, and did I mention Jim, the ever handsome and charming father of said boy? The first time this child tested me with the word “mom” and then looked up into my eyes with a little grin, waiting, waiting, waiting to see what my response was going to be, I knew I was in deep trouble. His inquiries have continued, albeit with modifications along the way. Once I was paging through a magazine while he sat beside me with a coloring book and crayons, and he stopped to ask me if he had come out of my stomach.
“No,” I told him, “you came out of your mother’s stomach.”
“But I want you to be my mother!”
I hesitated, then pulled out the bottom of my sweatshirt to make myself look pregnant. “Okay, get in my stomach.”
Michael giggled. “Kate! You can’t go backward!” And then, just as I begin to worry that the joke was improper, he asked, “What should I color next?”
Katherine Kindred has been previously published in the Literary Journal Memoir (and). She lives in Phoenix with her dog, Sophie. This is her first book.
