Things That Have Happened in the Last Year

I didn't realize it had been nearly a year since my last post.  Between then and now I've met my paternal half-brother Hans and his wife and young son.  I rejoined Facebook after a 2+ year hiatus, reconnecting me with my paternal half-sister Simone, the paternal first cousin once removed who orchestrated the Von Trapp family reunion, and my various maternal relations who I only ever communicate with on there.  Apparently no one was avoiding me; they just don't bother replying to emails.

No new half-siblings, leaving the donor conceived sibling count at zero.  No new word from my adoptive brother Dante or any other family.  I haven't heard from Dante since 2017 after I wired him our dad's life insurance payout.  I thought he might've friended our cousins on Facebook since he'd said when Dad died that he wanted to get back in touch with them, but the only thing I can see that he he has done on Facebook since then is join a group from our hometown, get into some internet fights with locals, get banned from the group, and then post that he has no idea why he was banned and they're all just too cliquey.  Now that's the Dante I remember.

No new word from my biological father.  No direct communication since he asked me not to contact him again after receiving my letter in 2014.

I can't remember if I wrote about discovering on Newspapers.com that my dad's father had another family and a well documented criminal record (thank you, Fresno Bee) before he moved back to the Midwest and married Grandma.  And thus my dad had a secret half-brother he may or may not have known about.  I emailed Dante about it but got no response.  The half-brother died a few years before my dad did and had no known biological children.  He had been named after my grandpa, but his stepfather had adopted him when he was little and given him a new surname.  I'd like to ask my dad's brother and sister if they knew about the secret half-brother, but I haven't seen my uncle since Dad's funeral or my aunt since my wedding over a decade ago.  I could probably count on my hands the number of times I've talked to them in my life, so reaching out for this would be more awkward than I'm willing to do.

My mom's suspected half-sister's daughter took a DNA test, confirming my grandpa was, in fact, her grandfather too.  I thought I'd written about my mom's secret half-sister/cousin, but I can't find it anywhere but here.  My cousin Michelle and I had started to doubt the veracity of the claim that Grandpa had fathered Ruby shortly before Ruby's mother had married his half-brother.  It was the big family "secret" all the cousins knew.  Ruby's daughter showed up as a first cousin match for me on 23andMe though, which is way too close a match for us to be half-second cousins (we share more than triple the DNA I share with my known half-second cousins on AncestryDNA -- the ones who should be her first cousins but aren't), so I know for sure now that we're actually half-first cousins.  We chatted on 23andMe a bit.  She asked after my (our) remaining uncle, Eugene, who neither of us has heard from in years.  I assume she knows as well as any of us who her grandfather is, but since I'd never talked to her or her mother (my half-aunt) before in my life and I don't know how their branch of the family feels about any of this, we never got onto the topic of biological grandfathers.  I wish I knew a polite and inoffensive way to say, "I've seen some wonky shit on here and I'm comfortable talking about anything you want to talk about.  You won't upend my world; I just don't want to upend yours either."

Excerpts about Mom from Grandma's Letters

I went back through the old letters from Grandma that my cousin Michelle lent me.  I copied down all the excerpts about my mother starting with her strange behavior, which I remember kicking up in 2002 shortly after my uncle's death, but which Grandma didn't start writing about until my mother stopped talking or eating for spans of time in 2004.  No drugs are mentioned by name.  Here's what she said:

Aug 24, 2004
Annie [my mom] still isn't doing very well.  What I can't get used to is that she doesn't talk to me. We can spend the whole day together, & she won't say 10 words all day. I know there are a lot of things bothering her, but I have never seen her like this. I guess part of it is a let down from all the years Chrissy [myself] was in school, & now that she is graduated she is making a life for herself miles away. Part of it is Paul [my dad, Annie's husband]. Part of it is physical, & part of it may be menopause. Beats me.

Since I had a full abdominal hysterectomy in '74, I don't know what she is going through. And I said at the time it was a shame, since I had planned to be a flaming bitch!

sept. 4, 2004

Annie isn't any better. She forces herself to take me out shopping on tues., but we can spend all day together & she doesn't say ten words. I can't get used to that.

sept 11, 2004

Annie isn't any better. In the "better late than never" category, now Paul and Chrissy have decided to be very concerned. Last Tues. morning she called and just said "I can't make it today."  I knew last week that she was just forcing herself to take me out. This time she admitted defeat, & stayed home. When Paul found out about it he called me, full of concern. I wished I'd had the nerve to tell him that he could help the situation if he would quit calling her a stupid, fat bitch, & pointing out to her that she has no friends. But I knew that would just cause more trouble, so I bit my tongue. I've done a lot of that in the 33 years they have been married. 

Then thurs. night Chrissy called, which is the first time that has happened since she went away to New York, in 2000. She had called & got the same one word comments from Annie that I have been getting for weeks.  Paul had told me that she sleeps 20 hours a day & that she has stopped eating. Chrissy is "worried sick."

I really think Annie is overmedicated, I know she is very bitter that she doesn't have a good relationship with either of her children, & there has been a real let down, since Chrissy graduated college & decided to live on the East coast. She is menopausal, & Paul can be as mean as a snake. All of these factors are a part of Annie's depression.

The same night Chrissy called, Grandpa insisted that I call Annie. When I was talking to her he said, "Do you need to be detoxed?" loud enough for her to hear it. I think it startled her & she seemed better after that. Asked how his appointment with the doctor went, & that is the first time she has initiated a conversation in weeks. Fri she took me to the grocery store & she did seem a little more like herself. 

sept 30, 2004

Don't want to jinx it, but I think Annie is starting to turn the corner. She talks more & even initiates topics of conversation. Still not going to church, but I take improvement where I can see it. We don't "do lunch" but the last three Tues. we have stopped at Wendy's for Jr. Frosties. The first week she only ate about half, the next week she ate two thirds, and this week she ate it all. Also she made it clear through Wal-Mart without breaking into a sweat. Keep praying for her.

Don't know how Chrissy is doing, since communications between her & Annie have broken down. [I'll have to look up my old emails to see what was going on at this time.  I can't remember "communications" ever "breaking down," just occasional respites from her calling to say I'm a bitch.]

oct 6, 2004

Annie and I went out shopping yesterday. She ate all of her frosty & was fairly talkative. I notice a difference in how she drives. She used to do it so naturally, like it was second nature. Now she grips the steering wheel tightly. Spends a lot more concentration before she backs out of a parking space, & seems tentative in a way. We come back out of Mason on a narrow stretch of road. End up to turn onto I-71 at Unity. Yesterday as we were getting ready to go off to the right, the car behind us came whipping around, on our right side, & could easily have caused a bad wreck! I made a remark about it & she said he didn't like the way she was driving. That surprised me & I said well, what was there not to like, she was driving in a perfectly straight line. She said she guessed she wasn't going fast enough to suit him, that he had been riding her tail-end ever since we turned onto that stretch.

