Robert Lubrican - A Model Mother

"I did not knock you up," I said. "I made a baby inside my lover."

"Potato, potah-to," she said.

"Are you happy right now?" I asked.

She stared at me for a long time. Finally, she nodded.

"Well, you’re happy, and I’m happy. This seems like a situation where someone is looking for a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist."

"We’ll see," she said. "Now, come love me."

I was worried I needed to be careful, that she was delicate.

She climbed on me and rode me hard, making the bed jitter and bounce, showing me she wasn’t delicate at all.

She told her doctor she knew there had been problems with birth defects in her family history, but not what kind. He scheduled extra sonograms and kept telling her he didn’t see any cause for concern. She took an online course and got licensed in Kansas, and used her realtor’s skills to find a real deal on a house big enough for three. It was a bank repo and the previous owner had taken it badly when they foreclosed. He’d broken all the windows and doors. He was currently doing eighteen months in jail. Insurance had replaced the openings. The interior needed some work, but Mom had time to paint and such.

By the time she moved in permanently, she was five months along, and had a sexy bulge. All I had to do was look at her distended belly and I wanted to re-enact the event that had caused it. She got big, but she was one of those women who carry a baby like a basketball, and didn’t suffer any swelling or some of the other issues that make a woman look like the beached whale she was so concerned about.

She told me that this time was different for her, primarily because she wasn’t depressed or in a constant rage that she was pregnant in the first place.

She did well in the real estate market in the Kansas City area. There were literally thousands of houses and apartments for sale, and thousands of people looking for someplace to live. What made her good at her job was a willingness to listen to what a client wanted, and then put in the work to find it. She made more in commissions in her first three months there than she had in a whole year back in Arizona. She made way more than I did.

We went out on a legal limb by living as husband and wife. I even bought rings for us to wear. I hadn’t listed her on any of my employment forms, and she wasn’t on my insurance, but she made enough that she could pay for her own health insurance plan. She told me she left marital status blank when she got that. I say it was a legal limb, because while Kansas recognized common law marriages, they only did that if the couple was legally eligible to get married in a conventional sense.

My mother was thirty-six when she had her second child. She delivered a girl we named Camilla Jeanette Jenkins, after nobody in particular. They were just names we both liked. Cammi was a hair over seven pounds and eighteen inches long, and perfect in every way.

Well, she cried a lot, but I’m told that’s pretty normal.

It was odd seeing Jennifer breast feed. Those had been my nipples to lovingly suck, and now I came in a distant second place. We had taken to calling each other Bob and Jennifer, respectively, so that we wouldn’t slip up in public. People at the hospital thought I was her husband and treated me that way.

This presented a problem, very much like the one we’d had back in Arizona. Some people knew me as a single guy and some people knew me as a married guy with a kid. If anybody at work found out I was "married" and had a child, it could cause questions. My background investigation didn’t show any such thing. Nor did my CPO application.

So I decided to climb farther out on that legal limb. I did some research about getting married in Kansas. Only one of the participants had to be there in person to apply for a license. Both had to sign a worksheet, but no blood test was required. Basically, once you showed them your identification, they took everything you said at face value.

Three days later I had a marriage license that said Jennifer Ann Jenkins could marry Robert Jackson Jenkins. We didn’t even have to go through a wedding ceremony. The law allows for two people to "become married through their own religious tradition," whatever that entails. Ours entailed staring into each other’s eyes while I said, "Do you want to marry me?" and her responding, "This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of." I said, "Since you didn’t run screaming from the room, I now pronounce us husband and wife."

I don’t think it sank in that this whole cockamamie thing would work until I took the papers to work and got her listed in my official file as my wife. and Cammi listed as my child.

After that, the only risk we faced was what would happen five years hence, when my security clearance had to be updated. I wasn’t too worried. It was possible that somebody might notice that the woman who had been interviewed as my mother, was now my wife. Then again, I’m told that all they do for an update is check criminal histories since the last clearance was granted. If there’s nothing there, they figure you’re still good to go. I hope so.

I have no idea, of course, what the reader does for a living, but it’s fairly safe to say that, whatever it is, you weren’t doing it one day, and you started doing it the next. If you stuck with it, you finally got to a place where your own self-image altered to the point that it just included your job as part of who you are. It was a little like that with Jennifer and me. Two years after we got married we just felt … married. I could still remember being her son if I thought about it, but for the most part, she was just my lover and mate, my wife and the mother of my little girl. She told me it was a little more difficult than that for her, but that she thought about our original familial relationship less and less as time went on.

When Camilla was two, I asked Jennifer to go off the pill.

She lay there, looking into my eyes.

"You’re kidding."

"You said you wanted grandkids. Plural," I said. "I get it that Cammi isn’t a grandchild, but you’re glad you had her, right?"

"Of course."

"So let’s have another one."

"You want to get me pregnant again," she said, her voice kind of flat.

"Desperately," I said.

"You’re pushing your luck, buster," she said.

"I’m used to it," I said. "I’m barely out of my teens, in the grand scheme of things. I’ve been taking risks for a long time. But look where it got me! I’m crazy happy. With risk, comes reward!"

"Don’t you think I’m getting a little long in the tooth to be popping out another baby?"

I blinked.

"No," I said, after thinking. "You’re healthy as a horse and when he or she is thirty, you’ll only be in your early sixties. You might even still get to have some actual grandchildren."

"You don’t play fair," she said.

I climbed on her. She resisted, but not too much, letting me wiggle my way between her legs. Eventually she reached to put me in her.

"You’re a horrible, beastly man, Bob Jenkins," she said, as I slid in deep. "You want to breed me again."

"I do," I said. "So will you do it?"

"Go off the pill?"

"Yes."

"I can’t," she said, her hips beginning to move.

"Don’t be that way," I cajoled.

She pushed me off of her. I thought she was unhappy until she started tugging and moving me around. She wouldn’t tell me what she was trying to do. She just poked and prodded me into the position she wanted me in. I ended up sitting upright, leaning against the headboard, with her on my lap. facing me. She bent her knees and reached to get me inside her again. Then she told me to bend my knees, which put her in a saddle of sorts, with her feet pointing at the end of the bed.