My Secret Adoption
Discovering the Truth as an Adult
“You know,” Maureen said, “of all three of you -- you look the most like her.”
We were standing outside of Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia in March of 2018 and I was confused as fuck.
My sister, Cathi, had died in that hospital eleven years earlier. Maureen was her best friend.
My brother-in-law, Steve, was four floors up, terminal with COPD, and was waiting for Maureen and I to come back from our un-ironic cigarettes.
I assumed that Cathi's friend was talking about my mom, Connie.
Connie had three daughters (Cathi, Pokie (nickname), and me) and since I had moved to Virginia a few months previously, I’d constantly heard how much I look like her.
“I mean, of you, Kristen and Sean, I can definitely see the most of her in you.”
Maureen was not talking about Connie, but she was talking about my biological mother.
And she was standing next to someone who reminded her so much of her best friend that she couldn't help but announce it.
I felt sick, stumbled back to Steve's room in a daze, and then went out for food with Maureen and the person I had previously thought of as my estranged niece, Kristen. Who is, apparently, my sister.
That was almost two years ago.
Since then, I’ve been assaulted by an alcoholic family member who pressed false charges against me for the assault she committed and had my very gay-looking self arrested in Virginia in front of two praying Mormons she had arranged to come over as after-the-fact false witnesses.
Read that again. Yes, that happened. And yes, even in the south, the public defenders (MY HEROES!!!) got the bogus case dismissed.
I've been dealing with a sometimes-disabling autoimmune disorder that apparently runs on my secret-mom's side of the family.
All of my hair fell out (including my f-ing eyelashes!!!) because of said autoimmune disorder and I went on methotrexate. I looked like Gollum.
The hair is back now but one set of eyelashes is white-blonde and my hair has all of these grey and white streaks that I kind of really really love. I'm Gollum-Skunk chic, thank you.
Oh, and I started writing poetry again after almost twenty years.
The writing (and presumably the prozac) led to this other thing.
Apparently, Cathi tried to tell me in the year 2000 that she was my mother.
I didn't believe her and I somehow shoved the memory of those conversations into some inaccessible part of my brain. I have no clue HOW that kind-of amnesia happens, but it did and it f'ed me right up.
She was my half-sister. My mom's daughter from her first marriage. She was blonde and Finnish for f's sake. And me? I look like my dad, my mom's second husband, Cathi's stepfather.
And besides, my mom died in 1991 when I had just turned 15, so surely, if Cathi was my mother, she would not have waited until I was 24 to tell me.
She wouldn't have wanted me to be alone all of that time.
I remember when Cathi came to visit my mom in the hospital when she was dying.
Her first words to me were, “you look so butch!” (I had shaved my head in a fit of rebellion a few months before.) She brought Kristen and Sean to say goodbye to their grandmother.
I was in 9th grade and had spent weeks in the hospital chair next to my mom.
And I don't mean something sane like spending the day there and then going home. No. I had slept in that f-ing chair, lived in that chair, for so long that I remember Cathi telling me that the nurse had mentioned that I needed to shower and eat.
Cathi told me, “You can't go with her, Sarah". Then she took a moment to say goodbye alone while I went to shower. I felt loved for the first time that summer, like someone was worried about me -- not like the adult I had tried to make myself become over the previous weeks, when I knew that my mom was dying and I was going to be all alone.
I had clung to one idea that whole time. One teenage heroic mission. My mom was not going to die alone.
My dad and her were estranged, my other sister was in California at camp, and her and Cathi had not spoken in a few years.
I remembered being sick as a little kid and Mom always appeared if I even sniffled slightly too loudly. She couldn't talk anymore and she couldn't see, but I sat next to her, held her hand, and played her favorite Broadway musicals on a tape recorder.
My mom was not going to die alone. She was loved. She was loved. She was loved.
When I came back from the hospital shower, Cathi was getting ready to leave. It was August 1, 1991. My mom passed away holding my hand a few hours later. I did not see Cathi again for almost ten years, in December of the year 2000, when she decided to tell me that she was my mom.
I had met the love of my life shortly before Cathi pulled her big reveal on me. I ran from that love, I was cruel to her, and for years upon years I could not remember her or the conversation I had had with Cathi.
Now, twenty years later, I am remembering all of it.
Piecing together fragments of memory from a fractured life.
My mom (Connie) got divorced when Cathi was 3 and went back to school to get her degree in psychology while Cathi was raised by her grandparents. Connie took Cathi back in right before she met and married my dad.
Cathi was 14.
I have only recently known and understood the level of sick competition that went on for decades between Connie and Cathi.
Cathi felt unwanted from birth, shuffled around, an inconvenience. But as she entered adolescence, she developed the kind of physical appearance that made her feel wanted. She thought she looked like Marilyn Monroe (and she kind of did).
And she resented Connie.
Connie's second husband, Jim, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army with two bronze stars, an attorney, and a descendant of the Ball Family of Virginia (making him a descendant of George Washington's mother, Mary).
He was also six-foot-three, handsome, and could drink more than Winston Churchill (who could drink more than Keith Richards.)
Cathi always joked about my dad having such good genes and then coincidentally somehow wound up settling down and raising her acknowledged-children 2 miles from George Washington's birthplace. She also talked to both of them about me being a descendant of Mary Ball Washington, like it was something she was proud of.
I shudder in revulsion when I pass the historic signs in this town now. The only thing I got from such an illustrious heritage was a bastard birth, perpetual abandonment, and big ears. (Look up the Ball Family online…those are some ears!)
I know I am the daughter of Cathi and Jim (Connie's second husband) -- the biological product of alcohol-fueled narcissism mixed with the resentment and revenge-seeking of a neglected child -- but that is not who I am.
I am the girl who spent the first twenty years of my life in a web of lies and the second twenty years in some kind of stupor of denial -- unable to love or to live.
I am also the girl who repeated the narcissistic patterns of abuse in my family. Period.
It doesn't matter that it was unconscious, it doesn't matter that I was horribly damaged, it doesn't matter that I was in a fugue state that caused me not to remember meeting and loving someone. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is how I treated her.
I met the love of my life at the worst possible moment in my life and I made her feel like shit and then blocked her and that whole time period so thoroughly out of my mind that I didn't function at all for twenty years or even recognize her when we met again.
She is why I started writing poetry in 2019 … the hope of her talking to me again … the thread that helped me piece my fractured memory back together.
I love you so much, so much I love you.
