Mommy Issues

As you might imagine, the cookout was a challenging experience. To feel so much at once, from support, to betrayal, to love and acceptance, was all overwhelming.

So, naturally I wanted to experience many extra emotions, all at once. How would I do this, you ask?

I would read an unopened letter from my mother that I’d had in my possession since March.

Why was this letter unopened? Well… mainly because my mother and I are not currently on good terms.

Let’s rewind.

Remember when I said that this email sat unopened in my Facebook messenger inbox for four years? There’s a reason for when it was sent.

Four years ago was when my parents began divorce proceedings. After 41 years of marriage, my mother decided that she wanted to live her remaining years with someone who was more attentive and thoughtful. My father wasn’t devastated, but was more surprised that she wasn’t interested in maintaining the partnership they had developed. As my mother had been a more active and visible force in my life, I wanted her to be happy. I supported this.

What I was unaware of, however, was that the real catalyst for this divorce was that my mother had met someone. From the brief amount of information I was told by my mother, I was pleased that he was someone who cared for her and treated her well. I believed she deserved that.

That is until a private investigator found me at school one day that May to inform me that the man my mother had met was actually not a good person. He had a rap sheet, had been disbarred over twenty years ago. He had hurt children. He had spent time behind bars. He had stolen money from hundreds of people. And he was already living in England near my family for over four months, in order for my mother to marry him (and allow him to become a British citizen, as my mother never changed her citizenship).

To say the least, I was stunned. The relationship I thought I had with my mother started to be called into question at that point. How could a woman who professed to love and care for her son smuggle a man her son has never met into another country, introduce him to her family (but swear them to secrecy), and plan a secret marriage to him before her son ever meets him?

As a fairly trusting person, I began to question some things. Honestly, a great many things. Those questions ultimately led me to an estrangement with my mother, as she has chosen this man over everyone and everything she professed to love, ignoring the facts about what kind of person he is.

After a back and forth between us, and numerous lies, and a myriad of other problems, I requested to not speak to or see my mother for a year. After moving to Ireland with this man, my mother unexpectedly showed up on my father’s doorstep and requested a meeting with me in November of 2015. We did, and hashed out many things, mostly centered around my need for honesty and how essential it was to me in regard to our relationship. That meeting gave me hope that we might start rebuilding our relationship on something real and honest.

And then Christmas morning I got an email from her…with a new last name. His last name.

I’d lost her. I was devastated. Angry. Sad.

Merry Christmas to me.

So, on my birthday, my father gave me a card from my mother. He initially wanted to read it to me. I refused. He then insisted that I read it. I promised I would.

I put it off. I wasn’t ready to read it on my birthday in March. Or over the summer.

At my M’s prodding at the cookout, I got it out of my car.

“What if she told you in the card? What if that’s why your father wanted you to read it?!?”

So, I read the card. At first, to myself. I started to laugh as I read. My family were… concerned.

Then I read the card aloud to my friends. I continued to laugh a bit as I read it.

I could type it, or post a picture. But just know, it said nothing about my adoption.

It did, however, use the word honest about ten times. You know, because she wanted an honest relationship with me. To rebuild on a bedrock of honesty.

But, nothing about my adoption. Which would, now that I know, be the opposite of honesty.

At this point, in the midst of feeling so many things, I realized something. The lies I thought my mother had started to tell me in the recent past had really started 33 years ago. Suddenly, so much more fell in place.

My mother had literally built a wall of lies from the moment I came into her life. Those lies started off small, but coalesced into a reality that ultimately destroyed what could have been. By denying my past, she deprived us of our future. 

She purposely fueled my deception. Throughout my life, she would point out things that she said were similarities between me and her family. The emphasis on multiple members of the family sharing a specific numerical day of birth, though in different months. The importance of British culture in our lives. Statements like “You have the same hair as my father!” or “You have short arms, just like me.”

Oh, look. There’s the anger I hadn’t really felt yet. Huh. It flared inside me like a cataclysmic event horizon.

And just as it reared and I wanted to rage against this person who is separated from me by both a physical ocean and an ocean of lies, I realized just how much displaced love she must have had wanted to share with someone, and she delivered it to me.  But, instead of sharing the depths of that love with me, and explaining where I came from, highlighting just how much she cared, her love ultimately clouded her judgement and broke her.

Betrayal, an emotion that was suddenly more tangible, blossomed within me. I might not be comfortable with the anger I know I harbor, but the realization that this woman who wanted to give me everything she could did so in a way that she also revised my history. That is unforgivable, at least for now. Without thought for my wellbeing, or any sort of realization that I might have a negative reaction to this revelation, the level of hurt I felt was increasing from ignition to inferno.

I stayed a few minutes longer, gave hugs, and then retreated home. It had been an eventful few hours. But, these moments were allowing me to start from scratch with no skeletons, no shadows. As angry as I was, I was using the frustration to fuel the first steps on to authentically living who I am.

So, naturally I texted my father that I wanted to have dinner with him, if he was available, on Wednesday. He excitedly agreed. In less than 36 hours I would be able to confront him about everything I knew. I was simultaneously afraid, but energized.

At this point, everything I knew was different. What else could he tell me that would alter that?

Turns out, quite a bit.