Bad Girl House

Years ago, I found something strange in a book that belonged to my mom. It sent me searching for answers that I still don’t feel I’ve conclusively found. When I was in the eighth grade I needed to find a book to read for my Language Arts class, so I could ultimately write the dreaded book report. My mom had been both a math and English major when she attended college to become a teacher. That meant that there was no shortage of books at our house. There were boxes and boxes of books in our basement to go through. There was just about anything you could want. I eventually found one that sounded good to me.

One night before putting the book on my dresser after reading, I noticed a name written on the inside cover. I recognized my mom’s perfect handwriting, but the name wasn’t ringing any bells. The next day, I went to ask my mom about it. I showed her the book, and asked her why that name was written in something of hers. She didn’t miss a beat. She told me that the name belonged to the woman that she had student taught under. I nodded, accepting her answer. Why would I not have accepted her answer? She had no reason to tell me a story that wasn’t true. She never had before.

Over time, I couldn’t help doubting my mom’s answer. It just didn’t add up for me. The questions I still had as a sheltered eighth grader weren’t very deep, but they kept nagging at me. Why would my mom have all of these books that she told me belonged to someone else? Why would she have written someone else’s name in those books? When no one was home I headed back to the boxes of books in the basement. I looked through the same boxes that I had seen before, but this time peeked inside the covers. Many of them had that unfamiliar name written in the corner. There were also some with my last name. I knew that my mom had taught English for several years before teaching only math, so it made sense to me that those books where from when she had her own classroom. I didn’t know what else to do with my curiosity, so I put it in the back of my mind for some time. I had forgotten about it for some time.

Four years later, I was suddenly reminded. Back then information was still kept on paper and put in file cabinets. The end of my senior year was quickly approaching. Not only were students cleaning out their lockers of old tests and text books, but the office staff was cleaning out their many draws of our files. Before our last day, we were all given a file containing our medical information and transcripts. It contained everything from our school aged careers. When I was handed mine, I saw something that struck me as very odd. My last name was in parenthesis after the one I had seen in so many of my mom’s books. The room around me disappeared. I couldn’t hear my friends talking to each other. My jaw hung open as I stared down at the two names. It was the first time that the question that really needed to be asked came to my mind. Who actually am I?

When I got home from school, I returned to the basement to search for anything I might have missed. There had to be more than just old books. I decided to work my way across the basement. Luckily for me, it was a small room. I knew that most of the room was full of decorations for each change of season, and the rest was full of our clean laundry and canned food. It did come across boxes that I hadn’t looked in before. It was a box of yearbooks from each year my mom had taught. I was afraid to look through them and find what I was already assuming. I worked my way backwards through the years, maybe to prolong the inevitable for myself. When I came to the yearbook from 1982, I was overwhelmed by what I saw. I found the page that said seventh and eighth grade math. Under that heading, was the unfamiliar name, and across from that was the grinning face of my mom. I stared at it with the same feeling I had staring at my papers earlier in the day. I also remembered that my uncle had worked for a heating and air conditioning company that had been owned by people with that name.

For eighteen years, I had believed that the man I had been calling dad was in fact my biological father. The yearbook I was looking at was telling me otherwise. In my head I was picturing all of the old photographs of him holding me as an infant and a toddler. Nothing was adding up. If I was born in 1977, why was this my mom’s name until until 1982? Why was this her name at all? She hadn’t told my the truth when I asked her about it the first time. I told myself that she must have had a good reason, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know the answer.

In my mom’s room, on her dresser, stood a picture that I had seen almost every day. The picture was of her and my dad. She was wearing a white dress that was covered in blue flowers, and he was wearing a dark blue suit. They were standing outside of our first house. I was always told that this picture was taken on their wedding day. I can even see the frame that the picture was in. There was a gold oval matting around the happy couple. At the same time that I was wrestling with my confusion, I happened to take a closer look at that picture. My mom’s arm was held out slightly to the side. I wanted to take the picture out of it’s frame to see if there was anything hiding behind the matting. I again had to be sneaky when no one was home in order to make my next discovery. The picture frame had been hiding the truth for a long time. I slowly and carefully slide the backing out of the frame, lifted up the card board that held the picture securely against the glass. Flipping the picture over, I saw a third person in the photo. It was a little girl in a light blue dress, lacy white socks, and black patten leather shoes. She looked to be about five years old. It was me.

