Email re: Mom's Hospitalization

Email from my dad dated July 26, 2006. This was one of the occasions that my mother was hospitalized. Based on the email below, my mother's reference to being hospitalized for dehydration in My Mother's Version of Events, and my memory, she was on some prescription medications (not sure which ones, but she had a history with muscle relaxants and sleeping pills long before this) that made her just sleep and not want to eat or drink anything. 

For reference, my parents were netting approximately $9k per month from my dad's disability and social security checks at this time.

 

Hey Sweetie, thought I'd get you up to date on happenings around here. First off, Happy Birthday. I sent you a present, I hope it was delivered ok. It should be there by now.

 

Well, Mom is out of the hospital now. Just nine days after being admitted. I really didn't expect her to get out that quickly, but without insurance, I guess they don't keep you very long.

 

They have her on some meds for depression, and her GU infection. She's supposed to see the doctor again Thursday, and begin outpatient physical therapy on Friday. Thing is, they also want her to see a shrink. How often these appointments will be, isn't known yet.

 

She can walk if she uses a walker, but when she first got home, she was still having your uncle help her. Today for the first time, she tried going to and from the bathroom without help from him, just using the walker. She managed to do it three times so far.

 

I know neither therapy is cheap, and we just can't afford to pay for it. We do have a little money saved in the checking account, but after paying all the back taxes and bills, it's not much. Now, we have one ambulance bill from before, and a new one left to pay. Not to mention whatever the hospital bill will be. I don't know if the doctors will bill separately. I was hoping after paying off all the back bills, we could save enough to pay the taxes at the end of the year, but I don't think that will be easy.

 

I went to the bank today, and opened a new account in my name only. Your Mother can't access it at any time, for any reason, unless I'm dead. I transferred some money to that account, so I could hopefully, do some saving from my social security check, and not have to worry about Annie draining the account.

 

The next time I'm at the bank, I will set it up so a certain amount of money will automatically be transferred from the old account each month as the main check comes in, and transferred to my new account. That way, there will always only be a steady amount in the old account, and your Mother will be less tempted to spend it.

 

I don't want to completely cut her off from the money, but I do want to have as much control over it as possible. I'm hoping that doing these things, will keep us from getting into the same situation we were in at the end of last year.

 

I'm getting her to eat, but only one hot dog a day, and some sliced peaches. If I can at least get her to eat every day, she might build up some energy and strength. This role reversal is very strange indeed.

 

Check ya later, Love, Dad...

Planning Dad's Funeral

My dad died at the end of July.  Dante didn’t want to have a funeral or memorial service.  He wanted to skip it all like my mother and her siblings did with their parents because it's easy and "no one will come anyway."  I didn't want to do it that way, partly because Dad had told me what he wanted and mostly because I didn't want to be as careless as my mother.  I told him I would come.  I told him about what Dad had said he wanted – just a small memorial service with Wes Montgomery’s jazz guitar rendition of “Willow Weep for Me” playing as a final send-off.  I would buy it off iTunes and have it on my phone.  It seemed easy enough, and when I die, I really don't want everyone washing their hands of me and pretending I never existed like my mom's family does.  

I had already researched crematoriums in my hometown back when Dad and I had discussed how much life insurance to keep, so I already had an idea of who to call and how much it would cost.  I gave the information I had to Dante so he could be point person, since he was still living in our hometown, and in Dad’s house no less.  I told him about Dad’s life insurance policy, how I was the beneficiary, and how the plan had been for us to split whatever remained after the cremation.  I told him I would give him my half in addition to his own if he would handle whatever needed handling and not make me do anything.  It didn't sound like Dante has a job right now, and he will have to find somewhere to live when the bank forecloses on Dad’s house.  I knew he needed the money more than I did, and I wanted the convenience of not being Dad’s next of kin for whatever needs handling more than I wanted anything else.

My best friend put me in touch with her mother, who has been something of a mother figure for me since I was a teenager.  She is kind and good at logistical dilemmas I would otherwise have to handle alone.  She gave me contact information for an estate attorney and an accountant, in case we (read: Dante) should need them.  She told me everything that she had to do when her own dad died and left her his farm in another state and how she divided up assets for her siblings.  I thankfully wouldn’t have to do most of that because my dad left behind significantly more debt than assets.

