Collage of Compliance 7.2: A Conversation With Mom

Hey Brother

Brother Andy, me, Uncle and Mom

If you haven’t read the first part of this subseries it is below. This will make a lot more sense if you do!

Collage of Compliance 7.1: The Ties That Bind

Interview with Mom.

The quarantine hotel in Bangkok did not allow drinking alcohol, and in retrospect that was probably a good thing. I guarantee I would have wanted a few beers more than I should have on asking my former Catholic nun Mom about her potential son she had given up for adoption. I hadn’t called her for two days and knew that she’d get worried if too much time passed.

I came into the conversation with a bludgeon. “I heard from my cousin, your nephew. He had a rather odd bit of news for me. There’s a man he thinks is your son who found him on the Ancestry database.” I went in police investigator style, hoping to give her enough rope to hang herself with it.

“My son!’ Mom huffed in a way that made me sure that she wanted this conversation over. I moved forward with the evidence.

 “He said that you gave up a son for adoption and that Aunt Rita helped you with it. This man is looking to find out who his biological parents are.”

Mom paused. I waited her out. “So this man, who is claiming to be my son…”

“Yes.” In normal times if I had had the more than a few beers I wanted to drink, I probably would have talked over Mom and drowned her out. I turned uncharacteristically silent and took a cue from her stoic family. I waited her out again.

Finally she spoke. “Well what’s his birthday?”

This was an odd question since birthdays were more of my Father’s, not my mother’s thing, but I thought I understood the gist of why she was asking it. If this guy was 20 years old he probably wouldn’t make the cut. I went with what I knew that every mother would want to know.

“He looks to be in his mid 40’s. A little older than Andy. He seems to be pretty successful. He looks in good health. He’s married.”

“Oh good!” Mom chimed in. You’re giving yourself away too much there, Mother.

“He has one son and he lives in Massachusetts. His name is Matthew. I’m sure if you’re his mother he’d probably like to meet you.”

Mom fell silent for a long minute. Her next question floored me. “What was his birthday again?” She asked, as though she were a small child or perhaps had suddenly developed dementia.

“Mom why the heck would I know the birthday of somebody claiming to be your son? Why wouldn’t you know that?”

“Well I thought maybe you saw it on Facebook or something.” She said sheepishly. It was odd with my astrology bend that I hadn’t even thought to check his birthday before this. I opened up Facebook on my computer and scrolled to his about page. “He doesn’t have a birthday listed.” I prodded. I don’t think I have to argue much that the birth of a child from a mother is perhaps the most significant bond in the universe. “You really don’t remember?”

“Well there was so much going on with me and your father and I was moving from Cleveland to Toledo.”

Wait a minute. “Dad knew about this?” I said incredulously.   

“He said he wanted to marry me but we had to hide the pregnancy from his family.” Several things felt off about this I was pretty sure that Mom had been living in Toledo for a few years when she had met my father. Supposedly their first date was at a bowling alley.

“There was a man in Cleveland. I had inappropriate relations, immoral sexual behavior.” I’d forgotten how difficult it was with Mom for her to open up about any female issue. As one example when I was about 13, instead of talking about periods or hormones or anything else related to my transition into womanhood, Mom simply discretely left a book entitled “Your Changing Body” on my nightstand. There was never any explanation given. I sort of knew how a baby was made I’d made a few myself. I could almost feel her blushing over the phone from 10,000 miles away. “Everything was such a blur.” She continued.

I began scrolling through the Facebook page of a man who was starting to sound like he was my biological brother. Surely someone had wished him a happy birthday at some point. Thankfully his relatively sparce postings didn’t make this an insanely difficult task. I thanked God he wasn’t somebody who posted 10 times per day. It was almost like he had set up Facebook just to be found by his biological family. “Okay Mom. Back on the birthday thing. I’m trying to look it up but I haven’t found anything yet. But it’s Ohio. There’s four seasons there. Spring, summer, fall, winter. I mean surely you remember with going into labor and stuff. Was it cold outside? Were there leaves on the trees?”

Mom hedged again. “I want to say it was sometime in the colder months.”

I found a hit on the birthday from a post in 2017. You just couldn’t make this stuff up. “Okay Mom I think I found his birthday. I’ve got a post from December 24, 2017 thanking everyone for all of the birthday wishes. Christmas Eve.” There was a long silence.

“Is it ringing a bell to you yet Mom?”

A Capricorn. The idea that a woman would not remember the birth of her child was already beyond the pale to me, even though I understood why she would want to forget. The idea that an insanely devout former Catholic nun would forget her Christmas baby, well, that seemed a few collapsing buildings too far for me.  

I waited her out. I prodded. “I’m sure your son would probably love to know details about his biological father too.”

Mom slowly unwound a story that was difficult for me to process. She was living in Toledo and went on some type of group date to a bowling alley. My father was there too. She left with another man, an Italian heritage sweet talker, as she described him. “I didn’t want to do anything with him that night. He really pushed himself on me.” With my Mom’s classic understatement, it sounded a bit like rape.       

I tried to probe around this issue but found the wound was so deep with so many layers of scar tissue built on top that it wasn’t going to give. “Did you tell this man that you were pregnant?” I asked her.

“He was a total jerk.” Mom said. “He wanted nothing to do with me after that. Your father was so angry. I came to live with Dad over the summer.”

I have never wished that my Father was alive so that I could talk to him so much as I did in those moments. Something more strange occurred to me then. “Is it possible that this child was Dad’s baby too?” I asked. Matt could actually be a full blood brother.

“This was in April. I think it would have been too early.” Mom answered back. It still hung out there as a possibility. I hung up after telling Mom that I loved her. Then I messaged Matt. I told him that I’d always known something was off in my family and my Mom had confirmed what we needed to know. I welcomed him as a brother.

He messaged back. Much of it was not surprising. He had known that he was adopted since he was a young age and grew up as an only child. His mother had died of breast cancer in 2004 and he had been on a search for his biological mother since then.

I knew I had to call my brother Andy. I decided to call the lawyer first. My uncle, I mean, my father’s brother. I wanted to probe around this strange story and told my uncle that I had a half brother found through DNA testing.

I remember his exact quote. “Well that has to be your Dad’s kid. Your mother is a fucking saint.”

A long silence ensued. Why does everybody always think it’s the guy when it takes two parents to make a baby?    

I told Andy next. “Damn I mean she’s got this guy from the bowling alley and Dad and she was talking about some dude in Cleveland. Mom really got around.”

“Show a little respect. She’s still our mother.”

I didn’t want to go into all of it because I was puzzling something out in my head. My mother’s story didn’t turn coherent until after I told her that Matt was born on or around Christmas Eve. The only two words she used consistently and without hesitation were “son” and “adoption.” I didn’t think it was an onset of dementia.

I wasn’t even surprised when my new brother Matt messaged me a few days later. “Hey I found this guy in the Ancestry database that also shows up as related to the family. You might want to check him out.” He sent me the link to this guy’s Facebook profile. I was doing the probability check in my head and was guessing that they’d come up as half-brothers to each other. They’d both been searching for Mom. The reasons my Mother’s story was so incoherent at first was because there had been two sons she had given up for adoption.     

Way to step on the gas there, Mom…

Part 3 is available here