Member-only story
A FAMILY’S STORY
After More Than Fifty Years, I Finally Met My Brother
I didn’t even know he existed
It was that rare moment when you meet someone but feel like you have known them your whole life. That’s what it was like when I met my brother face-to-face for the first time.
It was a journey to confront my past.
My natural father abandoned our family when I was just two years old. He simply vanished and no one had any idea what happened to him or where he was.
It wasn’t easy growing up without a dad in the sixties. All of my friends had two-parent families. I would walk up to strangers at the supermarket and ask, “Are you my daddy?”
I would ask family friends, “Will you be my daddy?” It broke my mom’s heart.
My mom was now a single mother of three children, with no job and no money. But she did what she had to do and took on the roles of both parents for my older sisters and me. She did all she could to give us a good life.
My two sisters were in their early teens when our dad vanished so they felt his absence even more than I did. He was extremely strict with them but they loved him and had to carry that with them their whole lives.
They pitched in to help my mom raise their two-year-old little brother. My mom decided she couldn’t really work until I started school because of the cost of daycare, even in the sixties, so we lived on welfare.
When I was six, my mom joined the workforce and we got off welfare. Things were finally looking up. Over the next few years, both of my sisters got married and started families of their own, so it was just my mom and me.
When I was eleven my mom remarried and I finally had a dad. I also got three new brothers and two new sisters. That wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. I often felt resentment from some of them. We were preventing their dad…