Dad died in the hospital across the state, a four hour drive away.  I told Dante I would be driving to our hometown with my husband and daughter in two days, when we estimated the body should be back in our hometown and ready for cremation and the memorial service.  My daughter had a surgery scheduled for the following week, so I wanted to get everything done and get back home.  Dante was calling our Dad’s brother, who told his sister and mother.  They were the last of Dad's family.  We hadn't been entirely sure our grandmother was still alive until that point.  

I would tell my mom’s side of the family -- a few cousins and an aunt by marriage -- less because I thought they cared about my dad and more because he was my dad and I wanted to tell them.  I knew they would be kind.  Dante asked me to pass along his cell phone number so that he might be able to get back in touch with them.  He said he’d been cutting himself off and losing contact with people for years.  He had just recently been coming out of a depression, he said.  He didn’t want to relapse.

“Is Mom still at Butterfly Glen?” I asked him.  “Are you still on speaking terms with her?  I don’t think anyone else in the family is.”

“She’s still there,” Dante replied.  “I visited her on Mother’s Day.  I wouldn’t call it ‘speaking terms’ though.  She didn’t really talk while I was there.”  He described how the people at Butterfly Glen keep her heavily sedated.  “I guess we weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to deal with her.”

I asked Dante not to tell Mom yet about Dad dying.  They’d been divorced for ten years and hated each other for at least thirty, so the only reasons I felt she would benefit from knowing were because her spousal support – 100% of her income – would be coming to an end, and because she might be able to use her ex-husband's death to get attention.  “It’s not the end of the world if I have to see her, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer not to, and we’d need a contingency plan for what she might do if she showed up at the service.  I'd rather she not know until I've left town.”

“I already called and left a message, but I haven’t told her yet,” he replied.  “It’s fine with me.  I don’t think anyone wants her there anyway.”  And that was that.

I drove my husband and daughter the seven hours back to my hometown.  I answered calls from Dante each day as he looked for another form or document he needed that seemed to have vanished in the hoard.  He’d found a metal lockbox, but it had gotten wet inside and seemed to permanently smell.  He emailed me the form to collect Dad’s life insurance.  I emailed him an obituary I wrote.  He’d been calling the VA and the crematorium every day, and he finally got the VA to say they would cover the cost of transporting Dad's body back across the state and the crematorium to agree to an early Sunday morning service.  I would have to extend my stay to a sixth day, but it was okay.  There was still a two day buffer before my daughter's surgery.

I spent most of my days in Cincinnati trying to keep my daughter entertained.  Our hotel had a pool, so my husband took her swimming every day, and sometimes I joined them.  Sometimes I stayed behind in the hotel room and watched "Gossip Girl" on my phone until I forgot where I was.  We walked around the local malls and went to lots of restaurants while I fielded logistical calls from Dante.  He asked if I thought Dad had a will and where did I think it might be.  I told him I was 95% sure neither of our parents had ever had wills.  It would have required them to do something.  Since they had more debt than assets, I had always planned to walk away from everything and let it be sold for parts, or whatever happens when you die owing people money.  I think that was Dad’s plan for me too.  I'm not sure what Dante's plan had been since his life had remained tied up with Dad's.  

Dante was freaking out a little bit.  A friend had told him the house would be taken within twelve days of the death of the person on the mortgage since there was no will leaving it to anyone.  The bank would put a lock on the door and he would be homeless.  I told him Mom was still on the mortgage even though she wasn’t on the deed anymore, so maybe they would go after her for the money instead.  I couldn’t find a copy of the deed without Mom on it, but I knew details from the divorce.  I wondered quietly to myself if Mom might try to retake the house. 

Dante asked if I thought he should stop paying the mortgage and the bills.  I told him that’s what I would do.  I told him the bank likely wouldn’t move to foreclose until he’d missed at a least a few months of payments, so I would stop payment on everything but utilities, stay put until the bank at least started sending threatening letters, and save whatever money he could for a new apartment.  He said he’d been cancelling our dad’s magazine subscriptions.  He had so many.   I warned Dante that the VA might not stop Dad's monthly checks right away and that, if they paid him something after his death, they would realize their mistake and demand it back in a few months.  It was the same thing that had happened every time he moved back into the hospital or the nursing home -- his check got reduced retroactively, and he was expected to pay them back thousands of dollars.  If this happened for three or four months like it did before, they would be expecting tens of thousands of dollars back.  I warned Dante not to spend the money from Dad's checking account in case this happened.  He replied, "Well, they better not do that then."