Chrissy must think she is better -- she called whining & complaining about her job! She has an office now, but says they expect her to get way too many things done, & if they don't get her some help, she may have to quit this job. Our mantra has always been "don't quit your job unless you have another one lined up!"  

oct 13, 2004

Annie is doing better. She's talking more. Got her hair cut. 

dec 29, 2004

Annie seems some better. Yesterday was the first time in months that she wanted to eat an actual lunch. For many weeks we settled for a stop at Wendy's on the way into Mason. She would get a Jr. Frosty, I added a jr. cheeseburger to mine. Then when it got cold, we would go to Chilli's for plain water & a bowl of broccoli/cheese soup. Yesterday she suggested 91st Street Bar & grill for potato skins & stuffed mushrooms!

jan 5, 2005

I do think Annie is a little better. Last week she suggested we eat at 91st St bar & grill. Yesterday she said we should have just gone to Patrikio's to start with. We know they have good enchiladas, but knew we were under a time constraint because of the weather, & Patrikio's is over in KY. She has been in touch with the two people from her class at Cincy CC that she spent a lot of time with. I will know she is better when she comes back to church, she hasn't been to church since the first of July. Did you know she has lost 70 lbs?

jan 26, 2005

Praise God, I feel like Annie is finally coming back to normal!! Her appetite is back, & she is talking to me again. Starting to take care of some problems & take an interest in the world. Her main concern right now, is that she is losing her hair -- by the handfuls! Chrissy lost the gas cap off her car when she was home for Thanksgiving. I tried not to nag her about getting a replacement, but knew it needed to be done. Yesterday she finally bought a new cap. Grandpa had told me to pick up another bottle of "Heet" when she handed it to me, she asked what it was for. When I told her it would take any moisture out of the gas tank, she said maybe she better get some too. She also bought a gallon jug of windshield fluid. 

Feb 9, 2005

By the time we left walmart the snow had started. We started home, by way of KFC for grandpa's chicken dinner. Our problem was that we go by one of the mason high schools. Normally we are by there before all the nuts, in their pick me up trucks & soup up new cars, are turned loose. But because of the snow they dismissed early. We watched a pick up truck go tearing out of the parking lot, headed east, same as us. Because the road was slick, & he was going way too fast, we saw him fishtail. He went in a complete circle & was headed right for us! Annie jumped a curb to try & avoid a direct hit, but he still managed to smack her back fender hard enough to put blue paint, from his truck onto the fender.

He never offered to get out of the truck & his passenger sure didn't want to roll his window down, but finally did. The driver was giving Annie "I'm so sorry! Lost my traction! My tires aren't very good!" She let him leave, said afterwards she was thinking what if it had been Dante. Then she found out my elbow had been split open, & was bleeding. But the worst of it was when she started to drive away. I told her it sounded like the front tire on my side was blown out. And it was.

Annie bought a wig last friday. She doesn't like it much, but it looks good, & I think she will get used to it. [I had no idea my mother ever bought a wig.] Right now it makes her feel like she has a hat on.

April 6, 2005

Annie had a hit & run virus on Saturday. She threw up, & passed out , then threw up some more. Felt like death on a cracker the rest of the weekend, but is fine now.

Annie even feels well enough that she is going to have our party, at her house, on April 25th, which is a real break through. She is getting used to her wig, but still hates it.

sept 22, 2005

Annie has given up on the idea that she will ever have grandchildren. She asked Lea [my cousin, Annie's niece] if she could be an "honorary grandma" to her baby & Lea said she can. She wants to give her a baby shower in Oct, but hasn't gotten a list from Lea about who to invite. Now when we go shopping, she wants to buy everything she sees.

oct 12, 2005

Chrissy & Annie got into it (poor Michael got the brunt of it when Chrissy got off the phone). Annie made the mistake of telling Chrissy I won't allow her to call Chrissy "a little bitch" which has really always upset me. So I asked her to call her a "snotty little knothole" instead. It is from an old TV show, Barney Miller.  

oct 19, 2005

Chrissy & Annie have butted heads again, so I doubt she and Michael will be coming here for Thanksgiving.  [I looked October 2005 up in my old emails and saw one from Michael to me describing how my mother had called him in the pre-dawn hours to pressure him to come to Thanksgiving and -- because he knew I had already said I wasn't going -- he told her he couldn't get the time off from work.  I had only taken time off work and traveled all the way to my parents' home for Thanksgiving the previous year because my mother had lied and convinced me my dad was dying, but maybe Grandma didn't know.]

And that's the last of the letters.  My mother was so much worse in 2006, but I guess this was around the time my Grandma stopped writing letters.  By 2008, my mother had moved in with her parents.  Grandma died the next year.

I Want to Understand

I read a book recently called Dreamland by Sam Quinones.  It's about the opiate epidemic in the US and how it came to be, from medical journal articles to pharmaceutical companies to pill mills and the Mexican dealers selling black tar heroin in small towns.  I don't know if my mother is/was on opiates.  But I assume so based on their being the norm at the time and the side effects I saw.

I've started reading a book about benzodiazepine use and addiction because benzos seem likely to have been prescribed to my mother too, based on her complaints and again what was common to prescribe.

I want to understand what happened with my mother.  The more I read, the more I feel unsure.  How much of her behavior was because of how she is?  And how much was because of what she was taking?  How can I find out what she was taking?  Even if I reached out to her and asked, I don't think she'd necessarily tell me.  And if she's as sedated as Dante said she was the last time he visited, who knows if she'd even remember what she has taken, or what she used to take, if she replied at all.

The only place I think I might be able to find a record of what my mother was taking is maybe in my grandmother's letters to my cousin.  But I haven't looked at them since the time I read through them for genealogical information and realized my grandmother -- the sanest, kindest, highest functioning person in my extended family -- habitually talked about me behind my back.  She judged me for not being concerned enough about my mother because I didn't come to her with my worries or tears.  I cried regularly about my mother, just not to her.  I remember sitting in my dorm room after my mom really went off the deep end, spending hours Googling her symptoms and behaviors and trying to figure out what was wrong with her.  I spent too much time on WebMD and the Mayo Clinic website because I thought it was a disease.  I feel so stupid.

It was years before I realized it was the pills, and even now as I read about opioids and benzodiazepines, I'm just now realizing just how much can be explained by the pills.  Example:  I thought when I didn't hear from my mother for days or weeks at a time (glorious breaks from her calling to yell at me, apropos of nothing) that she was going through a deep depression.  But she was probably just on pain pills.  She was probably mostly asleep.  The muscle weakness my mother insisted was some sort of progressive illness like multiple sclerosis and the doctors and I explained away as muscle atrophy from her refusal to get up and walk -- a common side effect of extended benzodiazepine use.  I should probably just do a search for most commonly prescribed pills in 2003 if I want to know what she started taking when she went well and truly off the deep end.  She had gone to the doctor to treat her sadness at the death of her brother.  I had asked her to just grieve instead -- told her her feelings were normal and wouldn't benefit from antidepressants -- but she took whatever that doctor gave her anyway.  This was six or seven years after the first time I saw her high on Soma (Carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant and non-benzodiazepine hypnotic).

I feel like an idiot.  I didn't understand anything about drugs.  I remember hearing about celebrities developing addictions to pain pills after surgery or injuries, but I didn't understand what that even meant or what that addiction looked like.  I didn't understand what being high on pills looked like.  When it came to what being high looked like, I had only seen caricatures of stoners in comedies on TV.   It seems from my grandmother's letters that everyone realized my mother was addicted to drugs but me, and I feel like an idiot.  When I was a freshman in high school, my mother had explained her behavior away with menopause (on the rare occasion she admitted it wasn't just me who was acting differently), and I was desperate to figure out what had happened that made her this way and how to prevent it taking hold of me too, since I had inherited half her DNA and assumed all of this was just happening to her and would do the same to me.  I had never seen my mother partake in so much as a glass of wine, and she was adamantly against any form of drugs.  Except the ones billed as medicine.  Then her adage of "little do good, lot do better" seemed to come into play.  Even when it came to Tylenol, she urged me to take more than the amount indicated on the bottle if the pain was "really bad," and she took god knows how many Tylenol herself everyday for as long as I can remember.  I wonder what her liver looks like.

