Just A Small Town Girl

Before I met my oldest brother, I had no idea that anything was missing from my life. I didn't feel any holes, any missing pieces.

The story of my mom's first child, adopted by his wonderful forever parents, wasn't part of the story I knew of my life, of my mom's life.

Since he found us, though, so much in my past, and my mom's past, makes more sense. Looking at things with the lens of added knowledge, there's so much more clarity.

For instance, Mom never expressed any overt hostility toward her hometown. She shared positive memories. There was no, "I hated every moment, and I couldn't wait to get out." Still, she never wanted to go back. She left at 19, and died at 83. She went back to her hometown exactly twice in those years, and one of those times was to deal with my grandmother's move out of her home and into a nursing facility.

When she got high school reunion invitations, I'd say, "Don't you want to go?"

"No," she'd say. "There's nobody that I need to see. I don't even know what we'd talk about."

Still, she's an introvert, very happy being alone, miserable in crowds, so that was fairly expected.

Mom hated crowds and noise, so it goes without saying that she disliked large cities; it would never have been her choice to live in one. She didn't even like to visit large cities. So, it was a tiny bit puzzling when she was also vocal about not wanting to live in small towns. "Small towns are terrible," she'd tell me. "Everyone knows your business, and everyone's in your business."

"I don't care," I'd say, especially as a child. (I wanted to live in a town that went beyond "small" and into "tiny.") My personality veers more toward TMI than it does toward close mouthedness, so having people know my business didn't seem like too big a drawback. Also, I'm very good at brushing off people who want to make my decisions for me. They annoy me, but I can ignore them.

That was viewing things through my lens. Through Mom's, things look different. I cannot begin to comprehend what it felt like to be an unmarried pregnant teen in the 1940s, in a small town in the Midwest.

My family probably already looked pretty scandalous to those with wagging tongues. My grandparents were divorced. My aunt was about to get a divorce. Mom was pregnant out of wedlock.

I can imagine the force of all of those well meaning advice givers and all of those judgement passers mostly from Mom and Aunt Jeanette's reactions - move 2000 miles away, and never come back. She never, ever spoke of it to me, my siblings, my cousins, but I don't have to hear the details; I see the results.

And, I can't count the number of times Mom told me that small towns were gossipy and judgemental. I chalked that up to her experiences during her divorce. In the picture perfect 1950s, she left a handsome husband and a pretty house to marry a never before married bachelor 20 years her senior - and he and her first husband worked together in a small town fire department. "Grandma," my daughter told her decades later, "you were scandalous!" She humphed, and smiled a small, amused smile. Now I know that, by then, she was a pro at navigating societal disapproval.

(In the turbulent, "free love" 1960s and 1970s, she was a faithful wife and mother. Whether she did it intentionally or not, I'm tickled that she swam upstream, against prevailing currents.)

How Mom described us now carries more meaning for me, as well. When someone asked how many children she had, my mother would say, "My husband and I have four at home," and, as the older kids were no longer at home, "My husband and I have four." It was invariably "we," not "I." If she said "I," it was usually with details about one or another of us - "I have one who's turning 30 this year." I always looked at it as her way of looping my dad in - two of us were children of her first husband, not my dad (her second husband). Still, he raised them, so I always liked that she always phrased it as "we have" four children, not "I have 2, and my husband has 2."

I'm still certain that was part of the intent. Mom presented us as a unit, because she saw us as a unit.

Now, though, I know that there was a second, unspoken part to that statement. "My husband and I have four" was accompanied in her head by, "And I have an older son." He was always in her head, always in her heart, just as the rest of us were.

So much of her life was colored by her first child, by this brother that I didn't meet until I was in my 50s. And now, I get to love him, too. And I love the way his life touched my mother's. I enjoy understanding her better. She was an outstanding mother, friend, aunt, sister just because of her own personality, but her experiences with her firstborn made her a better one. Having my brother had a huge impact on the kind of person she was, and the rest of us siblings (and our friends) reaped the benefit.

I understand so much more - and I am glad.

It's Always Something

My brother is 15 years older than I am; he moved away when I was young. I knew the name of the town he lived in, and the state, but not much else about his home. I was in 8th grade when Mt. St. Helens erupted. The next time my brother came to visit, he brought me a jar of ash that looked and felt like gray flour.

"Were you close to the eruption?" I worried. "It's in a whole different state," he told me. "I was a long ways away."

When I got older, I found out that he'd fudged that answer a bit; while truthful, it was sugar coated. That other state was just across the river, and while he was out of the line of sight for Mt. St. Helens, he was close enough that ash fell like rain over his home, his car, his town. Plus, the day before the eruption, he'd been inside the blast zone. Almost as distressing, from his home - from pretty much his whole town - he was in sight of two more dormant volcanoes.