Cincinnati was a long trip.  It was the first time I'd been to my hometown in six years.  I spent as much time with my best friend and her family as possible.  My birthday happened while we were there, so my best friend and her mother and sister and boyfriend all joined us for lunch the day before the memorial service.  It was nice.  There were even presents.  If you have to deal with a parent's death, make sure to do it in the town where your best friend lives.  It makes everything so much better.

The morning of the memorial service, my daughter was supposed to stay with my best friend's mom and sister while my best friend, my husband, and I went to the service.  Then we'd all go out for lunch.  But my daughter started running a fever the night before and wasn't better by that morning.  I asked my husband to stay with her in the hotel room while my best friend and her family and I went to the service together.  We made up half the attendees.  My brother arrived shortly after me, and that's when the man who runs the crematorium welcomed us, showed us around, and said our dad's body should be arriving in two more days.

My Adopted Brother

Dante's adoption anniversary is the anniversary of the day our parents -- my mother and social father -- finalized his adoption in court.  He was two months old and had lived with our parents since he was strong enough to leave the hospital.   

Every year we celebrated Dante's anniversary by going out with our mother's extended family -- our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and many cousins -- first out for lunch at Pizza Hut and then to a movie or the bowling alley and ice skating rink.  I loved spending the day with my cousins, almost all of whom were local and spent every major holiday with us, including nearly a dozen family birthday parties throughout the year.  But I was jealous that Dante had an anniversary and I didn't.  It was almost like getting a second birthday party every year, even if there weren't presents.  I was jealous of Dante a lot, any time he got something I didn't, any time I felt things weren't equal.  I think that's a pretty typical kid reaction to perceived unfairness.

When my mother told me I was donor conceived and immediately told me I could never tell another soul, including my dad or Dante, it cast Dante's adoption anniversary in a weird light for me.  Why was his adoption, or the fact that our parents weren't biologically related to him, deserving of a party, while what I saw as a similar facet of my own identity -- being biologically descended from a secret parent outside our family -- was a dark secret?  It didn't seem fair at all.

In hindsight, I think my mother was just doing what had she had been told to do (except for the telling me I am donor conceived part).  Tell adopted children where they came from (to the extent that you know).  Celebrate them.  Tell them they are "special" and "chosen."  That was where adoption had gotten to when Dante was born.  Never tell children they are donor conceived.  Never tell anyone where the donor conceived children came from.  If anyone knows the truth, the intended father will reject the child and the child won't respect him as its parent.  That was where donor conception had gotten to when I was born.  "For god's sake, tell your child," has been the prevailing wisdom since the '90s, but when I was conceived, secrecy was king.  Adoptions used to be dark secrets too, so it seems to me the prevailing wisdom of "what to tell the children" is a couple decades behind for donor conception simply because it's a newer phenomenon. 

It seemed bizarre to me to treat us so differently when the goal was apparently to treat us both "as their own children."  But the prevailing wisdom of the day was dramatically different for our individual circumstances, no matter how similar those circumstances appeared in my mind.  Secret parents.  God knows how many siblings.  Falsified birth certificates.  The wondering.  The perpetual unknown.  His unknown was twice as big as mine, but my secret was darker.  It seemed we had a lot in common, but I wasn't allowed to tell him so.

I'm not jealous of Dante anymore, or of the fact that he got an extra annual party.  I'm not even sure he liked those parties.  He never talked to me or our parents about being adopted or how he felt about it.  It might have meant nothing to him or he might have been broken up inside.  There was no way to know because we weren't close.  We weren't close, and our house wasn't a safe place to talk about such things.  Had he dared to bring up the topic of his birth parents, even if it was just to express a curiosity in who they were, I can only imagine how our mother would have retaliated.

