Secret Admirer

Monday Mystery – A Special Delivery

As I prepped dinner on Monday evening, the dogs’ feverish barking drew me to look outside and find a delivery van in our driveway.  A woman stood on our front porch with a bouquet of flowers in her hand.  I dashed outside to meet her and thanked her for the flowers, then placed them on the counter while I opened the envelope to read the card. 

All it said was, “No message, no sender.”

This left me puzzled as I tried to guess who the sender could be.  First, I asked my husband, but he denied responsibility.  It would be out of character for him as he rarely buys me flowers.  He prefers to plant them in the garden and bring the fresh blooms to me as a labor of love.

Next, I suspected my father.  The previous day had been Mother’s Day, and he took a bouquet to his wife in the hospital.  Could he have possibly sent one to me as well?  He has sent me flowers for my birthday, but Mother’s Day seemed odd.

“Maybe it’s a boyfriend,” my husband said out of the blue.  “Are you running around with someone?”

He was only joking, but my blood ran cold.  More than two decades ago, I had been married to a man whose paranoia about alleged infidelity led him to threaten my life with a gun.  Back then, I didn’t have the confidence or the means to leave, and I lived in mortal fear for several years, walking on eggshells to avoid any semblance of impropriety for fear it would lead to my death.

Now, over twenty years later, my current husband would never do such a thing, and his comment was meant to be humorous, but trauma is a strange creature.  His words unintentionally dredged up long-buried memories and emotions, causing me to feel sick and disoriented for the rest of the evening.  Luckily, a good night’s sleep remedied these feelings, and my trauma response left by morning.

Even after all these years, the horror still lives inside me, long buried but still able to rise up like a zombie from the grave.  The fear of being attacked for something I didn’t do will never go away, but I have learned how to cope with my feelings.  I didn’t go into a panic attack or a dissociative state, and that is progress from who I used to be. 

I think, in part, my emotions were already in a heightened state.  Mother’s Day is a difficult day for me.  My mother died thirty years ago, and I lost my only pregnancy.  As a childless mother and a motherless child, I don’t feel like I have much to celebrate.

Oh, and the mystery flowers came from our youngest son, my stepson, for Mother’s Day.  He has never sent me flowers before, so I never considered him when I ran down the list of suspects.  There was no message because he ordered online and skipped that part of the process.

When he called me later to ask if I received the flowers, we laughed about the confusion.  He had no idea his thoughtfulness nearly gave me a heart attack.

Perhaps I am not such a childless mother after all.