I don't think my mother had any idea what she was getting herself into when she started with the Soma.  This all started in 1995 or 1996, around the same time doctors decided pain was "the fifth vital sign," no one should endure pain ever and, if you are in pain, you should drug yourself out of it.  Oxycontin was new to the market and a hot, highly prescribed "non-addictive" opioid (spoiler alert:  it's highly addictive and has killed a lot of people). 

The good news is I don't have to worry about inheriting any of my mother's madness, even come menopause.  The other good news is I understand more about pharmaceuticals now than at least 85% of the US population.  And I know not to take anything a doctor prescribes until I've thoroughly vetted it online and, even then, not if I can do without.  If I ever take morphine, it'll be because death is imminent because I don't want to have to try to STOP being addicted to it.  Had I been a high school athlete or gotten into a car accident that left me in pain, I probably would've been prescribed opiates and quite possibly ended up a situation like my mother's.  It happened a lot to other people at that time and for years afterward.  The only reason it didn't happen to me was luck.  But now I know at least.  Now I have information.  And I guess it's good my mother ended up in a nursing home after her last suicide attempt and her refusal to take care of herself (and our family's collective refusal to take care of  her anymore) because she might have died of an overdose by now if she were left to her own devices and dosing schedule.

My mother is the case study I teach my daughter.  They still do DARE or some variation on it in her school, but it doesn't go into enough detail if you ask me.  The "just say no" tagline implies a hit of pot and an oxycodone are equivalent, and if a kid comes to see that something like pot doesn't actually destroy their life, they might just assume the other one won't either.  Lack of nuanced understanding is dangerous when it comes to what we put in our bodies.  My mother's insistence that alcohol and sex are evil while indulging in prescription drugs and junk food multiple times a day is a good example of how black and white thinking fails us.

I wonder what she would be like if she weren't on the drugs.  I mean, she fit the criteria for borderline personality disorder before any of that.  But she started taking hypnotics and god knows what else when I was in eighth or ninth grade.  What would her non-drugged behavior even look like to adult me?  I don't know.  I don't trust my childhood memory and childhood interpretation of what she was like before the drugs.  She wasn't all bad by any means.  Sometimes she was great, and I loved her so much.  Would she still have drained my bank account?  Would she still have tried to turn my grandparents against me?  Would she still have tried to turn me against my dad?  Yes.  That started before the drugs.  Telling me he wasn't my "real" father and that I couldn't talk about it to anyone was earlier.  Telling me he'd never wanted me and had wanted to beat her into miscarrying me was earlier.  Telling me she'd let me decide if she should divorce him and that we'd be poor and have to find somewhere else to live was earlier.

I don't know what she'd be like now if not for the pills, but I trust this particular scenario has played out as well as it could for me.  Sometimes, since reading Dreamland, I think about reaching out to her.  I hadn't realized until that book just how much the deck was stacked against her NOT becoming an addict.  But I don't want her to have my phone number, and I don't want the nursing home to start demanding money from me (I'd never pay them, so it would just be frustrating for both of us).  I'd like to check in on her and see how she's doing and what she's doing, but I don't want to interact with her.  I'm not sure if it would be worse to let things go and maybe have some regrets when she dies, or to take the chance of appearing on her radar and what backlash that could prompt.  I wonder what drugs she's on now.  I wonder how she feels, or if she feels much of anything at all.

Searching for a Published Family Tale

When I first DNA tested, when I started deducing the identity of my biological father, I found a man with whom I had so much in common I thought he might be my father.  Spoiler alert:  he isn't, but he did turn out to be my uncle.  I heard recently that he published something he wrote about his mentally unstable mother (so I think writing tell-alls about our mothers might be a genetically heritable trait?).  I hear it was deeply personal and possibly scathing, at least based on its family reception.  I want to find this piece of writing about my grandmother and the house where my father grew up, but I cannot. 

I don't know anyone who will tell me what it's titled or where or how it was published.  I don't know if it was a book or a magazine article or when it came out, but it was allegedly published.  My uncle is a prolific author who has published dozens of books and articles, but I can't find one that claims to be a memoir or a personal story.  His CV and his Google and Amazon author pages center on his career-related non-fiction writing, and none of them list everything.  None of them seem to list the articles at all.

I don't want to ask him personally partly because I don't think he'd tell me.  I have literally never contacted him, I'm not entirely sure he knows who I am, and I just don't like asking strangers for things when I can skulk about on the web hoping to uncover secrets myself instead.  My sister didn't know any helpful details and assured me our father wouldn't give up the information if she asked.  She feels sure he wouldn't want me to read it.  Any suggestions on where to find this story?  I'm betting it was an essay and not a full book... 

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.

Grandma's Letters

My cousin has a binder two inches thick with old letters from our grandmother.  Today she lent it to me to see if I could find any genealogically significant information that she hadn't.  She'd already highlighted parts.  She told me Grandma wrote things that were weird to write to your grandchildren.  She said Grandma hadn't been the innocent victim of circumstance she used to think she was -- she made the choice to stay in her environment, and she made it repeatedly until she died.

I hadn't expected my name to come up so many times in her letters.  My mother was my grandmother's only daughter, closest friend, and primary source of transportation, so it's only logical I would be a prime source of gossip.  Except I wasn't interesting.  The gossip isn't always bad.  Sometimes she says I sang at church and did a good job, or she comments on how hard I've worked to maintain a 4.0 GPA throughout school.  Sometimes in the next sentence she comments on my related "whining" or "complaining" or my "mood swings."  "Same old, same old," she dismisses.  I was 17 for that one.  It was around the time my mother called the hematologist from church to prescribe antidepressants for her "moody teenager," though talking to the doctor myself or seeing a mental health professional was still strictly forbidden.  I'm not sure how much of my bad behavior was witnessed first hand and how much Grandma heard from my mother.  I mostly saw my grandmother at church at that point.  

She details my mother's breakdown in 2005 on a week-by-week basis.  She didn't detail it in my letters, but she did for my cousin, and probably for other friends and family on her mailing list.  She comments how I "finally got around to being worried" about my mother.  "File that under 'better late than never,'" she quips.  My dad and I had been talking and worrying for some time of course, but that didn't count because it wasn't for an audience.  She said my mother's change in behavior was partly due to her poor health, partly her bad husband, partly her daughter finishing school and choosing to continue to live so far away, and partly because she didn't have a good relationship with either of her children.  And partly the "over medication," of course.  Grandpa yelled from the next room, "Do you need to detox?!" while my grandma was on the phone with her, but my mother heard him and "snapped out of it" enough to behave better, so no action was taken.  All of this came from letters.

My grandmother gauged my mother's mental health by how much she talked to her and how much she ate.  "Annie only ate a quarter of her Frosty yesterday," was cause for alarm, but "Annie finished her Frosty today," was a sign that the worst was over, the dark cloud had passed.  "Did you know Annie has lost 70 pounds?" she asks in January of 2005.  I didn't realize it had started so early.  I don't know if I saw her between Thanksgiving of 2004 and my wedding in 2008.

Grandma's reviews of me improved when she started receiving regular letters from me.  I hadn't realized I was writing my own press releases.  She references my purchasing "a proper dining table" in three consecutive letters.  I guess she wrote to my cousin more frequently than I wrote to her.  She details the stressors of my Manhattan job, but this time without the added snark or the implication that I'm whining.  I wonder if her news bites inherited whatever tone the original teller passed down.  She wrote about my trip to Atlantic City, my cooking Christmas dinner for Michael's family, and she seemed delighted or at the very least neutral about all of it.  