I can only remember my mother bringing up the topic of Dante's birth parents in my presence two times.  I remember her telling Dante that his mother had been 15 and was impregnated by a man whose children she had been babysitting.  I don't know if any of this was true, nor if it was "consensual," to the extent that sex with a 15-year-old can be consensual.  It struck me as a way for my mother to tell Dante that she was better than his birth parents.  Period.  The "slut" insinuation was there.  I'd like to say I imagined it, but as far as I could tell, my mother tended to view any sexually active woman as a slut who "had it coming," even if she was a child or married.  The only other time I remember my mother mentioning Dante's birth parents was once when he wanted money for something in his teens or early twenties.  She'd sneered at him, "Why don't you go find your REAL parents?  Maybe they'll have some money for you."  It had the desired effect of shutting him up.

I remember once prattling away in the living room as a child and accidentally saying "my mom" instead of just "Mom."  Dante and our parents were the only people to whom I called her "Mom" instead of "my mom," so it seemed like a natural slip up to me, but my mother cut me off and laid into me.  "How dare you?" she screamed.  "I'm as much his mother as I am yours!"  I'd never thought she wasn't.  She'd favored Dante for most of my life.  When he hadn't recently done something to prompt her to turn on him viciously, he was the one she chose for her team while I was left out in the cold with our dad.  I knew how things worked at our house.  I hadn't been trying to insinuate that the only brother I'd ever known wasn't a part of our awful family.  He'd been a part of it for longer than I had.  Still she blanketed me in shame.  It feels strange to feel so sure I had made an innocent slip of the tongue with no deeper meaning behind it and to also feel so deeply ashamed for it.  Maybe that's what good parents are supposed to do though -- defend their children against the perceived slights of others.  It was confusing whenever I became one of those "others."

I wish Dante had known I was donor conceived.  I don't believe it's harder than being adopted (or even as hard most of the time, depending on the family and the surrounding circumstances -- half the unknown = half the trouble?), but it's another way of being different, of being "other."  It's something we sort of had in common.  We don't relate to each other at all, and yet I imagine he must've felt like as much of an outsider in that house as I did.  I felt like an outsider years before I knew I was donor conceived.  I remember being in preschool and thinking I must've been secretly adopted.  I thought I had both a mom and a dad out there in the world somewhere -- people who would understand me and make everything make sense.

I wish Dante knew that I wasn't as favored or as belonging as he seemed to think I was.  As jealous as I was of him (sometimes childishly, sometimes with good reason), I could see that he was treated unfairly, especially by our dad.  And that, as often as our mother gave him an undeserved pass on his bad behavior, she sometimes said terrible things he didn't deserve either.  Did he ever see when I was treated unfairly?  Did he recognize how hard I tried to keep them happy?  Did it ever occur to him that his abuse made my life harder and scarier?  Could he care? 

I wish he knew that it wasn't always just him on the outside being mistreated like he seemed to think.  Nothing there was fair, and neither of us was the full-time golden child.  If he hadn't been a psychopath, we might have been friends.  It would have been nice to have a friend in that house.

Dante is still in that house.  I almost said "stuck in that house," but I suspect that's not how he sees it.  Every time he left -- usually because our mother had kicked him out -- he gravitated back.  When she finally moved out after the divorce, when he was in his mid-thirties, he left his apartment and independent adult life to move back into his childhood bedroom.  Why?  He brought his girlfriend and her son with him, but still, why?  Why would anyone live in that awful, dilapidated house by choice?  And now he lives there with our dad, the person who always treated him the most cruelly.  I don't envy Dante anymore.  He might be happier than me -- I honestly have no idea -- but I could never live the way he lives.  We are too different.  I have never been able to understand him. 

I don't know what effect being adopted has had on him.  No ones knows.  There isn't a "control" version of Dante who isn't adopted with whom to compare him.  I don't know how he might or might not have been different had he been raised by his birth mother, or by more functional adoptive parents for that matter.  This post isn't really about that.  I guess what I mean for it to be about is that you can't predict how someone will feel about being adopted or react to being adopted, and I don't think there is a way to undo the fact that someone is adopted simply by throwing them a party and calling them "special."  And just because you love an adopted family member like they're blood and treat them like blood and genuinely feel like they're your flesh and blood doesn't mean they don't still feel adopted (or donor conceived, as the case may be).  And that's okay.  It'll be more okay if you can let them feel it without taking it personally or trying to make them feel something else.  That's what I think anyway.  I can't speak for anyone else.

