I Outlived the Mother I Never Knew
Between the lines lie little truths and big mysteries
All I have left is a letter.
It’s just a plain envelope — unmarked by a pen, though creased and marred with tiny tears, battle damage it has accrued as it accompanied me on my trans-Pacific voyages. Inside, folded with two careful creases, is a sheaf of four pages of hospital stationery, each side covered margin-to-margin by writing in a cramped but artful hand. It’s a last message from a mother to the son she was giving up. It’s a last message to me.
In many ways, this letter changed my life when I fished it out of a forgotten filing cabinet some 20 years ago. Since that day, it’s never been far out of reach. It’s more totemic than anything, something I keep as a source of strength but that I rarely read anymore. Maybe that’s because some parts have become moving in different ways:
Some day, maybe around June 11, 2004 (if we’re still around), I’ll find a tall, dark handsome boy on my doorstep and won’t have to ask who he is.
It was a bleak joke, but in reality, she wasn’t still around in 2004. By the time my eyes graced that letter, she was already gone.
The adopted child can look forward to having the same basic conversation hundreds, if not thousands of times over the course of his or her lifetime. Many of us end up buckling beneath the burden of these conversations, each set of predictable questions and responses adding a little more weight until we tip over.
It always begins with “I’m sorry,” usually accompanied by a sharp inhalation and/or a plaintive sigh. It’s the exaggerated response of someone who’s not quite sure how to proceed, but is confident in their ability to fake it.
Next comes a question that’s as predictable as the seasons:
“Are you going to find your mom?”
There are variations here, of course. Sometimes they spice it up with “real mom.” Alternately, they might expand it to “your parents” or even “your family.” As one grows older, it evolves into the present perfect: “Have you found your mom?”
This is the point where I have to tell this person that my mother is dead and that the “I’m sorry” was premature by a few minutes.
Actually, I don’t have the same strongly negative reaction to these questions that some do. I’ve discussed my family background with audiences from very different cultural backgrounds, and they’re always full of questions and usually quite respectful. Adoption is a fascinating yet ill-understood process to most people, and I’m more than happy to field those questions — but I know how it’s going to end. We’ll get to my mother’s death, and the conversation will come to a crashing halt.
And if it does, against all expectations, keep going, then it’s certainly not going to last beyond what comes next: “I don’t know how she died.”
I don’t much care for being kept in the dark, and I never have. I was a compliant child, obedient to a fault, yet I could never accept “You don’t need to know that” as an answer. Ignorance is merely the beginning of a story that still needs to be told one way or another, or so I saw it. And so I would submit to that answer only until the investigation was ready to begin — whether that would entail skulking in hallways and behind furniture, or digging through drawers for forgotten journals or papers.
This thirst for information was exactly what led me to that filing cabinet, the one with the letter — but there was so much more to be found there. What I unearthed was not merely a stray letter, but an entire file representing nearly a year’s worth of paperwork, every bit of it concerning me. Adoption can be a complex process, and every blessed bit was laid out here — every motion, every expenditure, every legal letter, no matter how minor the issue.
It’s terribly humbling to read about your own life and circumstances from the outside, especially when it’s written out in a manner as efficiently cold as you’ll find in the law. Here were endless conversations about the “illegitimate child” — unnamed, not yet breathing the air and yet stirring the pot all the same. I was a problem; I was a solution to the problem.
Seeded here and there among the legal papers were articles of a more personal nature. These revealed odd details about my mother’s life — the contentious relationship she had with her own mother, her exceptional artistic gifts, and a few odds and ends about what she’d had with my father. The information was scant, but it’s all I had for a long time.
I lost track of how many times I flipped through that file in search of more information. Twenty times, maybe? There were letters about my mother, and letters to her — all carefully redacted so that no one could learn any inconvenient names. The warlocks of old may have been on to something when they whispered of the power that names could hold.
But no one moves that much paper around without making any mistakes. I held in my hand a copy of a two-page letter to my mother. The first page was censored, but someone slipped up on the second page. I must have read it a dozen times before I spotted it: Denise.
That gave me a full name, and that full name led me to a death record.
She was only 34 when she died. When someone dies at 34, there was a reason. When the obituary won’t give you that reason, then it was probably something tragic. Something that, perhaps, you don’t want to know.
Except I don’t much care for being kept in the dark.
Now I have a thought experiment for you, Reader.
There’s a man living in a suburban community outside of a large Midwestern city. His wife is out of the picture for reasons that need not concern us right now, leaving him to raise their three children — two daughters and a son — by himself.
Eventually, he meets a woman who becomes his second wife. She’s significantly younger than him but not scandalously so, and in time finds a place as stepmother to the three children. For a while, everything is fine.
After seven years, the stepmother dies. By now, the children are older — high school and college-age — and are ready to head out on their own. They scatter to the winds as young people are wont to do, find spouses of their own and have children of their own. Their father marries for a third time. Again, everything is fine.
Out of the blue, each of the three children receives a message from a stranger. He knows a fair bit about the family — more than a random person would — but claims never to have met any of them. Rather, he claims a connection through the stepmother, their father’s second wife. He claims to be her son, whom she had delivered and given away years before getting involved in their lives. Now he wants to know more.
How much do you think that this might disrupt their lives?
There’s no way to give a solid answer — it depends on far too many factors, most of them invisible. And this is something I knew even as I sent those messages to those three perfect strangers.
It must have been a surprise in any case. I don’t even know if their father knew about me — there’s enough of a stigma behind out-of-wedlock births that I couldn’t be sure whom my mother might have told. The stepchildren would have been fully justified in writing me off as some sort of con man, or a random loon.
My only defense to this lay in the circumstances. I was about to turn 33 — old enough, given my mother’s early passing, to contemplate my own mortality — and I had just received a crushing blow in my personal life. The branch beneath me was breaking, and I did what any panicked simian might do: Grabbed around for anything to arrest my fall.
The three of them weren’t the only ones I contacted, far from it — I was reaching out to everyone from long-lost friends to virtual strangers, anyone who might be there to catch me. Those three are the ones I regret, though. If any of them should happen to read this, I’m terribly sorry.
So I have a letter — no pictures, no drawings, nothing personal. I have nothing else, save an obituary that lists an early death with no stated cause. Once I thought that all knowledge was a blessing, but sometimes new information has fresh mysteries hidden between the lines. I know what that obituary implies, and it’s agonizing to consider.
And I’m left with a choice. I can acknowledge all of this as part of my personal history, put it into a little box and with luck, it will never come up again. Alternately, I can go deeper. There are always new avenues of inquiry, and even in the past few weeks, I’ve learned new things.
To ask questions is to embrace pain, for one never learns anything new without the risk of disillusionment. It takes a certain toughness to keep pushing deeper when the answers are such a mystery.
I just need to decide if I’m tough enough.
