So, Who are We Now?

Do you know that the trope of baseball players or other traveling workers in movies and TV shows has a bunch of different families all across the country? Well, that’s a real thing, and baseball players aren’t the only folks who do this; other “regular people” do it, and not just men. Women are family hoarders, too. Some, like my maternal great-grandmother, are cuckoos if you will. Leaving their fledglings in other nests to be cared for by the father's family, usually the father's family.

That's an extreme example. Most just keep their kids with them and have several fathers along the way, as my paternal grandmother did. A “single Mother.” That’s what I called my grandmother for many years; she was a strong single mother who provided for her boys the best way she knew how. That wasn’t the whole story, though.

I have gone four? rounds with my mother’s family on this roller coaster. The first couple of rides revealed that some long-time “family friends” were, in fact, family family, and not distant family either. My mother gained an aunt and several cousins.

Several years later, the aunt found more half-siblings and cousins. at that time my mother decided to go to a huge family reunion a couple of states away and report back to the rest of us who did not attend. She brought back news of many family members I do not know, have never met, and will never meet unless they somehow find and contact me. This was sometime in my tween years. Before DNA testing became commercially available. It was all being done through ancestry websites and public record searches.

The third run was much the same, but located in an entirely different area of the United States. Shockingly, only a few miles from where we had lived in Missouri. By this time, we had moved away to Florida, and this family had moved into Missouri from Indiana during my lifetime. I want to say, thankfully, since there are other stories you hear about long-lost relatives accidentally ending up married because of this exact sort of thing, but Florida is Hell.

Again, my mother went, stayed with her sister, and met these new family members. I was not going to be a part of it. By that point, I had some idea of why I didn’t want to connect with more members of my mother’s family. Regardless of the potential for them to be nice people, it was safer to stay away.

Only one of the extra families was the child of my great grandfather. and this last one wasn't it. This new family became the big question, and the first ones to get the DNA tests involved. My Great Grandmother carried a child to term and gave it away when my great aunt was 11 or 12 and she was completely destroyed by this fact. She was the second youngest, and she couldn't believe her brother or my Grandmother hadn't noticed either. It became a huge connundrum for months, years even. It led to opther members of the family getting DNA tested.

We have arrived at the current predicament. My brother texted me last year to let me know, in passing, that my Dad’s dad, was not his actual father. He had done one of those DNA tests that showed his bio dad passed away from liver cancer in 06. He was letting me know for health purposes. If I have gone through this so much and so often (relatively often) why is the newest of the events hanging me up? This hit me harder than the other ones for many reasons I can think of.

For one, my father is named after his father, and his grandfather before him. My dad is the third of his name. My middle name, the one I chose to take when I gave up my first name in the search for a better future, is part of that family name. Bailey, it hasn’t lost its ring, but it will, for a while at least, be a reminder of the black hole my family seems to be.

Another reason, my Dad’s family already didn’t have the easiest time sorting out their fathers. He only had half brothers to begin with, but that didn’t make them less of uncles to me. Now there is an indeterminate number of new siblings. I am sure my parents are finding out, but I haven’t heard since I am no longer in contact with them.

The main thing I remember about my Grandmother is her constantly shit talking my so-called grandfather. Complaining about how he didn't take care of his kids, and the fact that he left her and ditched her to another state. Etc. She didn't do it only to him, either; she bad-talked multiple men whom she tried to trick into taking care of children who weren't theirs. While also trying to cover her own indiscretions. As I look back on the facts of my Grandmother and my father's lives, she acted despicably.

I have always known her to keep these kinds of secrets from everyone. My uncle was kept in the dark that he was my dad’s half-brother all the way up until his high school graduation, even though EVERYONE else knew, to the point my mother accidentally mentioned something to the effect of, “It is so nice your bio dad sent you a gift for the occasion.”

Of course, looking back over my life, nothing can ever be really trusted to have been an accident with my mother anymore, but this would be one of the few things she is blamed for that wouldn't be fair. So it isn’t shocking to find out there were more secrets to be had, but it's still hurtful.

The world will never know the truth about any of these things, she is a liar, he is a liar, my mother is a liar, and so is her whole family. I currently don’t know what my name might have been if I were organized under the correct family tree. It doesn’t change anything legally, just as deciding to go by my middle name didn’t actually change anything, but it somehow changed everything.

You would think something like this wouldn’t matter, especially since I only saw the man maybe three times my whole life, if he were truly my grandfather he would have truly been the deadbeat dad my father talked about him being, but what if my grandmother never even told my biological grandfather, would he have been a real father to my dad?

One of the men in her life, of whom there were several, was good to her sons, and they affectionately called him Dad. I am not actually sure he was the biological father of any of my uncles, maybe my youngest one, who knows anymore. But my step-grandfather passed before I was ever born.

I am not even sure if my mother ever met him. Even if my grandmother wanted to preserve the memory of the good man who cared for her children properly, once her sons were grown, the time should have one day come to find out their true parentage, maybe that day when my mother busted open the egg, instead of turning the whole shit pot on her head, so they would at least have a chance at figuring this stuff out.

The last reason is that my dad’s family, while maybe not the “nicest” people, I have been coming to realize, are much more normal than my mother’s. Plus, my Aunt (pictured with me above), who took me in during the most difficult time in my life, is the sister of that grandfather. She loved us, spent time with us, and we loved her and cared for her.

She took me in when I was on the literal streets for God’s sake, so the thought that she suddenly evaporated from our family was one of the worst things about this. I know she didn’t at all. She loved me, and I loved her down to the end. She continues to care for me, in tiny ways, even after she has passed, in the little gifts she left for me, but it hurts a little still.

I am currently too afraid to have a DNA test done. I am 95% sure, I am my father’s child. I look like him and act like him, but my brother… has always been spoken about in hushed tones. Everywhere we move, people comment about how he looks adopted and other things like that.

Some of those comments are based on bigotry and people not understanding how genetics work (my skin is shades fairer than my brother’s.), but some of it may be our ability to see things that are unspoken. Of course, my grandmother’s comment was always that he looks just like his uncle, his half-uncle… and my comment when my mother announced she was pregnant, in front of everyone, was “Uncle G…. gets everyone pregnant (throws hands in the air)”

My aunt had also just announced her pregnancy, at least that was the explanation my mother hastily gave for that comment, and has stuck with my brother’s entire life. It is probably true. I hadn’t even gotten glasses yet. I was literally blind. What did I know? Apparently nothing, I still don't, and don't want to. Every revelation seems worse than the last.

K.B. Silver