"Doesn't that make you nervous? How do you sleep at night?" I fretted. I adore my brother, and wondered why he chose to live somewhere so "dangerous."

At that point, he hit me with some significant wisdom. He shrugged, and said, "It's always something." And do you know what? It is.

Recently, Kilauea, on the Big Island of Hawaii, went from a picturesque, photogenic window into an active volcano to a destructive one, with huge lava flows ruining houses and roads, causing evacuations, emitting toxic gasses. In the online news coverage, there were comments from people saying things like, "Why do they even allow anyone to live there?" The implication was that the government should stop people from living anywhere that there might be danger, to themselves or to their property.

I can't believe that anyone would think that people should be controlled that tightly. Think about it; if people can't live anywhere that there might be a disaster, we have to abandon vast areas. Can't live near volcanoes; they might erupt. So, pretty much any island is now off limits, as is the Pacific Northwest portion of the United States, where my brother lives. A significant portion of the world's mountains are dormant or extinct volcanoes. Yellowstone National Park is part of a "super volcano" - let's empty out Montana, Idaho, Wyoming.

And speaking of the Pacific, you can't live withing 30 miles or so of the ocean, if you're being careful. Tsunamis can come almost without warning, and wipe out whole cities. You can't live near the Atlantic, or the Gulf of Mexico, either - hurricanes!

You can't live in the Midwest - Tornado Alley! You can't live in most of the American Southwest - drought could kill you, as can creatures that bite and sting. Don't go near the Sierras - earthquakes! The San Andreas Fault! And how many of the huge cities of the Southwest can exist without air conditioning and imported water?

And floods - man, you can hardly get away from flood zones, if the right circumstances arise. Here where I am, in the high mountain desert, even a sprinkling rain can cause devastating flash floods.

We don't have a monopoly on floods. Right now, there's severe flooding a couple thousand miles away from me, in Maryland.

Gracious, I live in a place where earthquakes, floods and drought are frequent occourrences. Every summer, someone dies of exposure in the desert; every winter, someone freezes to death on the mountains. How do I manage?

Of course, I can't go many other places, either. Between insect borne illness, carnivorous animals, sandstorms, monsoons, extreme cold, extreme heat, scarcity of water, scarcity of crops, viruses, bacteria, fungus, and the crime and homicide rate of large cities, it's hard to find a risk free spot anywhere on the planet. We'd all be crowded into a few square miles, even if we could avoid those obvious risks, and that brings risks of another kind.

That's the point, of course. Even if we try to eliminate the obvious risks, something else will get us. And none of us will live forever, anyway.

It truly is always something.

Don't let it get to you.

A New Brother

Like most people, I'd watched Ancestry.com's commercials for their DNA analysis. I'd seen the great Internet videos with happy people crying over their revelations. I wished the test were less expensive, but one day I decided, this is available, and I can afford it - I have no reason not to take the test.

I was hoping for mysterious and exciting news. I wanted to be one of those people who said, "I had no idea!" when they discovered that they had, say, Native American ancestry.

Instead, sophisticated analysis confirmed what I already knew; I'm so white that I practically glow. All of my ancestry came from white Europeans. There were possible "trace" DNA matches of roughly 1% from elsewhere, but they tell you that the plus/minus on the calculations can be up to 3%, so that wasn't terribly exciting.

The biggest surprise is that my German and Polish relatives - I'm the third generation of that line born in the U.S. - had Brits in it, as well, because my British percentage is 53% without the 5% Irish included; add in the Irish, and almost 6 out of 10 of my ancestors were at least in part from the British Isles. My Eastern European percentage is 23%, with another 9% coming from Western Europe. I would have assumed that was higher, since my great great grandparents arrived here from Germany and Poland.

Well, no big exciting reveal, I thought. It was still fun to have the information.

Ancestry.com asks you if you'd like to make your DNA profile and/or your family tree available for others to view and compare. Sure, I said.

And then came the exciting reveal.

Just after Christmas, I came home to a message from my sister on my answering machine: "Call me back!" There were two more messages in my e-mail; she knows I read e-mail more than I talk on the phone. There were capital letters and the message: "CALL ME.  Ellen phoned me and asked me who someone on her Ancestry DNA list is...and I looked on there (haven't been on for a couple months) and found a "close family" relative AND a message from that person's wife, and I think he is our half-brother."

Ellen is our niece, our half sister's daughter, so that narrowed any relative down to my mom's side of the family. Another brother? All my life, I've had one brother, my genetic half brother. He's the oldest, and I'm the baby.