I don't know if there are letters from the time my mother swore she would turn her parents against me.  I can't stand to find them.  I don't want to read anymore.  I was shaking from adrenaline as I read about myself, like I was being attacked to my face, but there is no one to even talk to about it now let alone fight.  My grandmother has been dead for eight years, and I'm just now seeing that she wrote what I perceive to be snarky things about me when I was in the darkest and hardest time of my life.  I don't like it.  I don't like being made fun of for "complaining" and "whining" and having emotions.  I was depressed, and my mother was mentally unstable and abusing drugs.  They complained about my emotions, and then they complained when I stopped exposing my emotions to their view, even though it was 2005 and I didn't cut ties with anyone for another three years.  I've tried to stop having emotions, and I can't.  The best I could do was shield myself from the people who mocked me for having them.  

I am finding it hard to be generous when I'm hurt and angry and no one in that family has ever apologized to me (or anyone else, as far as I know) for anything.  I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.  I wish my dad and my grandmother -- and, hell, my grandfather too -- were alive just so I could say mean, cold things to their faces.  I would be quiet and calm, and when they would get upset at my terrible words, I would scold them for being so emotional, so "moody," so sensitive.  (It's what I'd like to do to my mother too, but I hear she's kept heavily sedated these days. More on that later.)  

I try to be generous because I know they all were mostly miserable, but I still judge them because they made me miserable too, and I deserved better than what they dished out.  Everyone does.  Everyone deserves better, but they were the ones who were responsible for me and prevented me from having that.  I will try to be generous and believe they did the best they could with the tools they had not because I think they deserve my kind thoughts but because it's good practice for the generosity I do owe to my daughter.  It's another way I can be less like them.  It's really hard.

I'm afraid I will never stop being angry.

Update on the NPE in my Family Tree

I previously wrote about the wonkiness in my family tree.  It's looking more and more like my gg-grandfather was not, in fact, my biological gg-grandfather.  I currently have 26 DNA matches I can trace back to the same married couple in the Willis family.  Ancestry isn't aware of most of them because I drew up their trees myself.  I've made at least thirty of what I think people call "mirror trees."  My closest matches in this Willis family group share just over 100 cM of DNA with me.  Based on other cousins with whom I share the same amount of DNA as well as the extensive Willis family tree I've mocked up, I think the eldest match is my second cousin twice removed and the other two are my third cousins once removed.  This is all still estimation.

I've also discovered, as more close matches appeared, that there are genetic links between this massive group of Willis family members and Aida and my closest mystery cousin, the one who self-identifies as Cherokee but turned out to be 100% white lady.  All my mystery people are turning out to reside on the same mysterious branch of my family tree.  I guess this shouldn't surprise me since I have so many matches across most of the rest of my tree that I can often tell how I'm related to someone based solely on shared DNA matches.  (I have a LOT of matches.  I credit it to being so historically American and the DNA testing companies also being American.)

There is so much data it's hard to compile into one place where I can see it at a glance.  Today I started to draw the family tree on a wall-sized dry erase surface in the hopes of fitting all the DNA matches I know and then trying out places where my mystery cousins might fit.  It makes me look like a conspiracy theorist, or so I like to think.  I just need some red string and photographs.

I currently have one most likely suspect for the role of gg-grandfather based on proximity of DNA matches, though he isn't necessarily it.  My next step will be to figure out some currently living descendants who might someday DNA test and to hypothesize what their matches to other cousins should look like.  I think the match I'd most like to see would be one of my g-grandmother's descendants, any of whom should match to my entire mystery bunch as well as to the descendants of my gg-grandmother's clan in Illinois.

Something to consider for anyone who thinks they can keep a child's paternity a secret if they just wait out the clock:  the person I'm in the process of finding out isn't biologically my ancestor is 150 years my senior.  He died decades before my parents were born.  He fought in the Civil War.  

DNA testing is still in its infancy.  Who knows what DNA tests will be able to unearth in another 150 years.

If anyone has done genetic genealogy focusing on people this far removed from the current era and has advice or suggestions for what I should be doing next, please let me know.  It's hard since the margin of error increases -- snowballs, really -- each time you go back another generation.

I Found My Secret Half-Great-Aunt with DNA Testing

I mentioned in a post two years ago that my maternal grandfather was conceived out of wedlock.  His mother was between husbands, and his father got around.  I also mentioned that a much younger half-sibling had contacted my grandfather in the late '90s, but I never learned her name.  She lived far away, and my grandmother had said she would send her a copy of the only photo they had of my great-grandfather and the few she had of his other children, the legitimate offspring.  My half-great-aunt didn't know her father because she had been conceived during an extramarital affair.  Her mother and social father (stepfather doesn't seem accurate if they passed her off as his own) already had two other children.  My half-great-aunt would be about 70 now, barely older than my mother.  Well, I found her.  Or, more accurately, DNA testing found us both.

My half-great-aunt popped up on AncestryDNA the other day with just three people on her family tree -- herself and her biological parents -- and I immediately knew who she was.  Even without the family tree, the 450+ cM of shared DNA and the many DNA relatives in common made it clear that my great-grandfather was our closest common ancestor.  I messaged her explaining how we're related (cushioned with "I think") and that my grandfather was one of the children born after their father's wife died.  I was trying to put delicately that he was one of the outsiders like her, that almost everything I knew had come much later from my own research.  I wanted her to feel comfortable talking to me.  I wanted her to know I was an outsider too, albeit one with lots of collected data and photographs.

I asked if she'd been the half-sister whose named I'd never learned who had written to my grandfather in the '90s.  She wrote back right away, and she was welcoming.  She said she was probably the same sister.  The few details my grandmother had mentioned, like birth year and state of residence, matched up, and she said she had tried to reach out to her "father's people" back then.  She hadn't known her father, she said.  She'd only seen him once when she was little, and her mother was still married to someone else, so she hadn't been allowed to talk about him at all.  How strangely similar to being donor conceived.

Looking Up My Family Online (Again)

Have you ever remembered something one way all your life and then seen it again later and it was completely different?

I was looking up Eugene, my lone surviving maternal uncle, online today, as I sometimes do.  He's hard to find.  I'm Facebook friends with his wife of nearly three decades, but she never mentions him, her photos don't include him, and based on some posts from her family, they didn't spend Thanksgiving together.  I wonder if they got divorced or maybe he died.  Surely one of my cousins would have known and said something.  Surely my regular Google searches for his name and the word "obituary" would have turned something up.

My uncle Eugene has lived in the same house for about three decades.  My other uncle used to live there too until he died in 2009 just shy of age 60.  They didn't live apart in my lifetime.  Uncle Boyd would pay the mortgage and Uncle Gene would pay the utilities.  Uncle Gene had always worked odd jobs that earned below the poverty line, selling used cars, playing in a band at a local nightclub, and working in collections at one point.  Pooling their resources was the only way they could afford their beautiful and spacious house, my mother said, and there was plenty of room for everyone.  I remember Uncle Boyd lived in a ground floor bedroom off the kitchen.  Uncle Gene and his wife lived in one of the upstairs bedrooms.  There was a stained glass window in the corner of the stairway, a gazebo off the front porch, and the sprawling backyard had fruit trees.  It was the nicest house anyone in our family owned.

I looked up the only address I could find online for Uncle Gene, but the picture was of a tiny shack of a house.  He must've moved.

