October 1999
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I called to ask my grandmother and step-grandfather if I could come home and copy the candy recipes from their cookbooks. They said that was fine and so I went home, expecting it to be just a normal visit. When I lived in the dorms as a freshman, I usually went home on Friday evenings to spend a couple of nights so this felt like any other weekend trip. And even though I was just visiting for a couple of hours this time, I figured I would chat with them, write out the recipes by hand and go back to my apartment.
When I got to my grandmother and step-grandfather’s house, I pulled down the recipe book from atop the stand-alone freezer in their kitchen, and as I searched for the recipes I needed, I found my father’s neatly clipped obituary hidden in between the pages.
My father — the name on my birth certificate and on every school and medical form over nearly 20 years, the man I had put on those family tree assignments in school, the father I assumed I would find eventually, someday.* The man I heard those stories about — how he and my mother married when she was 16 and pregnant with me, how he listened to her calls and read the letters she wrote home, how he beat her and then left because I wasn’t his child. Come to find out this man had died two years previously, in 1997.
I was devastated because I had lost any chance of ever meeting my father and knowing where I’d come from. I wrote in a diary about a year later “I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to do, except cry.” I remember it being dark outside and I was sitting on my grandparents’ front porch, alone and crying. I wrote that I called M, my then-boyfriend, and that “he talked me down”. I think I went back to my apartment first, but I ended up staying at his apartment that night because I felt too upset to be alone but staying with my family also wasn’t an option. That night can only be described as the feeling of being in a daze and completely discombobulated because all of my reality and hopes of ever meeting my father had been shattered in a single instant.
I don’t remember my grandmother or step-grandfather really reacting in any way. They weren’t mad that I found out one of the big family secrets, but neither did they do anything to comfort me. I suppose there was too much shame at being found out.
On Saturday I went back to my apartment and that weekend I received more news, yet another shock. My mother called me and through tears told me that DLF, her first husband, the man who (allegedly) beat her while she was pregnant with me, wasn’t really my father. She told me that she had an affair with another man while her husband, D, was stationed by the United States Air Force in Germany. That my real father was a man my mother met while her husband was away. That my biological father had divorced his wife, left his child, and was living with my grandparents. She gave me his full name and she told me the city in which he was living. She unburdened herself of her lies and secrets and because she was crying on the other side of the phone call, I felt like I needed to be the one comforting her.
It would have been nice to have had some support or someone to lean on during this time, but life goes on and I had to carry on as if nothing happened. I tried calling off from work, but my boss was in another city and we were short-staffed so taking a day off to process the news wasn’t an option. I had to go to classes the following Monday. I had to comfort my mother and grandmother. I had to offer grace and absolution to everyone in my family. I had to be a good girlfriend and roommate. And I still had to make candy for the vet’s Halloween party because that’s what I had signed up to do.
My mother relieved her burden by giving the secrets to me and now it was mine alone to deal with, beginning with finding my biological father.
It wasn’t until over 20 years later, while listening to a podcast called Family Secrets, that it occurred to me that my mother could have handled that very differently. She could have told me face-to-face rather than dropping a bomb over the phone. She could have made some effort to facilitate the meeting with my biological father. Instead of centering herself and her emotions, she could have given more consideration to mine in the moment and afterwards. I shouldn’t have been the one feeling like I needed to alleviate her guilt and shame, assuming she is capable of those emotions. Looking back now, I can see that she likely felt shame over being discovered, and not for what she did.
*Earlier in 1999 I found my father online. In a time before google, I ran an internet search using his name and one page listed him as “deceased”. He was so young, only in his 30s, that I assumed that there had to be a mistake. Surely that was not the same DLF as my father.