I went onto my Ancestry.com account, and found the same message sent to my niece and sister: "My husband was born in Reno, Nevada in Feb.1949. It was a closed adoption, but the ancestry DNA shows that he as a close biological relationship with you. Do you know how?"

Holy cow! I have another brother!

We made some phone calls, did some digging, and the information we all had matched up with my mother being this man's mother.

Our mom graduated from high school in 1946. Here is her graduation photo:

She was just beautiful. Here's another of my favorites, taken when she and her cousin Joanne spent some time staying, by themselves, at my grandmother's cabin on Houghton Lake.

We knew that right about this time, she was dating a young man named Jim. All I remembered was that it was a bitter breakup, and she never wanted to discuss him. My oldest sister remembered a bit more - that Jim's family had been well off, and they hadn't approved of him dating a farm girl. I once came across a photo in Mom's album of her, Joanne, and two young men. "Who's this?" I asked, pointing to the man standing behind her, with his hands on her shoulders. Mom's response was, "Oh. I thought I burned all the photos of him."

"What? What? Who is this? What did he do?" She was very calm, but unwilling to say anything else. And Mom wasn't the "reassure me, or keep asking, and eventually I'll talk" type. If she didn't want to discuss something, it would not be discussed.

Mom likes most people, so it was enough for me to know that, if she didn't like him, there was a reason. Now I wonder if his, or his family's, reaction to the pregnancy was the reason they broke up.

We knew that Mom and her sister, my Aunt Jeannette, and Jeannette's husband Fred arrived in Reno in the fall of 1948. The story we'd all heard was that they were on their way to San Francisco, and stopped here temporarily, but temporary became permanent when they loved it here. The part they left out was that they stopped temporarily in order for my aunt to establish residency in order to file for divorce from her first husband, a serviceman she'd married while he was on leave back home in Michigan. It was apparently an ill-advised marriage, short lived; Aunt Jeannette never mentioned it. It took six weeks to be granted resident status; as a resident, she could file for divorce. Fred probably didn't drive out with them, but arrived later. After the divorce, Jeannette and Fred got married.

We knew that Mom decided to come West because she wanted a change, something new in her life. That made sense. He sister was coming out here - why not go with her? What we didn't know is that one of the reasons Mom left home and traveled literally across the country is because she was 19 and unmarried and pregnant.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I admire my mom. Imagining her at 19 brought an entirely new and fierce admiration of her. Think about it - it's the 1940s. She's a pregnant teenager, unmarried, not even seeing the baby's father any more. She's moving across the country, so she's arriving in her new home with no job. She's living with her sister. Every single day, she feels the baby wiggle and kick, knowing that she will not raise him/her. She takes good care of herself, so the baby will be healthy. She gets bigger and bigger, and more and more uncomfortable. When she's out in public, people start to ask her about the baby. She goes through all of it not because it's easy for her, but because it's best for the baby. And she gives him his best chance at a happy life, a life she can't provide.

I'm not sure if she told her parents. They were divorced; she could conceivably have told one and not the other. My grandfather died before I was born. I love my grandmother, sincerely, but she was an overbearing woman; if she had known, her reaction would have been, "Let me tell you what we're going to do, Beverly," and she would have mapped out every decision. And I can see my mother incurring her wrath by saying, "Not we - me. I will decide what's going to happen."

I'm not sure if she put on a ring and invented fictitious answers to deal with all of the strangers who would inevitably ask personal questions, or if she told them the truth and let the judgement or pity roll off of her back. Either would be in keeping with her character - feel no obligation to share things that are none of someone's business, and take no grief from others.

She found a job in a legal office; she'd work for attorneys for the rest of her life. That's probably how she met the attorney who arranged the adoption; she'd later retire from the firm that bore his name, working for one of his partners. This attorney was a personal friend of my brother's adoptive parents, and handled the private, closed adoption.

I hear that, at the time, women were routinely sedated during labor, and often did not remember the birth. It was also usual policy for the birth mother to be kept from seeing, holding, feeding, or naming the baby, if s/he was being placed for adoption. It was considered less traumatic for them if they never saw the baby. Sometimes, they weren't even told if the baby was healthy, or if it was a boy or a girl. My 19 year old mother woke up in the hospital without the baby. (In almost exactly a month, she turned 20 years old.)

My brother's wife and his daughter told me the story of when his parents met him. They received a phone call saying, "Your baby is here," and drove an hour to the hospital. The babies being adopted were kept together. They walked into the room, and a nurse tried to hand her a baby. "Here's your son," she said. The new mother walked straight to the bassinet with my brother in it and said, "No, this is my son." The staff tried again to give her the other baby. "No, Mrs. R, this is your son. That baby isn't doing well (he was experiencing "failure to thrive"), and when he's better, he's going home with another family." She was not deterred. "NO. This is my son!" The hospital finally decided, two babies and two families meant that she could take my brother home. "He's always known that he was not only adopted, but very much chosen."

