Something Like Family
by Erin Jamieson
Art by Elizabeth Schoonmaker
The first time I see my mother she is dressed in purple galoshes and a lime green jumper, the kind of outfit a kindergartner wears to her first day of school. She doesn’t notice me at first and continues to sip a steaming mug.
I don’t know what to call her. I feel panicked and use her married name, because calling her mom doesn’t feel right for either of us.
“June,” she says. She doesn’t appear excited or anxious, just matter of fact, as if I’m the mailman or garbage collector. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”
I’m actually relieved: I’d spent the entire plane ride, worrying I wouldn’t be able to return her hug, her enthusiasm. Her muted response relieves us both the burden of pretending.
“My flight was early.”
The two story house has a sprawling porch, like something you’d seen in the South, not the Bay area. The shutters are eyelet blue, far softer than the chartreuse door, which I expect she painted herself. Though the grass was recently mowed, it is a sloppy job, a botched haircut. It’s fall, but then, it always feels cool here. The air smells like cinnamon and decaying leaves.
The majestic Queen Palm’s branches have been allowed to grow to the point they are scraping against the tiled roof. A house that might be nice, but is about as coordinated as my mother’s outfit.
“Planes are never early. In my experience, at least.”
I don’t know what to say to that. In Hattiesburg, we greet visitors with a cup of ice tea, ask how their travels were, tell them how happy we are to have them.
“Do you travel often?” I am aware of how stiff I sound. My mother either doesn’t notice or care.
“For work.”
That’s it. She doesn’t even bother to tell me what she does for a living, or ask me what I do.
It was a mistake to come here. My husband warned me, just before I booked my flight, a week ago. It was a particularly unbearable July evening, the type of day night when even the air conditioner at full blast was not enough. We were both in shorts we’d lounged in during our years at Jackson State, my hair pulled off the nape of my neck.
He told me he liked it that way, because it was easier to kiss.
But when he saw what I was doing, he tensed.
You aren’t really going there, are you.
It was an argument we’d had so often it almost felt scripted.
What would you do?
I told you what I would do, he said, filling a glass with tap water.
We used to have a filter but it broke a few weeks ago, and neither of us admitted we couldn’t afford to replace it, so we pretended that we didn’t mind the slightly cloudy water, the strange, almost earthy taste. When a story about Flint emerged in the news, as it did so often, we turned off the TV.
This might be my only chance to meet her, I insisted. Thirsty but not yet thirsty enough for our water. We were out of milk, and I felt irrationally angry at my husband for not asking if I wanted any before we finished the gallon.
You’re going to be disappointed.
Things aren’t like that there. I got up, fanned myself with a Newsweek. I was beginning to think the air conditioner was broken, too. Not that we could do anything about it.
They’re like that everywhere, June. I don’t know how the hell you’ve fooled yourself into thinking something else. Do you not see the news?
But I wasn’t in the mood for his platform. We’d also disagreed, vehemently on this topic. When we met our sophomore year at Jackson, it was exciting, meeting someone so passionate about politics and current affairs. I mostly kept quiet about my own views, probably a residual habit from being raised by very private parents.
After three years of marriage, the novelty has faded. I don’t love him less, but some days I secretly wonder if we made a mistake, if we aren’t compatible as we imagined. He wants to spend his life trying to change our country. I want to live comfortably. Attention, of any kind, still makes me uncomfortable.
As if reading my mind, he added, This is exactly the kind of situation who should want to avoid.
It isn’t a situation, it’s my mother. And you’re not changing my mind.
We went to bed angry, exactly the way we had for the past several months. In the middle of the night, I reached for him, not sure if I was ready to apologize but longing to be held. He’d gotten up. I found him in the family room, watching the news about another police shooting.
June, he said.
But I didn’t need to hear his explanation. Goodness knows I’d heard it hundreds of times before.
Elizabeth Schoonmaker, Fresh, painting
When she finally invites me inside, I am overwhelmed by cigarette smoke. When she notices me coughing, I apologize.
“Don’t do well with smoke?” she asks.
“I’m pretty much allergic to everything.”
“I make it a habit to make Darnell only smoke out back, but I think he cheated today, before he left for work.”
“Darnell?” I ask, in spite of myself.
“My husband.”
She didn’t tell me she had a husband. Somehow, she didn’t think this detail was important to mention to me when we talked over the phone, before I flew hundreds of miles to see her.
