Chapter 7 – Secrets and Sisters

If I have learned anything in this process it is that nothing is ever as it seems.  None of us really know the people that bore and/or raised us.  All of us have skeletons in the closet that we would rather never see the light of day.  That would include me as well.  But once those skeletons and ghosts get released the right way to deal with them would be to just come clean.  Trust is broken and the only way to rectify the broken bonds is to just talk it out.

Since all this has happened I have felt a very palpable distance between my sisters and I.  It is almost as if they are of the mindset that since the secret is out there is no need to keep up a pretense.  Both seemed to have pulled back from me.  Then again, I too have pulled back.  My mother is not the only who has yet to apologize for lying and keeping the secret.  My sisters do as well.  They believe that because they found out while still at home, under mom’s roof, that they had no choice.  Sure, I buy that.  What I don’t buy is why, over 21 years, they never bothered to tell me.  If they think they have gotten absolution from me, they are sorely mistaken.  This is no little matter they kept from me.  They both know that I have always felt different and never in sync with the rest of the family.  But all these years they allowed me to suffer, allowed me to feel paranoid and basically condoned the way our mother handled the situation.

Every act’s as if I am not allowed or entitled to be angry, that I am not right to demand an apology.  Are you kidding me?  For either of them to presume to know what I have gone through is a slap in the face.  They only had to deal with the knowledge of a half brother, which did not change much in their lives.  I had to deal with the loss of two full sisters, the loss of one father, yet gaining a new father and a new whole sibling.  The only person who seems to acknowledge that I am justified in being hurt and allows me to be angry is my adoptive father.  He has always accepted me as I was.  Of course he would get upset when I screwed up, which was often in my 20’s, but he always got over it and never held it against me.

Damn right I am still mad.  I probably will be for a very long time….

Chapter 6 – Honor My Father

Does there ever come a time when you can wash your hands of someone or of a situation and just let it go? Accept things as they are? If there is, I would love to know the secret to doing so. I have yet, after nearly 44 years of heartache and shame been able to completely cut the ties that bind me. Why do I hold on to something that will never be? Every day is a challenge for my survival within a family I feel ever so distant from. Added to that challenge is trying to find what my final assessment of my biological father will be.

It is bad enough that I have found out the “true” person that my mother is, but what do I make of a man/father I do not know. My brother called him a loser the other day and as funny as it may sound, I got a bit defensive of the father I never knew. Although I am fully aware of his alcoholism, lack of holding a job or keeping a roof over his family’s head, there I was, defending his honor. Why? When his children spoke of him I felt their sadness, their loss, their desire and wish to have this man be something more than what he ended up being. My half siblings had a very rough life with two parents who were drinkers, fighters and irresponsible. This man cannot and will not ever be able to hold a candle to the man who raised me, yet I defend him. I cannot understand that. Yes, he is my biological father, I am grateful for his giving me life, I just do not understand why I care what anyone says about him. Is it possible that I think I am a reflection of him? Anything derogatory said of him, has a barring on who I am as a person? Is it possible that I love someone I never knew, someone who never cared for me, looked after me or supported me?

As much as I adore and love my dad, my heart still aches a bit for this stranger and my soul yearns to hear his side of his story. Perhaps I am hoping that he did give a damn, but he knew I was better off where I was, without him. Maybe I am hoping he made a huge sacrifice. If that was the case, I certainly empathize and understand that. It is funny, how children can repeat the history of their parents. I know I have, were it not for the truth coming out, I would have never known that. In an odd way, knowing is reassuring to me.

Chapter 5 – Mothers Hands

After much thinking, I decided that at this point I am not ready to go into the gory details of abuse suffered at the hands of my mother.  So much of my life has been spent dwelling on this part of my life, time I now realized was wasted.  There was nothing I could do to make her not want to hit me or hurt me, it was not my fault at all.  All these years later I realize I was not paranoid, crazy or nor did I have a skewed sense of life in my house.  I also realize that she was not going to allow me to confront her about the abuse because that would mean she would have to face her past and god knows we have already witnessed the lengths at which she would go to keep her past hidden.

Of course, I could go into the many slaps in the face, backhands that came at the drop of the dime, the time she lifted me out of the bathtub by my hair and beat me, or the black eye here and there, or the time she threw an encyclopedia down the hallway hitting me in the head and nearly knocking me unconscious, or the times when my father had to pull her off of me, but I won’t.  That is giving her too much power and diminishes me.  Perhaps in a later chapter I will go into more detail, but right now, I am not ready to confront those demons.  Once I put them on paper, it will confirm the wasted time, love and energy I put into the woman that is my mother.  Let me preface here that I was a handful in my own right, I drank, came home late and was never one to follow rules, but when you crossed her, she would go to the extreme in anger (well, when I crossed her).  I was your typical child and teenager, but to her I think she always saw me at the demon spawn, not a child.

