To the Late Mother Who Gave Me Away

I hate to start on a selfish note, but I really do feel like I was cheated here, cheated out of some grand emotional moment that was my due. After six years of digging through filing cabinets, rereading the same legal documents ad nauseum, tracking down notaries and sending off papers that just got sent back to me...for all that to end in nothing feels wrong.

Maybe I'm just a little too fixated on the dramatic sentimentality of it all. I can picture the whole mess, as vividly as any true memory I have: The awkward letter exchange leading to even more awkward phone calls, leading to that tear-streaked Hollywood reunion. And then what? It's easy to relish that one beautiful moment, but what happens in the scene that follows?

Nearly fifteen years I've had to deal with this. I thought I had, but lately I'm not so sure.

Let me address a few things from your letter, though - which I did find, albeit later than you had requested. First, and let there be no ambiguity here: I have never held any ill will towards you. Some of the ignoramuses in my orbit may have talked about you "abandoning" me, but I always corrected them on the point. This was love, and love is painful.

I know a little about that myself, you know. I had to give someone up - a boy who was very much like a son to me. It's been four years since I've seen him, and I'll probably never see him again. If I do, he won't remember me. I'd like to think that I've had time to deal with that, too.

Have I been repeating your mistakes? I guess it's just in the blood.

I've read a little about you and your life, and it seems like we were very much alike. - but then you knew that, didn't you? I suppose mothers always know. And because we are so much alike, I can't help but think that your past was a mirror to my future. That thinking is a little mystical for me, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

That's why I shouldn't have quit so fast after I found that SSDI file. Six years I spent chasing a ghost, and then I quit because I know I'd never catch it. But there were others, weren't there? There were your parents, for one. They'd lost a daughter, but then with a single call, they could have regained a grandson. Why didn't I call them? And, once upon a time, I had my father's name - couldn't I at least have held on to that?

I guess I was just trying to move on in my own way. I didn't weep when I found out - I just felt something depart from me. But, ultimately, I'd solved the mystery, the puzzle I'd been working on for so many years. And so many things were changing. I was about to move overseas, and what happened in my first year became part of a brand new puzzle that would swallow up every second of my time.

Even so, don't think for a moment that I forgot about you. That letter? I took it with me. It's been on a few trips over the Pacific Ocean now, and some interstate trips to boot. God help me, I'm just not comfortable unless I know that I can rest my hands on it. I seldom read it anymore - it doesn't steal my breath like it did the first time I read it - but it is still a fragment of my past, and I don't think I'll ever be without it.

And so I've returned to that puzzle from my youth, this time trying to untangle your life from when we parted to when you left for good. It was thrilling before, back when I still imagined it would lead to a moment - now it's more of a duty, a thing I owe to myself no matter how painful it may be. Because I might have been robbed of that moment, but instead I was given a mystery - so maybe, in the end, I wasn't cheated.

For all of this, I thank you.