I don’t know why this omission bothers me as much as it does, or why it matters. But it does.
My father, I know, died a month before I was born. I don’t know the details. Only that he never met me, will never get to meet his daughter. Which is maybe why it does matter. It’s not that I expected my mother’s life to be a certain way, or for her to be a certain way, either. But then maybe that’s the problem: having no expectations whatsoever, all of this has come as a shock, too sudden.
My husband Kevin was right, the way he always is, I think. It makes me angry. I don’t want him to be right, not about me or my mother. I try not to inhale too deeply and follow her into the kitchen.
She opens the windows, one at a time, and I help. The fresh air does dissipate some of the smoke, and even though my head is throbbing, at least I can suppress my coughing. I don’t want her to think I’m being dramatic. People tend to take it personally, when I leave the room because someone’s smoking or there’s mold or I start sneezing because someone has on flowery perfume.
With strangers, I mostly just try to deal with it and draw as little attention as possible.
Strangers. I smile at the word. That’s what we are. Stupid, stupid.
“Is there a spot on my shirt?” My mother asks.
“What? No, I don’t think so.”
“You smiling like that. Darnell always smiles at me when I’ve gotten something all over myself.”
I wonder how often that happens. I’m notoriously messy too: on my first date with Kevin, I managed to knock the entire bottle of salad dressing over my lap. That dress never did stop smelling like soured Italian.
“Your kitchen is very nice,” I say, and it is, but nothing like I would ever want. The cabinets are sleek and polished, dark cherry wood, but the counters are a creamy peach, the tile floor the color of flesh. The kitchen table is built for four, with an almost mosaic design of turquoise and purple running up and down the perimeter. Every piece is nice in of itself, if peculiar, but nothing seems to go together, as if her kitchen is many people’s kitchens mashed into one.
She sees me staring at the table. “Bought it at a rummage sale. Five dollars, if you’d believe that.”
Five dollars in the Bay Area? I wonder if that’s life a nickel where I live.
“Must have been desperate to get rid of it.”
She laughs. “Story of my life. Collecting things people don’t want.” She pauses, the first note of hesitancy since I’ve arrived. “I suppose it was a long trip here?”
“It wasn’t bad,” I lie.
“If you’re hungry…” She gestures at a sleek stainless steel refrigerator that looks more out of place than even the strange table. “I don’t know what’s in there, but feel free to help yourself.”
Normally I would pretend I wasn’t hungry-rooting through a stranger’s fridge doesn’t exactly appeal to me-but I haven’t eaten for over six hours. The flights, instead of being delayed, were running ahead of schedule (does that ever happen? I’ve flown so little in my life, but Kevin insists it never does) that my layover was shorter than I expected, and I only had a chance to down a latte from Starbucks (coffee there is way overrated, I don’t care what Kevin says) and a stale muffin, which ended up tasting so terrible I tossed it instead of cramming it down before I boarded.
I don’t know what I expected her to have in her fridge, but it isn’t this. A half empty bottle of ketchup next to a plate of leftover Birthday cake. A jar of Dill pickles, an opened can of coconut milk, the kind you use in Asian stir fries. There’s some sort of leftover dish made with tofu, three bottles of sparkling water, and enoki mushrooms. I spot several bruised nectarines on the bottom shelf.
“Mind if I have an nectarine?”
“Oh, so you’re the healthy type.” She chuckles. “Sure, go for it.”
I don’t know if I’m supposed to take that as an insult or a complement. Maybe this is her way of making me feel comfortable, which, of course, painfully shows how very little she knows me.
The nectarine is fresh, picked at its peak ripeness, so juicy that when I bite into it, some of the juice sprays on my face. Out of habit, I wipe my mouth off instead of asking for a napkin. If my real mother-the one who raised me, I mean-was here, she’d have a fit.
“I’m bad at this,” My mother says after a moment of silence. She’s watching me eat, and I almost feel sorry for her, the way she crosses her arms across her chest, as if a stranger to her own home.
What do you say to that? She could be talking about anything, so I wait, but she doesn’t elaborate.
“Bad at what?” I say, irritated she’s forced me to ask.
“Being a host, I guess.” She pulls up a chair but doesn’t sit. “I didn’t know what to expect.”
My stomach clenches. “I’m not what you expected?” I try to keep my tone light but in my head I can only hear Kevin’s warnings.
“I always say things that sound terrible. I didn’t mean that. I was nervous, seeing you.”