But there was a gazebo in the same place.  And the front stairs looked the same.  And I realized my uncles had lived a tiny shack of a house all along.  How is this possible?  The lines of the roof and walls aren't even straight, and they're at odd angles.  According to the internet, the bank foreclosed on the house in 2013.  I guess they couldn't pay the mortgage without Uncle Boyd's contribution.  He lost his job at the steel mill to a machine back in 2000 and he never found another one -- it was the only job he'd had since he was 16 years old -- but I guess he received something in unemployment or maybe disability since he was diagnosed bipolar around the same time.  He should have had a pension too, though I don't know when that would have started paying out.  Grandpa started collecting his pension from the same steel mill when he retired at 55.  Anyway, Boyd died, the bank took the house, and my uncle Gene doesn't live there anymore.  One of my cousins said she had wanted to reach out to him after Boyd died but she'd held back because he's mentally unstable.  He was the most stable of all of them, I thought.

The bank auctioned off the house for $18,000 to something called BLT Homes Inc., which appears to fix up homes just enough to rent them out.  Uncle Gene and his wife started renting the place two houses down after that, according to the internet.  But I can't find anything about where Gene works, if anywhere, or what he does or how he is.  Why does no one in my family blog?

Then I started looking for my mother.  That way madness lies.  I haven't found an updated address for her since the group home the hospital released her to after her last suicide attempt by self-poisoning (don't try it, folks -- Harvard School of Public Health did a study, and ODing by pills has a less than 2% success rate).  And my dad said she left that place years ago when they told her she'd have to pay something to keep living there.  I keep searching by her name and her past addresses and diagnoses and the churches she's attended, but I find nothing new.  I don't want to reach out to her; I just want to watch her quietly while she is unaware.

Memories from Childhood that Didn't Seem Weird Until I Said Them Out Loud

For as long as I have known her, my mother has refused to wear a bra inside the house.  Unless she had to leave the house, she wouldn't get dressed at all.  Her usual nightgown -- and subsequently what she wore unless she was heading out -- was an exceptionally large, polyester muumuu.  She had a collection of them, all in the same cut but different flowered patterns and colors.  She even bought a slightly smaller muumuu for me when I was a child, but due to its wide neck coupled with her tendency to shop a few sizes larger than I needed, I couldn't physically keep it from falling past my shoulders and off my body.

My mother had a few regular volunteer jobs she did each month, either at my school or at the county health department's Well Child Clinic.  She spent Friday mornings grocery shopping with her mother, and they spent every Wednesday together at Walmart, where my mother would buy several hundred dollars worth of paper goods, cleaning products that wouldn't be used, and dozens of small fad toys (think Koosh balls or Beanie Babies) that no one we knew wanted.  These were the times my mother got dressed.

When my mother got home from grocery shopping, she would be too tired to do much else.  I remember rushing to help my dad bring in the groceries when either it was summer or I was too young to attend full day school.  My mother would carry grocery bags to the kitchen too.  Then, as she always did when she returned home from somewhere, she would whip off her bra, settle in to the couch, and turn on the TV, while my dad and I put the groceries away in the kitchen.  My job when I was little was to hand each item to my dad out of the bags on the floor where he couldn't reach them from his wheelchair.  He would squeeze the vast amounts of new food we may or may not eat in among the rotting produce and meat left in the refrigerator from one week to the next.  The various bags of potato chips usually went in the white particle board dresser that had inexplicably been in the kitchen since before I was born.  The other boxes of junk food were mostly piled on top of the dresser, but I also remember them scattered over the counters, atop the kitchen table where we were theoretically supposed to eat but never did because it was buried under piles of food, and across the occasional flat surface in the dining room.  There was one piece of furniture in the dining room that always held the most Little Debbie snack cakes, but I can't remember what it was -- a bench?  A shoe rack?

I don't remember my parents cleaning out the refrigerator more than once, when the original, yellow, 20-year-old refrigerator stopped working and they had to replace it, though it might have happened a handful of times when I wasn't aware.  I don't know how old the junk food was, but I remember finding a box of moldy low-fat Twinkies in the dining room in the early '90s.  Something in the low-fat formula must have imbued them with the ability to mold.

After we put the groceries away, we would eat lunch in front of the TV in the living room.  Sometimes it was grilled cheese; sometimes it was hot dogs.  I usually drank milk while my mother nursed a 64 oz. cup of 7Up or Pepsi.  What we watched depended on the year.  My dad always had his own TV in another room, but the rest of us shared the one in the living room, so unless there was a particular show I followed that my mother liked enough to want to watch with me, we watched whatever she chose.  When I was in preschool it was All My Children at noon followed by One Life to Live.  At least one summer in the late '90s it was TLC's A Baby Story.  I remember complaining to my mother that it was hard to eat on my lunch break from my summer job while watching a woman give birth, but she refused to change the channel regardless of how many times she'd seen an episode.  There wasn't anywhere else in the house to sit and eat, so I eventually stopped coming home.

My mother's afternoons usually featured another nap, which usually meant changing out of the rest of her leaving-the-house clothes and back into a muumuu.  I say "another" because she slept off and on throughout the day and night with little regard for the hour.  If she had a regular sleep schedule, I never caught on to it.  She usually slept on the living room couch, though there were a few years in the late '80s when she tried to share Dante's room with him.  She bought him a set of bunk beds and a matching desk with the money that had been in his savings account supposedly earmarked for college.  The lower bunk was hers, she said, as was the desk, which she positioned in the already crowded dining room, opposite her old desk.  It was quickly buried under collections of pens, papers, old mail, and leftover Koosh balls.

There's Something Wonky in My Family Tree

Warning:  This is long and might be completely uninteresting.  It's also hard to make it make sense without visual aids, so it might be nonsensical.

tl;dr:  I think my great-great-grandfather was either adopted or someone else altogether.

New Match
I got a new match on 23andMe not too long ago -- a 2nd to 4th cousin, the site said.  Since the user name said TJCapello*, it became my closest actionable (i.e., non-anonymous and as yet unsolved) match on the site.  I sent him the default "let's share DNA info and see how we're related" message, but -- as expected -- I didn't get an immediate response.  His profile was new and contained no additional information.

I looked up the initials and refreshingly uncommon surname and, taking into account that he was male, I found his full name and location online with a quick Google search.  I started drawing up a family tree for him based predominantly on his mother's obituary on Legacy.com (but also using pipl.com, Facebook, FamilySearch, and Ancestry), and I was delighted to learn three out of the four of his grandparents were Italian immigrants.  I have only trace amounts of Southern European DNA myself and a tree filled with British and German names, so I focused my tree-building efforts on the non-Italian quarter of his ancestry. 

Then I got another new DNA match, even closer this time -- a 2nd to 3rd cousin, it said.  I quickly learned it was my previous match's sister (different surname, but Google knows all).  Whatever my relationship to her is, it's the same one I share with him, so I figured I should be able to find our most recent common ancestors in the great-great-great-grandparent range or even closer (thank you, ISOGG).

I built out the English-sounding quarter of the Capellos' family tree until it should have intersected with my own.  It even featured the surname Willis* like my own tree, and they lived in the Midwest, not far from another branch of my own family tree.  But I couldn't find any overlap, despite my own Willis branch of the family tree tracing back to the 1600s. 

I put this project aside for awhile, and I come back to it every so often.  This wouldn't be an easy one to solve like I had thought.  Either their family tree contains an error -- perhaps from an adoption or a non-paternity event -- or mine does.  Or maybe that mysterious branch of my family tree that ought to lead back to New York where my great-great-grandfather was born really doesn't.   