A Minor DC Discovery

I had my birth certificate out the other day because of bank-related nonsense.  As I was putting it away, back in the lock box with the passports and the social security cards and the letter from my sperm donor father, a familiar name caught my eye.  The doctor who delivered me was the same doctor who had inseminated my mother.  I don't mean my biological father.  I mean he was the man who is now known for having impregnated patients with medical student sperm.  I learned his name from another local DC person long after the last time I'd look at my birth certificate.  I don't know why it surprised me.  I guess I had assumed he had been something more than a run-of-the-mill obstetrician and that he wouldn't do prenatal checkups or deliver babies.  Impregnating women with donor sperm doesn't require a medical mastermind, but I'd assumed he'd specialized in infertility.  I'd assumed he treated... something.

I wonder if the same doctor delivered Hans.  I was conceived the semester our father started medical school.  Hans was born the semester that he graduated.  It doesn't matter.  I'm just grasping at things we might have in common.  I wonder if Hans and I have ever known someone in common.  I wonder if my father and I have ever unwittingly been in the same building at the same time.  I never thought about these things before I knew who he was.  Then I thought how likely it was.  

I wonder if any medical student anonymous sperm donor has ever examined a woman carrying his child, or been present for the birth of his own child.  It didn't happen to me because first years don't see patients, but what if someone donated as a third year or fourth year?  Third and fourth years see patients.  If a medical student had his obstetrics and gynecology rotation when a patient or four were gestating his offspring, it seems like there would be a decent chance he might see one of them.  He could see one of those patients or possibly even be present for the birth of his own offspring and, based on the secrecy and alleged lack of record keeping at the hospital where I was created, there would be no way he or anyone else would ever know.   

"I Wish SHE Were My Daughter"

When I was in college, my high school friend Allie told me she and her sisters had saved up $10,000 over the years from the monthly allowance their parents gave them, and they were giving it to their mother for her birthday.  She had been wanting to re-carpet the house or something she considered frivolous, so they were stipulating that she had to spend it on something frivolous and couldn't spend it paying bills.  When this news got back to my mother, she caught my eye and told me pointedly, "I wish ALLIE were my daughter."

I don't remember being offended by the comment or taking it personally.  It was sort of typical of my mother.  She may as well have said, "I'm hoping to guilt you into giving me money."  I also knew Allie and her sisters all received substantially more in allowance than my parents had ever given me and that, had Allie been my mother's daughter, she would have had nothing to give her.  Knowing that helped. 

Homemade Gifts

When I was little, I used to make my family members gifts for holidays and their birthdays.  I think this is pretty typical for small children with zero income.  The stress that came from giving my mother gifts started when I was too young to remember.  If I drew a picture, she tended to mention how much better at drawing Dante had been than me even as a small child.  When I stopped drawing pictures and took to just coloring straight lines and shapes in the hopes of avoiding criticism, she told me my drawings were boring and that no one wanted to look at brightly colored lines.  Again, she would point to Dante's drawings (literally) as an example of what was good.  I could copy what he'd drawn at my age easily enough -- such things were still on my grandmother's refrigerator seven years later (hence the literal pointing) -- but doing anything Dante had done first was considered boring too. 

In school around the holidays, we often made things like "pencil holders" by decorating old tin cans, which I would eagerly offer up and my mother would accept with the sarcastic reply, "Great.  Another pencil can."  (It's not like she had more than she could use either.  Do you have any idea how many pencils you can find in a hoard house?  They are infinite.) 

When I learned to sew in elementary school and took to sewing and embroidering small throw pillows because it was all I knew how to make from the tiny scraps of fabric I could get my hands on, they prompted a disparaging snort and the similar response, "Great.  Another pillow."  That was around the time I started saving up all my birthday and Christmas money to buy proper gifts for my family.  I knew only babies made homemade gifts and that no one liked them anyway.  That point was very clear at my house.  That was the year my mother ridiculed me for buying her gifts at the Dollar Store.  It was around the same time Dante started stealing from me.  Childhood is the worst.

