Where to start? Which beginning? The very beginning in 1958? My first knowledge of it all around 2000? Oh, the skeletons just be falling out of our family closet.
In the late 1990's, my mom had hinted for a few years that she had something she needed to tell me before she died, which wouldn't happen for another 20 years, but good on her for her forward thinking. Apparently the 1995 film, Bridges of Madison County got her motor going and she decided she didn't want to die with secrets. Finally, one day I walked into their dining room in their Tucson house and she said, "Sit down, I need to tell you something."
"Before I married Eddie, he got me pregnant. He told me he'd taken a job in California and was leaving the midwest. I didn't know if he was coming back, so I chose to give the baby up for adoption."
The only sound I heard was the sound of my world crashing down around me. Eddie was my half-brother's father. He and my mother were married in 1959, my half-brother, Brian, was born November 7, 1960. In February, 1961, Eddie was killed when he fell from the Duluth-Superior bridge while working construction. At the tender age of 21, my mother was a widow with a three-month-old baby.
She went on.
"I met Dick Ekholm in Duluth after Eddie died and dated him for a while. I got pregnant again. When I told him, he said he didn't want any part of being a father, and he was gone. I chose to give the baby up for adoption."
The sound of my world crashing down was deafening.
"I think it was a girl. I didn't see it, didn't hold it. But when Eddie's son was born, they asked me to sign a circumcision consent. I wasn't asked for this one, so I believe it was a girl."
My immediate reaction was to burst into tears. Not for the siblings I didn't know, but for the past 37 years coming into focus. How many times had I heard Mom say, "I was never meant to be a mother." What child wouldn't take that personally? The times I felt unwanted, unloved, and un-everythinged were too numerous to count. It finally made sense. It wasn't about me after all, it was about her own feelings of shame and inadequacy.
I managed to say, "Do you ever think of finding them?"
"NO! I don't want to find them, and I don't want to be found." That discussion ended abruptly. "By the way, don't tell your brother. I don't think he could handle it." She dumped her truths on me and then committed me to be her partner in secrecy.
Mom gave me scant details about each one. She gave no date of when she gave up Brian's full brother. She said she went to a Catholic home for unwed mothers where she was treated miserably. The nuns wanted to make sure she was punished for having sex outside of marriage. She was made to do chores until she went into labor. She was left in a room alone then, only being checked on by a nun every couple of hours. Forty-eight hours later, she finally gave birth. I sat in stunned silence as I tried to imagine what that looked like, felt like for her. She was 19. How different my life looked at 19.
Tears streamed down my face when I started to understand my mother in a way I never had before. Her childhood was neglect and poverty and hunger and abuse. I knew those stories too well. Thinking of her, alone and pregnant in 1958 and with no one to give a damn, hurt my heart. And explained a lot.
She didn't give many more details about the other baby she gave up, except to say it was born in June, and June was always a hard month for her. It made me believe it was much harder on her to give that baby away than it was the first one. That was 1962.
In 1963, she met and married my dad, and I was born in 1964 on their first wedding anniversary. I grew up knowing my brother was my half-brother, but it made no difference in our family dynamic. He was my brother, Dad's son, period. Nobody outside of family suspected he was a "step."
"I wish I had a sister," I said to Mom on several occasions growing up. How she stayed silent, keeping her secret, I'll never know. Shame is a powerful motivator for silence.
How many times did I watch her sit in judgement of women who got pregnant outside of marriage? How often did she say, "Four children by three different men? She needs to learn to keep her legs together." The hatred she had for herself was staggering.
After I learned of their existence, I wondered if I'd someday find my siblings. I couldn't actively search for them because of Mom's resistance to knowing them. I didn't so much honor her wishes out of allegiance to her, as fear of her wrath. Pretty much a common theme in our relationship.
Along came Ancestry.com and the DNA database. In 2016, I spit in a tube and mailed it off. I thought it'd be fun to submit my DNA to see if my ethnicity matched up to what I'd always been told. German/English/Danish and a smattering of crazy. By that time, I'd put my siblings out of my mind...
...until about two days after I'd mailed in my spit sample. I was running errands one morning and thought, "Oh fuck, I could have just opened a huge can of worms better left sealed." What if my siblings found me? How would I keep Mom's secret, yet meet my siblings, which I longed to do? My "out" was that Mom had already started to descend into advanced Lewy Body Dementia and might never know if I found my sibs. I pulled into Taco Time, ordered a chicken soft taco, ate my feelings, and put it out of my mind...
...until 2019, a year after Mom died, when I logged in to Ancestry on a whim. A new match. Amanda Fritz. Before thinking, I contacted a couple of cousins on Mom's side to ask if the name rang a bell. Nope. Then my brain kicked in and I knew who she had to be! The daughter of one of the sibs given up for adoption. My niece! I didn't message her. I didn't think it was my place. Maybe she didn't know her parent was adopted. Maybe they didn't want to be found. What I did do was check my Ancestry messages religiously in case she tried to contact me. Life happened and I put it out of my mind, again...
...until one day in April, 2022, when I was visiting my dad in southern Oregon and my phone pinged with an email. I had an Ancestry message.
"Hi Jill, this is awkward, but according to AncestryDNA you may be my 1st cousin. I was born in Minnesota and I was adopted into the Carroll family as a baby in 1962. My name is Cathy Jones."
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