On the outside everyone saw a perfect home and family.  But for me, every time that door closed, fear gripped me.  I walked around on pins and needles always on high alert for her mood swings.  Even as an adult, when I walk into her house I am paralyzed.  As each days passes, her grip on me lessens and the more free I become.

Chapter 4 – Two Minus One

Trying to find information about a twin in West Virginia is no easy task due to it being a closed adoption state.  I find it so very odd that some states are open and give full disclosure upon request and others are not.  It would seem to me that every state would have the same thing.  It is unfair that some birth parents or adoptees can find who they are looking for and others cannot.  Under the closed adoption law no information is allowed to be released, so when calling vital statistics they would not even tell me yes I had a twin or no I did not.  All they could do was put a note inside my adoption folder so that if a twin came looking for me, they would release my info.  So basically both parties have to be in agreement that they want to be found before they tell you anything at all.

I went through all the motions, checking old newspapers for both birth and adoption announcements, hospital logs and speaking to people who were acquainted with my mother and biological father.  No one had any answers.  None the less, I kept trying.   About 7 months into this I found out that I was given a first name different from the one I that was on the birth certificate (the amended certificate).  Well that information allowed me to start from the scratch again since I had my real given birth name.  Let me preface here, my real given name was even closer than the one I actually use, it was Alana, thus my pen name.  Yet, even after my mother admitted that this was my original name, she still claims I was not named after him.  Ah, yeah, ok, Alana is so much different than Alan right?

Luckily for me, this umpteenth call to vital statistics was fruitful and I found a woman who must have had some compassion on me after hearing my story.  I think that since I had my real given birth name and that my birth mother raised me, she must have thought it was only fair I know.  I told her that I did not want to be chasing a ghost that was non-existent for years and that I wish someone would just give me some indication as to whether I need to keep looking.  Next thing I know she said, “I cannot seem to find any other babies born on that day in Wheeling”, I asked her if that meant there was only one, she said yes.  So there it was, I did not have a twin.  The answer was a welcomed one, but it also gave me a bit of sadness.

You have to understand my mindset at the time, any information I received that proved my mother a liar or hurt her gave me a high, I wanted to crush her.  As wrong as that sounds, my mission in life was to destroy her, find out all her lies and bring her to her knees.  I was out expose her to be the hypocritical, lying, manipulative woman that I had found her to be.  Still, even now, I must admit, I want to bring her down.  So many people have been hurt by her, not just my brother and I, but other family members she shut out.  Although I know she will have to answer to a higher authority, there is still that part of me that is hell-bent on making her answer to me as well.  I want her to acknowledge the pain and hurt she inflicted upon me as a child both physically and mentally and the mental abuse that continues to this day.  My lifetime was spent trying to live up to her expectations, morals and values only to find out that she had the morals of an alley cat.  Every time she ticks me off, I feel like yelling, “Hey, excuse me, I was not the one who chased a married man hundreds of miles only to get knocked up again!”.    My childhood, it looked so wonderful on the outside, but behind closed doors, it was my own personal private hell.  Coming to Maryland was suppose to be the best place for me, in hindsight I am not so sure, because life here was just as empty as the one my mother ran away from.  So we come to the dark history of my life, the place where you see what happened to Alan’s daughter, only because she was Alan’s daughter.

Chapter 3 – Found and Lost

So there it was, his real full name and date of birth, just staring at me from the pink paper.  I was a bundle of nerves and was actually shaking.  I knew that once I started down this path there would be no return and I needed to catch my breath for a moment or two before I took to my computer.  Life as I knew it was going to change in a matter of minutes and there was no way to really prepare for it.  I banged out the name on my keyboard, the first hit was to a site that had a picture of a grave marker, my biological father’s grave marker as well as his wife’s.

I sat there in a trance, looking at the computer screen and before I knew it was crying almost hysterically.  Perhaps deep down I was hoping this was one fact my mother lied about, the fact that he was dead.  That was not the case.  To this day I am not really sure why I cried.  All I knew was in that moment I felt a great sense of loss and sadness, overwhelmingly so.  But how could that be?  I did not even know this man and according to my mother, he and I never met.  Another fact which is questionable, but I will save that for later.

