Collage of Compliance 7.1: The Ties That Bind

An In the Family Story That is Getting Too Long for One Part

My Mom me and my daughter

Collage of Compliance 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 on the links.

As many of my regular readers know, I am unjabbed against Covid. This is also true of my husband, my daughters, my mother, and most of what I would consider close family members, which I guess could be defined as people that I would want to visit with. There’s a major caveat here.

I’m pretty sure two of my brothers are vaccinated.

Two of your brothers? You might scoff. Perhaps if you’ve been reading my personal anecdotes for a bit you might have heard me mention growing up with a brother Andy, my only surviving sibling after my baby sister Elizabeth died, in (largely) Toledo, Ohio, USA. Brother Andy is also unjabbed, as is also true of his new wife and my nieces. They saw through that whole charade themselves, thank God.

I’m talking about my other two brothers.

Wait what?

Perhaps regular readers also know that I am writing an autobiographical series. I totally recognize that I am not famous, or rich, or even that old, but that was at least half of the point of it. I wanted to talk about the experience of real, normal people in a given time. Unfortunately I figured out that I might not be that normal. I couldn’t find things written by people who had killed their rapist and everyone had a black uncle who worked for the CIA, am I right? You couldn’t make it up.

I went in and out of writing my books for over a decade. I wrote Travels With Nemo first, a sort of happy let’s drive across the USA with my dog road trip novel. Then I went to the dark side with my next one, a disjointed piece that started with a song of fire but I think ended with a forlorn rant against my exes. That all was set aside for years, until some stuff happened and another book began forming.

I thought at the time I would end the series with The Secret Marriage set in 2019. I definitely wanted to end the series by then. I was done with that writing style. The ending was simple, in that I got married and we lived happily ever after (or not) way. Call me uncreative. Then 2020 happened. Beyond the obvious global calamity that ensued, the longest held personal secret in my family emerged.   

With that Said Let’s Begin Another Edition of Storytime With Amy!

A Stoic Family

“Blood is thicker than water.” This was one of my father’s favorite sayings. Because of this I spent a lot of time getting shuttled between California and Ohio in my childhood to visit relatives.

I have never been as close to my mother’s Ohio side of the family as I was to my father’s much more colorful, smaller and vivacious California side, though I certainly knew them growing up and remain on friendly terms with all. My mother came from a proud and very traditional immigrant Catholic family, with my maternal grandmother from Finland and my maternal grandfather having come as a baby to America from Czechoslovakia. Grandpa was a decades long firefighter for the Cleveland Fire Department. Their house was in Rocky River, a respectable suburb of Cleveland, Ohio and I remember spending childhood summers feasting on cherries from their backyard tree as grandma harvested grapes and peppers and berries. Grandma and Grandpa both spoke careful clipped English to me and my brother, but they often spoke German language to each other. Grandma told me that she was fluent in four languages and thought it was odd when she was offered, and took, a job as a high school Spanish teacher, because she didn’t think she was very good in that one. I guess her Spanish was good enough for Ohio back then.

The Christmas and Easter events in Cleveland were lavish affairs with my two aunts and one uncle and their spouses and families. These were not dramatic family events I can’t think of ever seeing a single member of my mother’s side of the family drunk, even though decorum ruled and most seemed to drink an aperitif after Christmas dinner or perhaps a glass or two of homemade wine that grandpa had brewed from his fall harvest. A few of the men might retire to the basement to drink scotch and smoke cigars, while the womenfolk stayed upstairs minding the children and sharing recipes. I have no doubt that there were dramas but for the sake of providence those things were kept very tightly behind closed doors, at least to me. I always felt like we were the black sheep of the family.

I also have no doubt that there were secrets.       

In September of 2020 I was staying at a quarantine hotel in Bangkok, Thailand with my then 7-year-old daughter. The only way to get back into Thailand at that time was to stay 15 days in one of these places and test four times negative for Covid counting pre-flight. It was a desperate but calculated decision I made as I wanted to go back to my husband in Phuket.