The Wonkiness
Recently I've started finding other DNA matches, on Ancestry this time -- all in Ancestry's "4th to 6th cousins" range, which tends to be a very loose estimate -- whose trees overlap with that same Willis branch that doesn't fit into my own.  I've found upwards of five matches whose trees overlap in the same place, making them all second and third cousins of the Capellos, though Ancestry hasn't put it together into a "hint" for me yet because I sometimes have to draw up the family trees myself based on less detailed trees or user names alone.  I appear to share about half as much DNA with those Ancestry matches as I do with the Capellos, which leads me to believe my family tree intersects with the Capellos' a generation more recently than it intersects with the others'.  But that leaves me confused.  Looking at their family tree, that means I'm descended from a Willis born in the early to mid-1800s.  I already have all those slots in my family tree filled.  I don't know how they could fit into my own tree.

That said, I don't believe any ancestor on my family tree is necessarily the right one until I have at least a couple separate (non-sibling) matches whose combined DNA and family trees support my data.  The more distant the ancestor, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  The more distant the cousin, the less possible s/he is to confirm.  I'm in contact now with some cousins so distant that the relationship doesn't even show up in our DNA anymore, and I only feel confident of the relationship because of overlapping family trees and mutual DNA matches within those same family trees. 

Logicking It Out
Here's the deal with the Willis branch of the tree in question:  It shows up in several reasonably close DNA matches' trees, so I assume it is how I'm related to them.  It's possible I'm wrong, but it's unlikely.  In order to fit it into my own tree however, something currently in my tree must be wrong.  First, I know the Willises are connected to my maternal side because my paternal uncle on Ancestry shares zero of those matches with me.  I also have enough known DNA matches at this point to draw the conclusion that several specific ancestors on my tree must be accurate.  I can verify my mother is my mother, I can verify her parents are my grandparents, and I can verify my great-grandparents too.  I have enough reasonably close DNA matches backing up my data that I feel confident about six of my eight maternal great-great-grandparents.  I even have an Ancestry "hint" that aligns another more distant cousin with ancestors of one of the two remaining great-great-grandparents (I feel less certain because it's only one match and a distant one at that).  That would leave Jack, my great-great-grandfather who supposedly came from New York. 

Jack is the brick wall of the mystery branch of my family tree.  I have no DNA matches to support him, and many hours of research have yielded no indication of who his parents were, which makes it exceptionally hard to find DNA matches that would support him.  His wife, my great-great-grandmother Emily, was from rural Illinois, within a 45-minute drive of the Willises.  According to census records, she was twenty years younger than Jack and had their first child -- my great-grandmother -- when she was 28.  They'd supposedly married two years earlier, but I have not been able to find a marriage record, though I found one for her first marriage easily enough.  Lots of my ancestors crossed state lines to marry though, so I'm not even sure where to focus my search.  Could Jack have been my great-great-grandfather but actually been adopted?  I would think this more likely if he didn't claim to have grown up in New York, over a thousand miles from the family to which I'm trying to connect him.  I could be wrong, but I don't think adoptees were moved that far from their birth families in the 1850s.  Could my great-grandmother have been a non-paternity event (NPE), meaning Emily was impregnated by someone who wasn't Jack?  If that is the case, I'm still not sure who my great-great-grandfather would be.  There isn't one specific "most likely suspect" in the Willis family tree, either based on DNA or based on relative age and geographic proximity.

Next Steps
My closest DNA match on Ancestry whose tree contains the Willis line has several matches in common with me.  A few of them also contain the Willis line, but several don't have detailed trees, nor are they related to the entire cluster of other Willis descendants, though they are related to each other.  My next step is to build family trees for the ones who don't have them yet, or whose trees only have a couple of names, which is most of them.  My hypothesis is that the ones who aren't mutual DNA matches with the Willis cousins will be related via an adjacent family line -- perhaps the Thompsons.  Thompson was the maiden name of my closest Willis cousin's great-grandmother.  If I'm right and they're connected via an adjacent family line, it would tell me which generation connects me to that family tree -- the generation containing both the Willises and the Thompsons (or whichever adjacent family surname) rather than an earlier generation.

In case you're wondering why I would put so much effort into something that matters so little, please understand THIS IS MY FAVORITE KIND OF PUZZLE.  I have been waiting for something like this to happen ever since I solved the "who is my biological father?" puzzle, which was at most a 4-star difficulty on Dell Logic Puzzles' 5-star scale.  I find few things as gratifying as solving logic-based puzzles, and solving this one will create an even bigger hint toward solving other genealogical puzzles, of which there are two more I've been working on for months.  I've written about Aida, but there is another one I haven't even mentioned yet (she self-identifies as Cherokee, but her DNA is 99% European), and the solution to this Willis puzzle will help me towards solving both of them via deductive reasoning.  In short, I'm doing this for fun.

*Not his actual name.

Genetic Counseling for the Donor Conceived

I'm getting to the point where I'm posting enough stuff my half-siblings know that, if they stumbled across this blog for whatever reason, they would be able to identify me.  This makes me nervous, but not nervous enough to stop posting.  Obviously.

My half-brother Hans emailed me the other day to say our uncle had tested positive for some sort of mutation that puts people at higher risk for specific types of cancer.  He said our father had asked him to let me know in case I wanted to get myself or my daughter tested.  Below Hans' note was a series of emails between my biological father and my uncle's wife.  She had the job of informing my uncle's family members that they might want to get tested.  There was a limited amount of information exchanged.  The emails were from several months ago, but the dates showed my biological father just had forwarded them to Hans to forward to me this week.  It reminded me vaguely of how people who find out they have an STD are supposed to reach out to everyone they've been intimate with.  "Hey, it's Joseph.  Yeah, the Joseph who sired you about 30 years ago.  Good times, huh?  So anyway, I tested positive, and it turns out you might want to get yourself tested too..."  I wish I had more known half-siblings, just to add to the comic effect.

I had a check up scheduled with my doctor for just a few days later, so I brought a print-out of the email chain to my appointment and asked my doctor what he thought of genetic testing.  I'd assumed he would say there wasn't much point in it if I'm not planning to have more kids and there is nothing actionable I can do with the results anyway.  When I'd brought up prenatal testing before conceiving my daughter, my OB/GYN at the time had said, "What for?  If you don't even know your family medical history, how can we know what tests to run?"  I hadn't known who my biological father was back then or anything about his family medical history, but I thought there were standard tests doctors could run for common disorders. 

To my surprise, maybe because I have more family information now, my current doctor had a different reaction.  He referred me to a local cancer center that does genetic counseling and strongly recommended I do it.  He said that, while there isn't often something actionable to be done with a heightened cancer risk, there might be more screening options in the future, and the field of genetics is progressing constantly so it would be good to have my results on file.

I called the genetic counselor to make an appointment.  She asked me if I had a copy of my uncle's report because there was relevant information in it that they could use in testing me.  I told her I might be able to get a copy.  She stressed the importance of it until I finally explained that my biological father was an anonymous sperm donor and I'm still a secret to most of his family, said uncle probably included.  I told her I would ask my brother for the report, but I wasn't sure I could get it.  She told me it was okay.  While it's useful information and would inform what genetic tests would be done on me and would probably make my testing cheaper, they can work without it. 

Then she asked me to compile a list of every  member of my extended family who has had cancer too, as well as which type of cancer and at what age it developed.  I know some of that.  I know what I know anyway.  I don't know when their various cancers developed, but I know they all died soon thereafter or as a result of the cancer, and I know when they died, so surely that counts for something.  My information isn't lacking enough that I would try to ask for more anyway.  Most of the cancer in my family is on my father's side.  All of the "lady cancers" are, and those are the ones whose risk are heightened the most dramatically by this particular gene mutation.