After a few moments I decided to see if I could find anyone related to him.  This was going to be hard, cold calling, explaining who I was and hoping I would get an individual that had a clue as to what I was talking about.  Forty plus years is a long time and people do forget.  First call out of the gate I hit pay dirt.  Her name was Anita, she was Alan’s daughter, my half sister.  Before I got two sentences out she said she knew who I was and had known about me since she was 5 or 6 years old.  I couldn’t believe it.  It seems like the whole damn world knew about me and my situation, EXCEPT me!  What she said next threw me for a loop, she asked where my twin sister was.  A twin?  What twin?  As far as I knew I did not have a twin.  So I asked her if she had my brother (Alan’s son) confused with a twin.  That went over like a lead weight.  She knew nothing of a baby boy and I had dropped a bomb on her.  I felt horrible.  Apparently she was under the impression that my mother and Alan’s affair was very short lived, her hearing about my brother, his age and adoption really upset her because she realized it was not a fly by night relationship.  Great I thought, just what I did not want to do, upset his family.  After we chatted for a few minutes, she gave me my three half brothers names.  Two were very cordial and inquisitive with me.  We talked for hours and it could not have gone any better.  My one brother wanted no parts of knowing me or even talking to me, even over a year later I have not spoken to him.  I understand his misgivings and respect his decision.  I was already fortunate that the remaining three were so forthcoming.

Over the next few days I received a few pictures of Alan.  He was quite the handsome man, dark hair, blue eyes, olive complexion and beautiful smile.  I can see why my mother fell for him.  I can also see where some of my features come from and that made me happy because for so long I felt like the odd duck in my family.  Although I had been told I looked like my Uncle Maynard, my mothers brother, I still always felt different.  Even days and weeks later I could not help but still feel and overwhelming sense of sadness about my father.  It is very hard to explain the feeling of finding him and losing him in a matter of 35 minutes.  I also felt sad for my brother, who was searching for him in 1988 only to be told by my mother that he was dead, when in all actuality, he did not die until 1993.  Then there was the loss of never knowing any answers to all the questions that I have and never knowing his side of the story. Nearly everyone associated with this fiasco from the 1960’s has passed away, except my mother, and my father’s sister Nancy, who lived in Alabama.  She was next on my list to call but first I had to get the ball rolling to see if there was any truth to my having a twin.  And so the plot thickens…..

Chapter 2 – Lost in Transition

When you receive information that is so life altering like I did, I suppose as a form of self preservation a portion of your brain shuts down and yet you still function.  There were hours in my journey that were unaccounted for, trips to the store I do not remember, conversations that lasted hours that I cannot recall, I could be standing on my patio on minute and the next I am laying face down in the middle of my yard with grass stains on my socks and knees with no idea how I got there.

But in the midst of the madness I somehow found the inner strength to begin searching, and by searching I mean a relentless, non-stop kind of search.  I was surviving on coffee and cigarettes.  My laptop and computer became a lifeline of sorts.  My adrenaline was always pumping, sleep was hard to come by and I would find myself getting up in the middle of the night because something popped in my head for a search or idea where to look.  It became an addiction.

So thus began, the search for my biological father. The only name I had was one that my mother gave my brother years ago. After days of searching that name in the Wheeling area, I realized it did not ever exist.  Now I knew something was not quite right.  Asking her only yielded a response nothing good can come of it and no name.  Heck, she never called me when all this came out, after nearly seven days I had to call her.  Yeah buddy, she really cared that her child was devastated beyond belief.  Again, she was worried about her own self serving motives, not her daughter.

But that sixth sense I have always had, it was telling me the first name was on track, I just knew it.  Why you ask?  Well, the name given to my brother was Alan, the name I went by was Lana.  Mix the letters in Lana up, what name do you get?  You tell me folks, is that a damn smart deduction or is it not?  Unfortunately for my mother, she underestimated her daughter. She thought I would just suck it up and let it go on her words alone.  Oh hell no, that was NOT going to happen.  Once I decided that this must be the right first name I wondered if perhaps the middle name is similar to mine, Lea.  Little did I know at the time how close I was and how similar the middle name would be to my own.  In my search the same five names would come up, of course different last names than the one given to my brother.  It was all so frustrating.

I decided to take a different approach and started posting on the ancestory boards and the local West Virgina boards.  Yes indeed, I put my mothers name out the for the world to see.  It was a long shot, but I had to take drastic measures.  If I was not on the internet searching and posting I was on the phone with courts, libraries, hospitals and the Department of Vital Records.  Days went by and there I was, still drinking coffee like a fiend and smoking like a freight train.  I barely came up for air.  Nearly at my wits end, I called my sister crying.  Told her all the things I had been doing, how I felt and everything it was doing to me.  Not that it matter, I just knew that if I dumped it on her, it would be a direct line to my mother.  It was done in the hopes that my mother would show some compassion and give up the name.  That was a pipe dream if ever there was one.