My mom had been hiding things from me for my entire life. She wasn’t just hiding things from me, she was hiding things about me. I’m sure I was never supposed to figure all of this out. I was supposed to believe what I was told. I now had even more questions than I had answers. But there were things that I thought I knew for sure. If my dad wasn’t my biological father, then my half siblings were only my step siblings. We weren’t even related. This wasn’t going to help the already difficult relationship I had with my dad. It all felt so much bigger to me that just being hidden in a picture. I had been hidden from an entire other family, and they had been hidden from me. As much as I might have been hurting, I didn’t want to bring it up to my mom again. I had to tell myself that she had done what she thought was best for me. I didn’t want to upset her, if it was something that she didn’t want to tell me. Like I had before, I tried to tuck away my feelings. It was much more difficult this time, because what I had found turned my entire life upside down. It tried to sort out all of the why’s and how’s in my own head, but there were still too many holes in the small amount of information I had.

If it had been up to me, I probably would have never talked to my mom about her name, or about the picture. I had kept my school file in a drawer so that she wouldn’t know that I had any other clues about her past. Only months after this was when I met John. As he talked about his parents, my troubles with my dad, and my uncertainties about who was spilled out of me. I guess I thought he should know that about me. I’m not sure that he had been honest about the family dynamic he had grown up in, as I poured my heart out to him. I told him these things right before the fateful night that he met my parents.

John convinced me that I needed to address my questions with my mom. He told me that it would continue to eat me up inside if I didn’t. He wasn’t wrong about that, but I also felt like he was pushing me to talk to her about it before I was ready. I didn’t think that I was ever going to be ready to essentially call her out for lying to me. I figured that the best way to go about bring it up, was to show her the paperwork I had gotten from school almost a year ago. I tried to act as if I wasn’t sure that it was the same name that I had questioned her about in the past. This time she couldn’t avoid giving me a real answer. After she let out a long, breathy sign, she began telling me her story. She had been married once before to a man named Joel, and that man was my biological father. She described him as an extremely intelligent rocket scientist who could have worked for NASA. The reason for their divorce had been him being an alcoholic. She filed for divorce while she was pregnant with me, and everything was finalized before I was born. This was during a time when visitation and the rights of the father were not the same as they are now. The judge granted her full custody of her unborn child. She had requested that her lawyer offer my father the option of not paying child support if he agreed to never see his child. For whatever reason, my mom didn’t want him or his family to be a part of my life, and he agreed to her terms. Not long after I was born, she met the man who would eventually adopt me and make me his daughter. They had been dating when he appeared in my baby pictures. Their wedding photo had been taken right before they went downtown to be married by the Justice of the Peace, only five years later than I had thought.

Our conversation had been very brief. I didn’t know what else to ask her. I again took what she had said as the truth. When I think about about it logically now, things still don’t make sense to me. There are so many possibilities that come to my mind. I understand that it can be necessary to protect a child from a parent, I don’t understand how someone could just walk away from their child. How could an entire family just walk away from a child? I wonder if my mom was the only one that knew I existed, and she simply got divorced. My father could have been the only other person that knew about me, and was such an awful human being that he agreed to disappear. I have only ever seen one picture of him when my mom had my grandpa’s slides put on DVD. It wasn’t only the fact that I had never seen him before that let me know it was him, but it was the nose on his face that looked just like mine. Even that could be somewhat coincidental. Maybe I wasn’t his child at all, and my adoptive father was also my biological father. He could have been the other person that knew about me until I could no longer be hidden. I see my mom looking back at me through the mirror everyday, but I also see hints of my step sisters. People who don’t know we aren’t related, are always surprised to find out that we’re not.

My mom told me when my biological father passed away, which often makes me feel that I was told the truth. There wouldn’t really be any reason for her to tell me that if he was absolutely no one to me. Since I never met him, I didn’t have much emotional reaction to the news, but it still meant that a part of my history was gone. My mom made a similar gesture at my grandmother’s funeral. While I was looking at the rows of flower arrangements, attempting to keep my composure, my mom leaned towards me and whispered in my ear,

“That’s your other grandmother.” We walked over to her, and my mom introduced me. My memory may very well be mistaken, but I believe that what my mom said to her was,

“This is my daughter, Kathy.” I don’t think that I was presented to her as her grand-daughter, which creates another question mark for me. The woman simply shook my hand, and said she was glad to meet me. I never saw her again.

I tend to believe that the most logical, easy answer is normally the right one. Eighteen years of hiding the truth has unfortunately made me continue to doubt it. Still being a bit unsure about who I am leaves me feeling just as hidden as that truth. I feel rejected by people I have never met. If they are my family, I feel that I’ve missed out on a life that could have turned out very differently. I try not to feel betrayed by the family that I did have, because they were doing what they thought was best for me. In my own mind, I can make both versions seem logical. Both versions also hurt me just as much. The same person I continued to question, is the only one with the answers.