I told my brother thank you for the information and thank you when he got me the extra pages from our uncle's report.  He's always very prompt in his replies.  I didn't mention that I already have heightened risk for colon cancer, which I inherited from our father's genes, in spite of our father pointing out in the email chain that he thinks he got "the good genes" because he hasn't yet had the same colon issues his brother or mother have had.  I'm not going to tell any of them the results of my genetics testing either, both because I don't think they want to know and also because I want to have information they don't have for a change.  I'm not mad at my half-siblings.  They are nice and kind to me, but I'm angry at my father every time I remember he exists, not just for this.  I get so angry when I think of him that I often cry in impotent rage, and I don't want anyone in his family to know that.  I want them to think I'm calmer and cooler than them, as I've always pretended to be.  I do not want them thinking I'm irrational and ungrateful or expecting too much.  I will take what I can get.  I will take months' old forwarded emails indicating that my daughter and I might want to get ourselves checked out for new and exotic cancer risks, carefully funneled through a third party so that I don't dare take liberties with my father by responding to him directly.  I know I have more than most DC people already.  But I'm still angry.  

Bright Side:  At least it's not ALS.  I scoured my raw genome data from 23andMe, and I'm definitely not getting ALS.

Breaking Up with My Mother

Near the end of our relationship -- just before the several months of silence that preceded my wedding -- my mother left me some rather fucked up voicemails.  I've mentioned them here before.  Sometimes I would come home from work to a happy morning voicemail chattering away about wedding cakes and an angry afternoon voicemail calling me an ungrateful little bitch.  Sometimes there were more than two.  I still have them.  Almost all of them.  My voicemail at the time was set up to send mp3 files to my gmail account, and I didn't delete them.  I starred the most fucked up ones so I could find them later if I needed to build a case against her or I guess just feel sorry for myself in a masochistic sort of way.

I listened to two of her starred voicemails the other day for the first time in at least five years.  I'm not entirely sure why, though I have wanted to post them here for a long time.  I've run across them before in my email, but I have avoided them until recently because I anticipated they would make me feel bad or start shaking like I used to whenever I heard her voice.  It was the first time I've heard her voice in at least five years.  I didn't start shaking, so that was good.  I didn't cry either, which is also good.  They were a lot meaner than I remembered.  Pretty much every time I run across an old email or story about her, I'm surprised again by how much worse it was than I remembered. 

In both the voicemails I listened to, she said something along the lines of, "Answer me this one question and I'll leave you alone forever.  What did I ever do to deserve the way you treat me?"  That might not be verbatim, but I don't want to listen to them again to check.  Take my word for it that it's close enough.  And the answer to her question is that she did very little to deserve the way I treated her.  I was kind to her.  I tried to help her and make her happy.  Bear in mind that these voicemails were before I ever cut ties with her, when I tripped over myself trying to save both my parents at the expense of most other things in my life.  Most people would have considered me a good daughter, or at least that's what they say out loud.  She didn't deserve the way I treated her.  She didn't have to because she was my mother and I loved her and felt responsible for her. 

After I got married and my mother stopped contacting me again and my dad made his threat to let himself die of infection rather than live in a nursing home, my husband I moved.  That was when we bought our house so that my dad could move in with us.  My mother hadn't reached out to me in the ten months following my wedding, and I didn't reach out to tell her I was moving. 

I didn't hear from her again for three years, when she finally found me on Facebook.  She sent me this message:

I miss you, I love you. I sent you an anniversary card but it came back. Just wanted you to know I am getting the help I need and would love to be in contact with you again. I am living in a group home called Butterfly Glen and it helps. My address is 12986 Appleton St Cincinnati, OH and my phone number is 513-555-9876. I would love to hear from you. I was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and am being treated for it. I feel much better. Love forever and always, Mom

My first reaction was shock.  Not at the content so much as the fact that it was her.  Sort of like how I used to start shaking whenever the phone rang.  Flushed face, pounding heart.  I'm not sure if it was more fear or excitement.  I find them hard to tell apart. 

I didn't know what to say.  I wanted to tell her good job.  I wanted to praise her for getting help, even if the help she was getting was not by choice.  I knew from my dad that she had only ended up at Butterfly Glen because of another "suicide attempt" after both her parents died and she was going to have to find someone new to take her in and take care of her.  No one retrieved her from the hospital's psych ward, so she had been released to Butterfly Glen, an assisted living home I presume she selected from a short list based on its name.  She has always loved butterflies.  Butterfly everything.  Also, it's a shithole -- I've looked online.

The problem with responding to her was that I didn't want to renew contact.  It felt like an abusive ex with a drug abuse problem was reaching out to say she'd gotten clean and was ready to be together again.  Why?  I'm fine now and it was so hard to break up -- why would I ever walk back into that?  I want her to be happy and healthy, but what I don't want her to be is my problem.  I reached out to my best friend, Jerry.  I explained that I didn't want to have to deal to my mother again but that I felt I owed it to her until the next time she went off the deep end.  "Don't respond for three weeks, and I bet she'll comply," Jerry said.  Jerry knows my mom.

The fact of the matter is that I don't know if my mother was still abusing prescription drugs at Butterfly Glen.  I have no idea how much of what she was on or how diligent her doctors were.  I thought back to how she'd been before the muscle relaxants and the sleeping pills and god knows what else.  Back when I was thirteen and younger.  Her behavior wouldn't have been mistaken for bipolar disorder back then, before the drugs.  And that's when I started remembering some of the stories I've told here, and I realized I still wouldn't want her in my life.  No version of the mother I've ever known would be someone I would choose to have in my life.  Life is easier without her. 

I explained to my therapist, "The more I think about my childhood, the more the good memories are colored by the things I know now.  It seems like the love I felt for my mother was mostly Stockholm Syndrome." 

She replied, "Maybe it was."  I didn't expect that response.

I didn't reply to my mother's Facebook message.  She sent me another a few months later on my birthday, but I didn't see it until even later because it was in my "other" inbox, where unsolicited messages from strangers go.  She wrote:

Happy Happy Birthday!!! I can't believe that 30 years ago today you came into my life and changed it forever. I wanted to update you on family events. I'm sure that Dad told you that Grandma Wilkes died in May after your wedding. Uncle Jim died last November and Grandpa Wilkes died on August 4th this year. All I have left is Dante and you and Michael. I'm living in a great group home called Butterfly Glen I am being treated with medication and group therapy for Bipolar disorder. I am doing great and the only thing that could be better would be to hear from you. I don't want anything from you just to hear from you and to know where you are and what you're doing and how you are doing. Love Forever and Always, MOM

I was pregnant with Eliza at the time.  I never replied.

I Hate Being Kissed on the Mouth by Family

Everyone in my extended family of origin kisses each other on the mouth.  I know some families just do that and it's not meant to be creepy because it's what they do and everyone is allegedly cool with it, but being kissed on the mouth by my family has bothered me for as long as I can remember.  I was fine with hugs or a kiss on the top of my head, but because that wasn't how my family did things, uncles, parents, grandparents, and Dante would grab me and/or pin my arms down while they kissed me on the mouth, I presume to show me who was boss.  They often laughed about how much it made me squirm.  My uncles otherwise seemed to be perfectly decent people.  In retrospect, I don't recall being grabbed or pinned at all by two of them.  I just remember them kissing me on the mouth after I learned to cringe quietly and stop putting up a fight.  