About a week after that conversation with my sister my phone rang at about 5:30 that night.  It was her, all she said was, grab a paper and pen, which I did.  She then proceeded to give me my biological father’s full name, birth and death dates, along with his wife.  Apparently she wrote it down in 1993 when our mother had told her.  Of course I was thankful, but I was also absolutely livid.  How dare my mother, give my fathers name to a child that was not his.  I deserved that information not my sisters.  What the hell is wrong with this woman?  Like it is my fault I was born, as if it was my fault she had 3 year affair with this man that produced two children.  Her disdain of me was so transparent but the feeling, it is ever so mutual.

Chapter 1 – Almost Heaven

On a crisp day in September 1965 at Ohio Valley General Hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia a little girl was born.  She had dark brown hair and hazel eyes, chubby little fingers and chubby little toes.  That little girl would be me.  In hindsight, I do not think my arrival was a happy occasion nor do I think that it was something that my mother wanted.  I am almost positive that had everyone around her not known her situation, I believe that I would have damn near been left in a basket on some poor souls stoop.  Innately, I think I have always known that deep down but never really had to face it.

There is nothing like finding out at age 43 that everything you thought you were, everything that made you who you are and everything you believed all those years were nothing but an illusion concocted by a woman hell bent on covering her shady past and her wrongdoings. Not to mention her wrangling your siblings and other family members into the grand illusion, swearing them to take the secret to their graves.  What kind of woman does that?  Who manipulates their family to such a degree?  Who would go this far to the detriment of their own child?  Easy, my mother, the Queen Bee, that is who.  And it all began in West Virginia.

West Virginia is a beautiful place.  I can still smell the mountain air and see all the beautiful trees in the country.  Though I only lived there six short years sometimes I still find myself wanting to go back.  I remember snowy mornings when a squirrel would sit on a window sill in the kitchen in Wheeling, I remember trail through the pastures to get to Mrs. Klugge’s house and her delicious chocolate cake in Dallas Pike, I even remember the day that Santa Claus drove by in a red 57 Chevy convertible.  Talk about a sight!  Yep, those are things I do remember.

It is the things I do not remember that haunt me today.  The people I do not remember, the voices I can’t put a face or name to, the other children I played with and a name I was called but have no recollection of ever being called it.  Or the man who’s face I so desperately want to remember but cannot. The one thing I cannot remember or feel the most is love, everything seemed cold to me, kind of out of sorts.  I do not recall being held, hugged and loved on like a mother does a child.  And once my sisters came along, well, all hope was lost.  The bond, it was never made and sadly for me, after all this, the damage is irreparable.

Perhaps I should fill you in more.  Apparently I am a child of an affair to put it nicely, to put it not so nicely, a bastard.  All of which I did not know until my older brother surfaced.  Unfortunately, he was in the same boat as me, with the exception that he was put up for adoption.  I know what you are thinking; you would have thought our mother would have learned the first go round with this man.  It would seem that he was a real Rico Suave’ in his day so to speak.  At least that is what she says, but he is not here to defend himself, so her word, which does not mean a hill of beans to me, is all I have. Well that and stories carried down through the years.  Don’t ask me who got the better end of the deal, my brother or me; personally I think he did because he got out and away from her narcissistic insanity.  Funny thing though about the whole bastard label, I have always felt like one even when I did not know I was one.  You know like the sixth toe or the third nipple.  Everyone knows it is there, but nobody wants to talk about it.  But I am here to tell you, truths can set you free more than you can begin to imagine.

Unlike some in my family, I have always been proud of my West Virginia hillbilly roots.  I even crack jokes about hillbillies, so all of you hee-haw’s out there be forewarned.  If you are touchy about your hillbilliness, get over it or stop reading because I will no doubt offend you in some manner.  As I was saying, although I have been in Maryland for 38 years, I am still drawn to my southern heritage and wear it as a badge of honor, to the chagrin of my mother.  There have been quite a few people who have said I seem more southern than northern or that I have a southern way about me.  Even though my mother dragged me out of West Virginia and tried to erase her past and mine as well, it did not happen.  A full transformation was never to be, again to her dismay.  And truth be told, that is just fine by me.

I was lucky enough to be adopted by a man who I could not be prouder to call my dad but naturally I had to find out who my biological father was.  It was with a broken heart I began the journey.  I trudged ahead even though I felt  like I was betraying my “dad”.  The last thing I wanted to do was hurt him.  But I had to know the truth.  A lifetime of lies to unravel with no idea where to begin.  West Virginia was calling me back and I had to listen.