Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: May 17, 2022 09:05PM
Growing up, I always envied the kids who had emotionally supportive mothers. I did not, and I'm not sure my Mom--throughout her lifetime--ever even KNEW an emotionally supportive mother of any kind, so she literally didn't know what an emotionally supportive mother was.
As an adult, I now realize that in her case she lived all of her adult life in terror--terror that I would find out (from my paternal Grandmother and paternal Grandpa most likely) that my "father" (the man she was married to) was my biological uncle, and his brother was my actual biological father.
I did not learn the truth for many decades (I was decades into my adulthood when I learned the truth), and only then because (I think) my [paternal] Grandma threatened to tell me.
My Mom drove all night, from northern California down to southern California, to "tell me" in an intensely convoluted way: My Mom related to me a complete, month-by-month, chronology of where everyone in our close family was on the planet, during the year before I was born--which I am pretty sure she expected me to eventually decode, and I eventually did.
(It all centered on me being, notoriously, supposedly "six weeks late" when I was born.)
Subtract out that infamous "six weeks" and what is left is: when I was conceived, my father--the brother married to my mother--was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the US Navy, and his brother was here in Los Angeles with my Mom. My Mom's Ob-Gyn went along with the fiction, and did what was necessary to convince the family at large that I was, indeed, six weeks late.
Looking back, I now realize that my Mom lived her entire adult life in terror that she would be outed as a "bad" woman--most especially to me.
What she was incapable of learning or intuiting was that I really don't care [and wouldn't have cared], because either way, I still have the same paternal grandparents, and they were TREMENDOUSLY important to me when they were alive, as I was growing up, and they still are now, though they have been deceased for decades.
I wish my Mom had not had such a haunted and terrible adult life--especially since it was all SO UNNECESSARY!!!
I wish that my Mom's Death Certificate, and my Dad-who-raised-me's Death Certificate, did not have "End-Stage Alcoholism" listed as the primary, or the secondary, cause of death.
I wish all those people's lives (including my paternal grandparents, and my biological father's later wife-and-offspring family) had not been destroyed, or massively damaged, by my conception.
But that's what happened, and I am here, and I long ago accepted the literal facts of my biological life.
I wish everyone else involved could have done the same.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2022 09:57PM by Tevai.