It’s almost a relief, to have her admit this. Growing up, I learned that showing my feelings was a sign of weakness, that you were supposed to act and be a certain way. My mother doesn’t seem remotely interested in impressions.
“I was too.”
I hear the faucet leaking. I wish she would turn it off, but I’m too shy to say anything. Is this what the whole week will be like, I wonder. Sitting with nothing to say? What did I expect: a heart to heart, a Hallmark moment when we embrace each other and say how happy we are to have finally met?
No, I didn’t expect that, maybe. But I did want it, I realize. I wanted my mother to be as sweet as she sounded over the phone, wanted her to see me and at least show some display of affection. But we are two strangers in a house that is not my home and never will be, and when I leave this week we’ll go our separate ways.
I know this and tell myself I’m okay with it. I’ve gotten by without her most of my life, haven’t I?
Kevin and I almost didn’t get married because of my mother. Seven months into our engagement, with the venue and reception already booked (the church I attended as a child and teenager, and on and off as an adult, per my mother’s request. We booked the conference room and decorated with things we bought from Hobby Lobby and Michael’s), I became obsessed with finding her.
Kevin had always been more interested in wedding planning than me-I’d wanted a small ceremony, sans reception, but, knowing my mother would kill me if I did something like that and knowing it would mean a lot to Kevin, whose own parents had been together only five years of his life, I let him make the plans. I helped, sure, but only when asked, and he didn’t seem to mind, consulting me with his ideas about cake flavors, who to invite. I always told him: whatever saves some money.
And he was okay with that, until I stopped answering his calls, getting messages a day late because I’d been in the droves of the internet, searching with no success.
It started with a single newspaper clipping: a feature on women entrepreneurs, two or three from each state.
And my birth mother was among them. I knew it was her: she looked nearly the same as the picture my mother who raised me had shown me, when I was old enough to understand. High cheekbones, like mine. My wide hazel eyes, stubborn chin. She could have been my twin, had she been my age, had her complexion not been several shades darker than mine, her dark, curly strands full and beautiful, compared to my mouse brown, limp strands.
I read her name over and over: Trinity Brown. It sounded musical compared to my name.
“You don’t know that’s her,” were the first words Kevin said when I called him that evening, unable to keep this to myself.
I remember feeling deflated, startled that he wouldn't be happy for me. I wished he was at my apartment, so I could see his expression, but he was working late: I knew he would pick up his phone only for me during inventory week, felt slightly guilty for calling him.
But I realized it had nothing to do with that, because the next night, over a wedding taste test of cedar plank salmon (ended up being way too expensive anyway), Kevin kept changing the topic whenever I brought her up.
“Is it so wrong I want to find her?”
“June,” he said gently, “If she wanted to meet you, she wouldn’t have done a closed adoption.”
I was aware of the caterer doing his best to pretend not to be listening as he took our barely touched placed and swapped them with a rosemary chicken entree.
“She wouldn’t have left a photo with my mother if she wanted nothing to do with me,” I argued. “That makes no sense.”
But I was the one who wasn’t making sense, according to Kevin. At the end of the dinner, when he asked what entree I liked the most, I was startled to realize I couldn't remember taking a bite of anything but the salmon.
In the weeks approaching our wedding, he gave up on asking me for feedback, arranged things himself. And while the last week I did try to get involved, make up for the late night searches to figure out whether or not this woman was who I thought she was (I had no where to start), I think he resented me for it.
Even though our wedding was wonderful, even though I did not look for my mother again until months later,
I worry he still does.
Elizabeth Schoonmaker, Day Off, painting
Kevin calls me twice the next morning, but I miss both calls. I’m doing something I never imagined I would, thrift shopping with my mother on the sprawling streets at the heart of San Francisco. It is a colorful, eclectic city: mandarin orange and canary yellow exterior paint, steeply slanted roads, the bustle and energy of Chinatown, the hippie vibe of the infamous Haight Street (infamous at least, to my “real” mother), the strangely preppy and orchestrated hush of the Marina.
The Marina is where I feel most comfortable: button ups, collared shirts, boat shoes, khakis’. It looks like somewhere my mother would have loved to live, if we had been richer. But this is where my biological mother seems to most uneasy, the most eager to rush on. I stall near the New Leaf where they’re selling pistachio gelato, the boardwalk where sailboats glide on slate gray water.