I remember my maternal grandfather pinning me on his sofa and nibbling at my neck while my mother and grandmother ignored my screams from the next room.  I was generally accused of overreacting if I protested... anything.  "He's just trying to play with you!  Stop screaming!" was an average reaction to what felt to me like torture or assault.  I was horrified to realize my massively fat grandfather was stronger than me even when I unleashed my full strength, or was at least stronger than me when I was pinned on my back and immobilized and panicking.  I remember being panic-stricken on more than one occasion when I realized even my full strength couldn't fight off a teenage Dante or a grown man.  But shortly after I calmed myself down enough to go limp, my grandfather let me go.  I guess it stopped being fun for him when I stopped fighting.  I spent time with my maternal grandparents at least once a week from birth until I moved away for college, but I can't remember ever liking my grandfather.  I'm not sure anyone did, to be honest.  He was always kind of a dick as far as I could tell.  He's dead now. 

An Open Letter to My Mother in 1965

Dear Annie,

I'm writing this to your 15-year-old self because that is when I believe these words might have meant something to you.  We met when you were 30 and I was born.  I think 30 was too late.  Fifty-something, when I tried to tell you some of these things for the first and last time, was far too late.  The last year we were in contact, you were generally drugged and sometimes barely lucid.  So I'm telling you these things in 1965, when you were old enough to understand but still young enough you might have believed you could change and choose your own fate.

Things are going to get rough.  I know they've already been rough.  I know you are the only girl among all your brothers and that you have to help out around the house in ways they aren't expected to, and I also know your dad is kind of an asshole.  Don't try to claim he isn't.  We both know he is, and it's as much my right to say so as yours, so deal with it.  I also know you're poor, but you'll be surprised to learn your family is doing better than the majority of American households fifty years in the future, and your parents are going to be just fine thanks to unions and pensions.  You're going to be just fine too -- physically and financially -- but you won't see it that way, which is the bigger problem.

You are smart.  You might have always suspected this and someone convinced you otherwise, or maybe you never even realized it, but you are smart and resourceful.  If you are willing to believe these facts, you can be unstoppable.  But you have to try.  Continually trying is the really hard part.  Perfection is not important.  It's not even possible, so forget about trying to be perfect and trying to avoid failure, and just do.  Stop taking all the remedial classes in school so that you can get the best grades.  Stop taking the jobs you think no one else wants.  You are smart enough to do more, and you will never be perfect no matter how low you aim.  Just do the best you can.  Take every opportunity you can.  Keep trying, and you'll be fine.  You know how I know this?  I'm really smart.  Trust me.

In a few years, you're going to marry an asshole who reminds you vaguely of your father.  Emotionally stunted, fits of rage, decent provider, all that same old comfortable bullshit.  Don't let him break you.  Just because the disability checks come in his name doesn't mean he is the only one of value in your relationship.  Your innate value isn't based in US currency.  Neither is your daughter's.  Try and remember that.

I know you're pretty hard-wired at this point to buy goods cheaply and avoid investing in nice things, either because you've grown up poor with parents who grew up even poorer or because of your low self-worth or both, but please know this deal-seeking tendency is not the most fiscally intelligent tactic.  You will have plenty of money soon.  You'll have more than you immediately know what to do with, which will prompt you to eat steak sandwiches every night, as you will tell me, because apparently this is a stupid and expensive thing to do.  Anyway, if you avoid seeking deals and shopping for thrills and hoarding because it makes you feel safe, you will continue to have more money than you know what to do with.  When you need a new pair of shoes, spend five times as much as you would on the cheapest possible pair and get something nice and comfortable and sturdy.  It took me years to learn to shop this way, but it's actually less expensive than buying a ton of cheap stuff you won't end up using.  You'll also have less of a hoard, which I realize is also something you're probably hard-wired for at this point based on what your childhood home looked like and the stories you told me. 

You are mentally ill.  I know those words sting, and I want you to understand that it isn't something bad about you.  It's just something that is.  You are too young right now at 15 for most decent professionals to diagnose you with what ails you, and it probably hasn't even occurred to you anything is wrong yet at this age.  You probably seem like a fairly typical teenager.  It will get worse, but it's not entirely out of your control, and a good portion of what goes down will be courtesy of prescription drug abuse.  Yes, it's still abuse even though they're prescriptions.  Remember that.  If you can effectively treat an ailment without a prescription drug, do it, even if it involves hard work like therapy or regular exercise.  I kind of doubt even your 15-year-old self would hear me out on that particular note, but seriously, even prescription drugs can be dangerous and you will have a tendency to get out of control.  Know thyself.

I'm not sure how you feel about control at 15.  I've always craved control over my own life and my own situation, but the version of you I know generally wanted people to take care of her so she could check out.  I hope you aren't like that already.  You are powerful when you try to be.  If you don't like something, you can change it.  Please don't check out.  Please don't expect other people to take care of you like the wilting flower you will pretend to be. 

It might be hard to believe that you could get a full-time job that would support you comfortably or that you could earn a college degree or seek help from a mental health professional until you start to feel good from something other than excessive doses of prescription drugs.  You could do those things though.  I know your parents "don't believe in therapy," but fifty years from now, most of your family will be dead, your parents included, and the rest won't speak to you.  You'll be left with very few options beyond stepping up to the plate and taking care of yourself.  Please rise to the challenge.  Please take care of yourself.  Please be the smart, capable woman I know you could have grown into.  It's not too late.  It's never too late. 

And when your family stops talking to you, it isn't because they hate you or because you're "bad."  It's because you behave in a cruel and crazy way and they choose to stop dealing with you because they have to take care of themselves too.  You are almost full grown, and you haven't been the baby of the family since the year after you were born.  I'm going to lay some ugly truth on you:  you will never again be someone's number one priority.  Ever.  I hope you got the bulk of your mother's attention in the months following your birth, but that was it.  No more.  I realize you don't even remember that time.  I'm truly sorry, but that's the hand you were dealt.  You have to be your own grownup now.  If you refuse, well... I guess someone in a nursing home might keep you alive, but it won't be all that pleasant, and you will still eventually languish and die.  You can be the capable, in control woman I know you can be, and you can choose your own happiness, or you can languish and die.  You don't get to be someone's baby.  You don't get to be the beloved golden child.  Not everyone gets a turn at that fate, and if you ever did, it's long done now.  Sorry.  Them's the breaks.

I hope this letter isn't too much of a downer.  I wonder -- do you ever cry anymore?  I know your dad was kind of a dick about that with the, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!" line.  You said the same line to me, followed immediately by how much you hated when your father said it to you.  You don't cry much in the future, at least not in front of other people.  I do want you to know though that people see how you feel.  You're not going through it all alone.  They can't do for you the things you have to do for yourself, but people are there and they do care.  They just can't save you.  You have to do that part yourself.  It's really hard, but I know you can do it.  You're smart and capable.  You feel things deeply.  It's hard feeling like you're all alone, but there is help out there, even when you're eventually old and alone.  But you have to try.  You have to choose to be the one in charge of yourself.  If you give up, no one will rescue you.  If you hit rock bottom, you will hit it hard and it will hurt.  No one will scoop you up and save you.  Know that.  It hurts, but it's important to know that. 

The most important thing you can ever do is take care of yourself.  You have a tendency to want to rescue people, to be their savior.  It doesn't tend to go as well as one might hope, but you could save yourself.  That would be amazing.  I hope someday in the future, more than fifty years in the future, when all the time I've known you is done, these thoughts reach you.  I hope you realize it doesn't matter how old or ugly or fat or poor you think you are.  You can still choose to take charge of your own life and take care of yourself.  And I hope you do.  Because I love you and have always wanted the best for you.  I just can't tell you face-to-face anymore.  I have to take care of myself and my daughter and my family instead because that's how this was always supposed to work.  I can't save you, but I will always pray you decide to save yourself like I know you can.  That's the best I can do.  Now let's see your best.  -- C