So, Who Are We Now?

Do you know how baseball players in movies and TV shows have 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.

It does in fact take two to tango. Though I guess since they usually keep the children with them, many times they just end up “single Mothers.” That’s what I called my grandmother for many years, strong, a single mother. That wasn’t the whole story though.

This is unfortunately a concept that I have known about ever since I can remember. 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, my mother gained an aunt and under her cousins etc.

Then, several years later, they all found that they had more siblings and cousins than they had previously imagined. 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, bringing 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.

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. I want to say thankfully, since there are other stories you hear, about long-lost relatives accidentally ending up married because of this exact thing.

So 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. I think we lived in Florida at this time, but time is kind of warpy for me.

The last round was a slight mix-up of the other rounds, while three of the instances were one partner, my great-grandfather making extra families, the new one was (or was related to) a secret child of my great-grandmother (who had at that time recently passed away) that she gave away.

This child wasn’t the youngest, or the oldest, in fact, my great-aunt was the most shocked of anyone to find she had a sister she didn’t know about, who was apparently born while she was alive. We still don’t know many of the details on that one, at least I don’t. I believe my family had already moved all the way to California and I was an adult for this.

So if I have gone through this so much and so often (relatively often) why is the newest of the events hanging me up? My brother 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 of liver cancer in 06. He was letting me know for health purposes. 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.

My grandmother has always kept 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 her anymore, but this would be one of the few things she is blamed for I wouldn’t blame her for. So it isn’t shocking to find out there were more secrets to be had, but it is hurtful.

My grandmother talked a whole boatload of trash about the man she was married to, the person she claimed up and down was my dad’s biological father. I am not in the know, I have none of the details, and I am making wild assumptions and leaps of logic here based on what little I remember, but could this have all been to cover over her own transgressions? Were they at least equally cheaters?

The world will never know, 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 like deciding to go by my middle name didn’t actually change anything, but somehow it 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 which there was a number, was good to her sons and they called 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 had been coming to realize that they 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 the 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 fairer than my brother’s.

That is basically what it amounted to) 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 didn’t even have my glasses yet. I was literally legally blind, what did I know?

K.B. Silver