“It’s not that interesting here,” she tells me when I stop to take pictures with my phone. I start to protest, tell her I want to see the Golden Gate Bridge, but she already has something else in mind, gesturing me to follow her to her car.
I notice a young couple glancing at the pair of us, but maybe I just imagine it. By the time we make it to the car, both of our hair is flattened to our scalps, though my mother effortlessly brushes it back with her hand. I guess she’s used to blustery weather.
When we park a block away from Haight, she tells me she has a surprise for me. Not knowing what to expect, I follow her, pretending not to feel uncomfortable as we pass by display windows advertising tie dyed cut outs, turquoise beaded necklaces, flavored incense. I don’t want to be a prude: I want to like this, like what she likes, or at least understand.
Maybe that’s why I follow her in the tattoo parlor. It’s thin, cramped, and smells like old bubble gum.
“I don’t do tattoos,” I tell her.
She laughs, surprised. “I don’t either.” She nods at a small case in the front. “They have the neatest little bracelets here, way cheaper than those boutiques we saw earlier.”
I’m not exactly inclined to buy anything from here, but I oblige her, craning my neck to look at the bracelets she was talking about, too aware of one of the employees watching impatiently. The bracelet is innocuous, sterling silver or maybe something cheaper, a delicate chain with a single charm.
Without asking me, my mother tells the man we’ll take two bracelets. She selects two additional charms, pays. “Let’s get out of here before they try to convince us to get pierced.”
I laugh, more relieved than anything. “I can pay you back,” I tell her as she hands me the bracelet.
“It’s a gift.”
I only look at it later, as we’re eating burgers on brioche buns (I’m not into the whole health food kick, she confides). The first charm I expect: a miniature of the Golden Gate Bridge, lightly detailed.
The second charm makes me feel sick.
Home is with you, it says.
It happens just as Kevin told me it would, only much worse.
We’re walking back to my mother’s car after a long day, my feet blistered from my poor choice of shoes, my skin slightly sunburnt. My mother, with her darker complexion and sensible walking sandals, is neither.
“There’s one last place I want to show you,” she says.
I am still thinking about the bracelet, what it means, or if it means nothing at all, like Kevin told me: it’s not the same as her asking to see you. How can you know she wants to spend the day with you and isn’t just doing it because she’ll sound terrible if she doesn’t?
And then I notice we are far away from the boutiques and ice cream parlors. Elmhurst, a sign reads as we enter a neighborhood. I rack my brain from the material I studied about the Bay Area before coming here, come up empty.
When I ask where we are, my mother says simply, “East Oakland,” as if that explains everything. That seems to be a habit with her: saying things and expecting me to understand.
Maybe that’s how it would have been, had she raised me.
I push the thought aside, tell myself not to get caught up with silly things. I am worried about how much little things are affecting me, how heavy the bracelet feels on my wrist.
We pull into a driveway, what looks like a condo with pale blue siding, so unlike the color of the other houses we’ve past. It looks more like something I could find in the midwest.
“Now I don’t know how this is going to go.”
I look at her. “What are we here for?”
She doesn’t answer. I have a strange feeling she is examining me: my now running mascara, my flat hair, my petal pink skirt. She bites her lip, as if deciding something, but before she does, there’s a knock on the side door.
“Trinity? What the devil are you doing out here?”
A well built black man with my mother’s eyes and a head of gray hair is looking at my mother with a mixture of bewilderment and amusement. He looks like he’s sixty, but he might be much older than I think.
“I was hoping you’d be home.” She pauses. “I have June with me.”
For a minute, he has a blank expression. Than he seems me, smiles, extends his hand for me to shake.
“It’s good to finally meet you.”
When my mother met Kevin, I knew there was something wrong. I was hesitant to a fault, partially my personality and partially from my upbringing, and waited nearly five months into the relationship before I decided to have them formally meet. We weren’t living together-raised Catholic, I was traditional that way, and Kevin, a lukewarm Protestant, was happy to respect my decision, one of the first men who did not get upset with me when I told them I was going to sleep with them.
But I had a feeling we would end up married some day, the same way I knew I was meant to be a journalist, even as family members urged me to take up something “more practical”. I have a sense about things before they happen, even if Kevin says that’s a bunch of crap, that if I’m always pessimistic, I’m bound to sometimes be right.
I was right about this.
We agreed to meet at O'Charley's for lunch. My mother and Kevin shook hands, stiffly, and we selected a green booth in the front, since there was all there was. When the bread basket came, I was too nervous to touch it.