It wasn’t terrible, but I recognize that I got lucky. I came during a lull in cases where the Prime Minister was doing a veritable victory lap on how well his Covid Zero policy of shutting borders had worked out, in order to distract from internal protests in Thailand. Many Thais and even most Westerners were supposedly for the restrictions at the time, in retrospect perhaps (media manipulation aside) because once you got to Thailand it wasn’t as insane as in the USA because there was “No Covid.” There were no cases in the quarantine hotel me and my daughter stayed at, and rules regarding things including facemasks were pretty lax at the time. I don’t think the hotel had a lot of guests so despite supposed 45-minute sign in limits for the exercise area, we sometimes stayed up there for two or three hours once our 7-day test results cleared as negative. It was the only thing we were allowed to do there besides sit in our hotel room.   

I was watching my daughter play with another child in the designated exercise area on the roof of the quarantine hotel near sunset when an odd Facebook message popped up on my phone. It was from a male cousin on my mother’s side of the family and was completely out of the blue.

“Hey. A gentleman has contacted me that I think might be your stepbrother.”    

This was an odd message for multiple reasons. Although I am on cordial terms with all of my mother’s side of the family, I only rarely heard from them directly. This cousin had visited with my brother Andy a few times over the years but I hadn’t seen him myself in over a decade. And also, my parents were both as best I knew first and only marriages to each other, so an unknown stepbrother, apparently “related” from a secret marriage and then a secret divorce, seemed rather odd to me. I messaged back the gist of that, looked at the Bangkok sunset, and mused to my cousin.

“Why would this man be telling you this?” I messaged back. How or why would a man claiming to be my stepbrother have tracked down my cousin on my mother’s side of the family?

“I had my information searchable in the Ancestry database.” He messaged me back.

Well now. That doesn’t sound very much like a stepbrother. I remembered in 2014, not long after my father died, my Aunt Rita and her husband came to visit my Mom. I was there with my husband Oh at the time and my mother showed her the garden at our Las Vegas house. Aunt Rita said that she had done a genetic test on Ancestry.com. My Mom, her sister, seemed especially fascinated by this and asked her a lot of questions about the results.

They talked for close to an hour about this, with mom asking about the mechanics of how this genetic testing worked. I remember at the time being fascinated that Aunt Rita had come up as close to 25% Russian heritage. My mother, her sister, would have been presumably around the same percentage. I had never given a single thought before that to how Finland, where my grandmother was from, shared a border with Russia. By default, being my mother’s daughter, I would be over 10% Russian blood myself. I barely listened as Mom asked her sister how probabilities on genetic testing were calculated. Barely.

I was thinking about it now. My mother, her parents, her two sisters and one brother were as strait-laced of a traditional stoic Catholic family as you could find. Every marriage as best I knew was a first-and-only multiple decades long affair that ended in death of the spouse, and every child born thereafter were presumably full blood sisters and brothers and the progeny of both parents. There was no step this or half that or secret that or foster or adopted someones, much less the what do you even call Daddy’s new girlfriend’s kids from prior relationships, stuff going on in this family. They also had all married spouses with a long heritage elsewhere, usually in the USA, so there was none of that European royalty cousin banging going on here either. If this man had found my cousin in the Ancestry database, I could make an assumption that “first cousin” would be a probability step or two lower than “half-brother.” This probably was therefore not related to some top-secret affair that his father, my biological uncle, had had.

We messaged for a bit about my quarantine in Bangkok. My mind was reeling. I finally came to my next point. “Why are you contacting me about this?”

“There’s been a long rumor in the family that your mother gave a son up for adoption. Aunt Rita helped her with it.” I had never heard such a thing, but if there was ever a family that could keep a secret that big, this was it. This is also the type of family where “rumor” means “99.9% likely true.” If they message you saying they’re going to be at Phuket Airport the next afternoon and would like to do a meetup, they’re not kidding. Get to the airport. This is not a Daddy went out to buy cigarettes he’s coming back any minute 20 years later type of family.         