Why Doesn't Juliana Look Like Her Parents?

One of my fears leading up to my daughter's birth was that she would accidentally be switched in the hospital and I would only realize it after months or years, when I'd have to decide whether to continue raising the baby I knew or to trade her for my biological baby who grew in my womb.  That sounds like a terrifying sort of Sophie's Choice to me, and people like to make TV shows and movies about it, so I worried about it.  As far as I can tell, newborn babies look more like each other than they resemble their parents, so I spent the first few weeks of Eliza's life staring into her tiny alien face, looking for someone familiar.  Thankfully, after a few weeks, she started to resemble both my husband and myself, and my worries abated.  Sometimes people say, "She looks exactly like Michael," but people most often say, "She looks like a perfect blend of her mom and dad!" 

No one says that about Juliana.

Juliana was born the same year as Eliza.  She is the daughter of my college friends Julio and Isabella.  Julio and Isabella look a lot alike, with the same medium pink complexion and dark brown eyes and dark brown hair, so it came as a surprise to their Facebook friends (and probably their families, but I only see their exchanges on Facebook) when they started posting photos of the startlingly pale Juliana.  "She's beautiful, Julio!  Whose eyes are those?" people asked, referring to the bright blue color that never faded to brown.  "Love those golden curls!  Where did she get that hair?" they continue to post.  Julio doesn't acknowledge the questions except to occasionally post links to articles explaining how two brown-eyed people can have a blue-eyed child. 

He is right, of course.  Genetics is far more complex than our seventh grade science classes led us to believe.  It is entirely possible for two brown-eyed people to have a blue-eyed child.  Still, if there is one thing I've learned from being donor conceived, it's that children inherit features from their parents.  When they look nothing like one or both parents, there tends to be a reason.  And Juliana looks nothing like her parents. 

Here are all the possibilities that went through my head:

1) Maybe they used a sperm donor.  After all, Isabella has curly hair too, and Juliana smiles sort of like her.  They don't look particularly related, but that doesn't mean they aren't. 

2) An affair?  I don't believe this though.  I include it in the list because it's possible in the most literal sense of the word, but I give it a 0.5% likelihood tops.

3) Maybe Julio and Isabella used IVF and used gamete donors or "embryo adoption," or one of their gametes or the entire embryo got switched with someone else's.  I would put more weight behind this possibility if it had taken longer after their wedding for them to get pregnant.  I currently have no reason to believe they used IVF at all.

4) Maybe Juliana was switched with another baby at the hospital.  ::shudder::

5) Maybe a variety of mutations and long dormant traits have caused Juliana to look different from her parents, despite being their biological daughter.  She doesn't appear to have any sort of albinism, but something like that might at least explain the difference in coloring, though not the difference in her other features.

About a year and a half ago, Julio and Isabella announced that they were expecting their second child.  I waited anxiously to see what she would look like in a way I wouldn't admit to people I know in real life.  I wonder if anyone else was doing the same.  If she resembled Juliana, I felt I could rule out the "switched at birth" scenario, which I personally think is the most scary and upsetting.  If she looked like Juliana, either they were using a donor who was passing on a lot of physical characteristics, or they were somehow passing their long dormant traits along themselves.  Though I admit "long dormant traits" are something I stopped believing in when I found photos of my biological father.

Emilia was born a few months ago.  She is beautiful.  She has both her parents' dark brown hair and eyes.  Her face looks so much like a tiny, fat version of Julio's that it makes me laugh.  There is no question of who her parents are or where she inherited her features.  Juliana stands out more than ever now. 