My mother talked to Kevin as if it were an interview, and I guess it was, in a way. She asked normal questions: what he did for a living, how we met (she already knew some of these answers).
And things seemed to be okay, if a bit formal, until my mother excused herself to the bathroom when the salads came.
“I don’t think your mother likes me,” Kevin said as he nibbled on a roll. He wasn’t touching his sesame chicken salad. That was all he’d ordered, too. Kevin is a steak and potatoes kind of guy. On our first date, he’d ordered a double decker reuben, not caring that his breath smelled like garlic. That was part of what made me fall in love with him: his confidence without arrogance, his fuss free way of living. No need to impress others. Like I tried to, felt I had to.
“Nonsense.”
“Come on, June.”
“She’s just getting used to you.”
He took a bite of salad. “I noticed.”
“She’s like this. I told you. She’s overprotective.”
He shook his head. “It was more than that and you know it.”
I sighed, exasperated. “Don’t make this into something it’s not. You can’t make everything into something political.”
“Something political? It’s not political for me, June. It’s something I deal with every damn day. You ever think about that?”
I wanted to throw the bread basket at him. I hoped no one was listening to us. “You get into that crap and think everyone’s a racist. Well, they’re not.”
“You’re not being fair. You don’t get it, do you? I don’t have a choice.”
I stared at him in disbelief. “What about me? Don’t you think if my mother had a problem with it, she would have a problem with me?”
I’ll never forget what he said next, though it would take some time for it to settle, long after my mother returned and we continued our meal.
“Because you look white. You can forget. You can be anyone you want to be. Did you ever think that maybe this isn’t about your mother hating me? Maybe she wants you to live a life where you don’t get pulled over because you’re with a black man, or someone assumes you got into college just because of your race.”
I don’t think I spoke to him for the rest of that evening, but by then my mother had gathered her composure and we talked about things that we pretended to care about, like how salty the dressing was, and, really, wasn’t it a terribly rainy week?
This is not what I expected. It seems as if her whole family is here and they look like me and they don’t: the same chins or noses, the same eyes or lips. But I am the only person in the room someone could mistake for white. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t make sense that I do: I have a black husband, love him dearly. I have many black friends. It has never mattered to me.
Because it hasn’t had to. Because I have never been somewhere where I am in the minority.
Was this how Kevin felt, the day he met my mother? No, I decide. He wouldn’t have tried to justify faulty logic, like I am now. Or have been defensive.
Everyone is friendly. I meet people who might have been my grandparents, eat Saltines with slices of colby jack. The apartment smells like fresh laundry detergent and pine sol. I have the impression they cleaned especially for me, which makes me feel sick. There is my mother’s sister there too, my would-have been aunt. She is nothing like the aunt I grew up with: a soft, kind face to my aunt’s stern and angular jaw; reserved like I am, where the aunt I grew up with would flat out tell you if you looked ugly or had a big nose.
“I’m so glad you look like Trinity,” the grandmother tells me. Everyone else is startled into silence. “Not like that son of a bitch.”
“Mom.” My mother steps forward, as if to shield me. It is the first motherly thing I have seen her do and it feels off, like I’m in a movie that has been poorly cast and they’ve forgotten to give me my lines. To me: “I’m sorry about that, mom is just--”
But the grandmother is unashamed, resolute. “She would've kept you, you know.”
I feel my chest tighten. It’s all too much: the pine sol smell, the grandfather who is trying not to watch this, this life that might have been mine but I will never know.
Kevin was right: there are some things I do not need to know or hear. I want to leave, but where is there for me to go? I am in a city I do not know, with people I do not know.
My mother decides for us. “I took her here to meet you. I thought you’d like that. She’s just here for this weekend, but if you’re going to turn this into some drama shit we’re leaving.”
To my surprise, the older woman doesn’t protest, just looks at me calmly. Her hair is the same texture as my mother’s but so almost translucent. Her eyes, though, are the same as my mother’s eyes, the same as mine. She reaches for my wrist, the one with the bracelet. Her touch is surprisingly tender.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she says. “I just wanted you to know. In case we don’t get a chance to meet again.”’
The car ride out of the city is silent. My mother asks half heartedly if I want the radio on, and while I would like some noise, I don’t want to worry about her asking me if I want a certain station on, messing with the volume. With Kevin, I also tune into classical music, over his loud protests (he’s into metal. When we first met, I guessed he was into hip hop and he accused me of assuming that because he was black. Back before he knew I was half black, but he still gives me crap about that).