  “At any rate here’s his Facebook Page if you want to check it out.” My cousin provided me with the link.

I spent that night in the hotel room scrolling through this man’s Facebook page, which he had kept public. In his pictures he bore a resemblance to many people on my mother’s side of the family and looked to be in his mid 40’s. He updated his Facebook every few weeks, all of which were upbeat we’re alive and we’re okay type of posts of family photos. There was no politics, no virtue signaling, no memes and no personal drama posted that I could see. He was married with a link to his wife’s page and appeared to have one son. He had a Master’s degree from Harvard and worked in digital communications, so I could assume that he was a techie of some sort. He said that he was from Detroit and currently lived in Massachusetts.

 I decided to friend request him. He accepted it immediately. I didn’t quite know what to say to the guy yet as I collected my thoughts. I didn’t call my Mom either, even though I had been updating her almost every day.

My mother is not a teetoler, but in keeping with the stoic, measured providence of her family, she drinks so little alcohol that you would never know the difference. She used to drink one beer with my dad sometimes when she was younger, and sometimes she would split a 25 ounce can of Bud Light with me in Las Vegas, but that was it. I never once saw my mother drunk though one time my ex Joe kept on pouring liberally into her wine glass when she wasn’t looking at Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house in Oceanside and she got giggly. It was the cutest thing I had ever seen.

In keeping with the providence of her family, my mom is also a former Catholic nun. One of the sisters should have joined and she picked it up. I asked her about this when I was young and she explained it.

“When I was young I thought that was really what I wanted to do. But they had final vows after the two-year seminary they knew some people would drop out. And I knew by then that I wanted to have a family.”

Mom finished the seminary at 20 years old and married my dad 10 years later. That was a long time in the swinging sixties and seventies where lots of things could have happened. There was also my psychological profiling from my youth.

My mom went on an extreme religious bend after my baby sister died, taking on a fanatical obsession both against living in sin and also praying regarding the end of the world coming soon. After I began in psychology classes in college, I came to consider this as an internalized martyrdom complex for some sin that she felt she had done, but I didn’t know what it was, exactly. It came out in so many ways over the years. Everything was always a hardscrabble struggle for us.

My father wasn’t a drinker either. I saw him drink with friends sometimes, but on those occasions, he was relaxed and in a mood to talk about glory days of his 20’s and the like. He had a temper that he took out on Mom, though thankfully not physically. He didn’t need alcohol to show it.

“Your Mother is just so Goddamned naïve sometimes!” He would shout when he was angry because she didn’t cook the food right or something. I never understood what set him off he was very doting to me and my brother.

In short I’d felt for a long time that there was something Mom had done, almost certainly related to premarital sex that she had had, that had caused her to internalize her religious upbringing in such a way. She could be like the mom from Stephen King’s Carrie growing up. This also explained her family’s relative distance from our family and why she had embraced my father’s side to such a degree.

This was all of course circumstantial evidence, and my Scorpio moon walked in on an investigative bend. See I’m not a PCR test in an asymptomatic person at 45 cycle amplification means you definitely have Covid type of person. I’m looking for a rock-solid case, an all the puzzle pieces fit together perfectly type of thing. If you have symptoms of Covid, and take a PCR test which is positive, then take an antigen test, then show biomarkers and have genetic sequencing done which shows the exact variant or subvariant, I’m not going to argue with you. That’s probably Covid.

So in this case I had a lot of circumstantial evidence, including a genetic test indicating that this man was related to my mother’s side of the family somehow from a cousin in the Ancestry database. Now I also had an unsubstantiated hearsay rumor that my mother had given up a child for adoption. I also had a psychological profile built here which indicated motives, intent, and guilt after the fact.

Any good investigator knows what I needed here to build an open and shut case, though.

I was going to need a confession from the nun. Err, Mom I mean.

Part 2 is available here

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