I'm sure that my mother worried, and hoped his family was a happy one. In fact, his mother was literally chosen "Mother of the Year" for our state. He was happy, loved and healthy. He grew up with two (adopted) sisters. When we met, he teared up as he said, "If I could, I'd thank her for getting me to my parents. If I could have chosen, I would have chosen them."

He'd had his DNA tested to learn what his ethnic background was, and to try to find blood relatives. Ancestry.com couldn't tell us that he was my brother, just that he was a close relative.

He was surprised by finding Eastern Europeans in his background. As soon as he saw my mother's maiden name, he recognized it as Polish, "and I thought, 'There it is!'"

At almost 51 years old, I finally got the announcement of a new sibling. I had a new brother! Well, he wasn't new, but the news was.

And so I added to my family my oldest brother, Allan. With him, we also added his wife, Jenny, and their nine children. I almost doubled my nieces and nephews! Many of them have spouses and children. My family suddenly got much, much bigger!

I thought of conversations with my mom years ago, when my nephew and his girlfriend placed a child with adoptive parents. They didn't tell the extended family until all the details were in place. They were concerned, his mother said, that the extended family might be opposed to the adoption. None of  my nephew's relatives were.

To my mother, I said, "The most adult thing they've ever done is realize that they're not ready to be parents. Someone has been literally praying for this child to arrive. Please let him go to his family."

"Oh, absolutely. Absolutely," she said.

My grandnephew's parents offered to let any of us who wanted to come to the hospital be there to meet and hold him before he went home with them, to another continent. I went, but my mother did not. "It would be too difficult, seeing and holding him and knowing that I'd never see him again," she said. I understood then; he wouldn't be back until he was at least 18, and she wasn't likely to be alive then. I understand more now. She'd already done this once.

Before we met Allan and his family, I worried a bit. What if they didn't like me? What if they were critical of my mom? What if he didn't want more relatives? I decided that whatever he wanted, it was fine with me. Baby sister? Yes! Just medical information? OK. It was up to him what he needed from us.

Someone said, "Just because you share DNA doesn't necessarily mean he has to be your brother." I knew what they meant - family is more than blood. But at the very least, here were 10 people whose lives were made possible by my mother. That meant that they were precious to me.

Although he grew up near us, he now lived in a neighboring state. With his birthday approaching, Allan made plans to have his birthday party here, so that he could meet as many of our family as he could. He, his wife, several of his children, children-in-law and grandchildren came, as did his sister, who flew in from Hawaii.

They're wonderful people. We loved them before we even met them. "I can't believe you were all out there, all this time," Allan's sister said.

Finding out about them is both exciting and new, and very familiar.

And my brother was happy to have more siblings - just as we were happy to have him.

Minutes after meeting him, we were posing for photos.

Here's Allan and all of his attending siblings; one sister could not make it.

Here's all of us in attendance; this is not the whole family.

It was fantastic finding ourselves in each other's faces. My niece Bekkie gasped at a photo of my mother at 16, saying, "That's me! That's exactly what I looked like at that age!" I had the identical reaction looking at my grandnephew Trevor. My niece Katie looks like my sister Lynne, daughter Lana and son Alex.

A friend who lives far away saw the photos on my Facebook page and said, "Boy, are your mother's genes strong! Look at all of you!"

Here's the Facebook profile photo I uploaded after the party. 

Allan's had a mustache his entire adult life, so the theme of his party was "Mustache Bash."

Someone asked me, "Are you angry at your mom?"

"Angry? Why would I be angry?"

"Because she never told you."

Oh, no. I understand completely. Especially when I was a child, I would have made her crazy with questions. "Are you sure you can't find him or her? Do you think it was a brother or a sister? Can't you ask someone? They have organizations where you can register - why don't you register? Do you think he or she is looking for you? Do you think they look like me? Do you think they'd like me? Are you sure you can't find him or her?" If I found out that we knew the attorney who arranged the adoptions, I would have been insufferable, urging her to ask him for information, in violation of law and conscience. "I'm sure he knows something!" Oh, no, she did the right thing by not telling me when there was no way to find him.

And I have siblings and a father; she couldn't possibly juggle all of our feelings.

Now, our parents are gone, no one's feelings will be hurt, no legal agreements broken.

Mom died four years ago; Allan's mom died three years ago. Bekkie said, "I'll bet those moms got together and said, 'We have to get these kids together!'" I'll bet they did, too.

They were both great moms; they both loved their children.

And now we have new siblings. I mean, we always had them, but now we know.

Thanks, Mom.

Thanks, Allan.

And thanks, Mrs. R.