As much as I wonder what the truth is behind how Juliana came to be Juliana, I hope she doesn't take a DNA test before she is eighteen because I feel 86% certain Julio and Isabella are not her biological parents, and I feel 75% sure they believe they are, in spite of any nagging thoughts that might linger at the backs of their minds, and nagging questions from oblivious and sometimes tactless friends on Facebook.  I am afraid there is another little girl who was born on or around the same day at that same hospital in Queens, who has beautiful dark brown eyes and hair and doesn't blend in with any of the strawberry blond, Irish-looking people in her family.  And I hope none of those parents have to come to terms with the realization that their biological daughter -- the one who inherited their looks and some of their personality and some of their mannerisms and intelligence -- is living in someone else's home and calling someone else "Mommy."  If there were such another little girl and they found out she existed, then all the parents involved would have to figure out what to do about that.  At eighteen, I feel like the girls will be grown and probably in college and able to associate with whomever they choose -- ideally all four of their parents.  It wouldn't make coming to terms with the truth any easier for them -- harder probably, based on every person I know who has found out hidden truths about their parentage -- but at least it would be more an existential problem than a logistical one at that point.

Of course, if she is DC and they are simply hiding it from everyone, I hope she finds out sooner rather than later.  Because if there isn't another little girl in another house, there won't be the question of where Juliana will live or who her "real" parents are, even if Julio and Isabella aren't biologically related to her.  If she is donor conceived, Juliana will have to deal with the brunt of that reality alone because she is the only one who will have lost family in that equation.

Unless of course the IVF accidental embryo switch scenario is the one that happened, in which case Julio and Isabella's biological child might exist somewhere else, born sometime else to someone else, and they will never find her or even know if she exists unless she takes a mass market DNA test.  Now I can't decide which scenario sounds worse. 

Happy Birthday To You

My parents stopped giving me birthday and Christmas gifts when I was in my 20s, and I'm not entirely sure why.  With my mother, it was a blessing, partly because I couldn't say "thank you" enough times or in enough ways to prevent her getting angry and yelling at me for being ungrateful.  It was also a blessing because the things she'd sent me were crazy -- mostly heavy boxes full of random crap she had bought on sale or in the Target dollar aisle.  Sometimes there were small toys intended for small children, which seemed to be how she still saw me.  My mother stopped acknowledging my birthday (or any holidays) about a year before I ceased contact with her, and about six months before I stopped acknowledging hers.  This may have been an intended slight on her part, but it was just as likely a side effect of being depressed and so mentally inept that she didn't acknowledge much of anything.

The last time my dad (social, non-bio father) gave me a gift was later, just before my daughter was born.  I don't know if he has some kind of belief that people with kids are too old to receive gifts (though I was sending *him* gifts until a year after that) or if I'd unwittingly upset him somehow, or if he felt slighted by my daughter's existence, or why he stopped sending me anything -- I have an Amazon wish list after all, and it requires very little thought to select something off of it like he previously had -- but that was the last time I received anything from either of my parents. 

I realized a couple years ago that the only way to maintain a relationship with my dad without resenting him was if I stopped putting more energy in than I was getting back out.  I quickly learned that that meant putting no thought or energy whatsoever into our relationship.  He wanted me to do him favors, handle his finances, be his emergency contact on all his paperwork, but he wouldn't call me.  He wouldn't email me unless I emailed him first, and our emails centered around whatever personal complaints he had and whatever he'd been watching on TV.  If I said something about my daughter, his only grandchild, he usually ignored it.  If I said something about my life or my interests, he usually ignored it.  I told him I was happy to help him out but that I wanted him to start prefacing his requests with, "How are you?" or "How is the baby?" and that it hurt my feelings that he didn't acknowledge her, or me really.  He said he understood and would do better, but nothing changed. 

That was when I made him take over his own finances.  There was no reason he couldn't manage them himself anyway, beyond the fact that he never had.  I stopped giving him personal information since he didn't acknowledge it, and I stopped asking him questions in my emails because I didn't see the need to keep drawing out the conversations about TV shows I'd never seen and foods he currently hates.  I just responded to the things he said and the (very rare) questions.  I tried not to take his lack of interest in me personally and instead looked at our exchanges like an anthropological study.  Our communication tapered off. 

Now I acknowledge his birthday and Father's Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas with a "Happy [Holiday], Dad!" email in which that line is both the subject and the entirety of the body.  I can do that without thinking about it, so I'm willing to put in that much effort, at least for now. 

For my birthday this year, he sent me the following email:

"Happy Birthday!  At least you're still young enough to enjoy it."

I replied, "Thanks!"

This is the relationship I used to wish I could have with my mother, when I still bothered wishing for anything in regard to her.