I Might Have a Secret, or, Bet You Bastards Are Sorry You’re Not Following Me Now….

Here’s me and my dad when I am about four months old:

Which, if the woman I am meeting over Zoom tomorrow is my sister, would have made her about four years old then.

I have a younger sister:

And tomorrow I might meet my older sister.

My dad was a bit of a man-about-town, which I knew probably from the time I was about …. ten? I mean, as much as you know that kind of stuff when you’re ten. If we count all the times I knew, from say age four, that my mother was borderline murderously angry at my father, then there could be an entire Brady Bunch out there.

We knew my father’s mother was Irish, my father’s father, Pearce, British, my mother’s mother Irish with a little Scottish mixed in, and my mother’s father, Italian. A cousin or someone had told my sister there was a little French in there, so she had done Ancestry, confirming, oui, French, which I think makes us official European mutts, and, yes, there seems to be a sister. I was (in my head) bemoaning not being able to say brother from another mother, because I love stupid things and rhymes, when I realized I could say, sister from the same mister. Which is a very weird thing for me to think of, I think, in the circumstances, while also being exactly like me to think of. And there you go.

I am an adoptive mom, so if I have a sister out there who wishes to know me, she certainly should get to. It does bring up a lot of thoughts because I spent my entire childhood as a daddy’s girl, and there was another little girl out there. Hmmmm…. Complicated father-feelings, right? Was my dad aware? Was he letting another little girl grow up without him? As an adult who knew him (who is different from the little girl who knew him) I can imagine he would have done whatever he felt complicated his life the least. I’m so sorry not to be able to think there is a more stellar version of him who I can present to his daughter.

Well, tomorrow, we’ll see.