We turn down a narrow street when my mother stops.
“It’s okay,” I say hurriedly. “You don’t need to apologize. For the visit, or leaving me, or--”
“Cop.”
I look at her. “What?”
“There’s a cop. That’s why I pulled over.”
“Oh.” We both wait for the cop to pass. He doesn’t. My mother taps her multicolored nails on the dashboard. I think about Kevin’s obsession with following police shootings, how many times we’ve argued about it.
You assume the cop’s always racist.
See June, that’s what I don’t get it. Guy’s dead either way, isn’t he?
Cops are good people, my mother always told us at family gatherings. It isn’t fair how they’re treated. She and Kevin, always trying to get me to accuse all cops or black men of wrong doing. I hated them both for it.
I tell myself to breathe. In all the times I’ve been with Kevin, we’ve not once been pulled over. Part of why I always thought that he was overreacting, and I hate myself now for feeling so anxious. I’m with a woman, anyway, and no one can tell I’m black (am I bad for thinking that way? I don’t know). Nothing is going to happen, I tell myself.
The cop is a Latina, with wavy dark brown hair and a petite build. I relax.
My mother doesn’t. She’s still clutching the wheel. She only rolls down her window when I jab her in the shoulder.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” the officer says.
“Afternoon,” she says stiffly.
“I wanted to let you know your backlight is out.”
“Oh.” My mother’s shoulders slump. “I didn’t know.”
“I won’t write you up, but make sure you get that fixed soon as you get home.”
My mother nods. Waits. I feel myself waiting with her, but I’m not sure why. The police woman tells us we’re free to go.
I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath until we are on our way again. Is it because it’s the first time I’ve been in a car that gets pulled over, because of the things Kevin has told me? Or is it because, for a single afternoon, I felt what it might feel like to live in a mostly black community, to identify as black, to understand that might mean something more than I imagined?
Elizabeth Schoonmaker, Untitled, painting
Your father. She tells me as we drive back. We were young. But not two young. I was almost twenty one. I think he thought he could be with me. I thought so too. But when he learned I was pregnant, he left.
Now that she’s telling me, I can’t stop listening, even though it feels like we’re on tracks, watching a train headed towards us.
It wasn’t like that. He wanted to love you. But he didn’t agree with it.
When I ask her what she means, her careful driving slows so much the red Mazda behind us blares its horn.
Having a kid. We were already married. You didn’t know that. Probably thought I was a knocked up teenager who dropped out of high school.
I don’t answer. I don’t need to.
He didn’t want kids? I manage.
He did, until Derek died. His friend. He thought it would work out with us before then. Derek, well, we don’t know for sure what happened. He went out for a few drinks. He drank a little too much, but he was a good guy. A real good guy. He was best man at our wedding. That night, after he left the Tavern, a police officer followed him. Asked what he was doing. He was walking mind you. He would never have driven buzzed.
She pulls into the driveway but neither of us get out.
When he didn’t answer, they asked to search his pockets. There was a man on the looser, a drug dealer in the area. They were tough on drugs then. Thought it would make things safer. He was scared, not thinking. I don’t know. All we have is their account.
She means the police’s, I realize. I am used to interrupting, trying to offer a lukewarm response, something that would piss both my mother and my husband off. But now I stay silent.
He looked like the man they were looking for. Thought he might be armed. That’s what they said anyway. Never made it to trial. No charges filed.
My throat is thick. I am pushing back rationalizations. I don’t know if it happened the way my mother tells it, but I realize she doesn’t either, and I realize the result is the same: the man is dead, my father gone.
Because he didn’t think I would be raised well by a black mom and a white dad. I don’t forgive him. I don’t even understand, maybe. But I don’t hate him for it.
My mother doesn’t finish her story, doesn’t say why she decided to give me up or when. And I realize none of this matters. None of it matters, because it is not my story to tell.
I don‘t stay the whole week. When I get back home both my mother and my husband are waiting for me at the airport. They ask if everything went okay, if I had a good flight home.
I embrace them both, hold onto them, try not to think. Sometimes it’s easier that way.
Maybe in a week I will talk about what I learned or maybe I will keep it with me. I told myself I would not be changed but that is no longer an option, a blessing and a curse, the first and last gift my biological mother will give me.
