I have been thinking a lot about my brother and about my sister.

Those who’ve been following my story know that I have an uneasy relationship with my brother, whom I grew up with, and a brand-new unknown relationship with my half sister, whom I have never met.

Prior to talking with my sister on the phone, and exchanging some email and photos, I never really realized how sad it is that my brother and I are not close. One visitor to my blog pointed out that I should consider my relationship with my sister in light of my relationship with my brother (or something like that.) This made my whole perspective shift dramatically: I had not thought to consider the two of them as “my siblings” before. In other words, I had drawn truly no connections there.

Starting to mull things over, I find it really disconcerting to think of how much I’ve lost since childhood. My half sister is someone I simply never had access to; a strange decision born of the times in which she lived as a young child. Those were the days when “doing what’s best” meant avoid complex family configurations like bio dads and step families. So I don’t count her as a loss, so much as an opportunity for connection that was denied.

But to really consider what I’ve lost since childhood, I could make you a sad long list. My brother and I were very close at the time he left for college.  His issues with depression came to light as a teenager, and continue to this day. As his younger sister, a full five years behind him, I was not in any reasonable position to help him, but I knew that he needed help. I thought (as twelve year olds, and other people, tend to do) that by loving my brother as much as I did, that I could heal him of whatever sadness or anger he was feeling.  My clueless parents, at a loss as to how to help him either, thought that sending his little sister in to “talk with him” when he was feeling suicidal was a good way to help him feel better, since he wouldn’t talk to them at all.

In spite of his emotional troubles, he was able to use his smarts to finish high school, and get into college.  Off he went, and leaving me behind of course, and soon little sister was easily replaced by college pals, girlfriends, marijuana and jazz. We lost touch, and I supposed he no longer needed a little sister to love him, or bake him apple pies when he came home to visit, or to follow him around and bother him when he was showing his visiting college girlfriends around the town.

I was also quite busy by then, learning how to be a holy terror teenager myself, as my parents picked that time to decide to split up in the most agonizing ways they could think of, with my dad slinking off to sleep somewhere other than my parents’ room. First, he colonized my brother’s empty bedroom, then trudged downstairs to the basement guest room. Finally, as my grandparents died, he crossed the street to live in their house “in order to fix it up and clean it out.”

And so it was that within the course of a few years, I lost my brother (to college - 1985), my parents (to their self-absorbed separation / divorce - begun in 1986 and finalized in 1992), and my grandparents (died in 1988, and 1989).  Plus, my best friend’s family moved to Germany (1987). I really cried when she told me they were moving away, it seemed so unfair.

Fast forward to now. My dad’s health is less than stellar. My mom drives me insane. I speak to my brother about twice a year. And I want to connect with my half sister — Why?

I don’t really know what I expected to gain from this. Did I track her down for my father’s benefit, or mine? If I want so much to connect with family, why am I also so estranged from the ones that I actually know?

I spoke to my brother for the first time this year on Easter. His wife is apparently recovering from major surgery,  and their family is doing their best to adjust to life in which the mom of the house is significantly disabled (temporarily - it is hoped she’ll be able to recover fully within 6 months or so). I feel very sad for my nieces and nephew, and for my brother, that life is so difficult for them right now.

I find myself thinking, “What can I do? What should I do? How can I help my brother?” It’s a familiar and painful feeling. I think I’ll send them a care package, at least. In the long run, I can’t help him, really — his life is what it is. He and I are very different and his choices have molded him so extremely.  We grew up together, but then, apart.

Did you ever see the Muppet movie in which Gonzo is contacted by his alien relatives and he finds out that he’s not really alone like he thought he was? I think my hopes concerning my sister were something like that. That I would find this long lost sister and learn that there’s a reasonable, creative, kind and interesting person in my family who is something like me.

Is that so much to ask?

About a month ago, I wrote Jennifer a long, hand-written note telling her about my dad, his reasons for allowing her to be lost from his life, though it hurt him. I let her know how precarious his health status is. I explained how badly he wished he could see her again someday.

As time passed, began to think she’d decided that it was all a hoax, or that it was all too difficult. Perhaps, I worried, I’d done the wrong thing to barge in on her life and make such strong suggestions that she make an attempt to connect with her bio father and with me. I have wanted to find a way to fill this emptiness of the unknown sister. I’ve seen how much my father has suffered over his guilt, his regret.

I am a parent. I know what it is to love one’s child. Jennifer is a parent, too. I would think she’d have this same insight into the depth of feeling that one has for one’s child. This feeling doesn’t go away. I know it never went away for my dad, even though he relinquished her to be raised by his ex-wife and her new husband. Nothing can change that decision, or his loss of knowing her for her life. But knowing her now would heal him in a way. I think it would somehow relieve his ache, if he could see that she is really fine.

Enter me and my mad internet searching skillz. I barged in, tracked the lady down, and called her. Wrote her email and letters. My mind filled with What If this and What If that.

Never did I think the response would be what it finally was, today, in my email.

Jennifer wrote to me the following message:

Dear Pann, Thanks for the note. I’ve been trying to think/construct the thoughtful response it deserve.

Some people can write so eloquently, for me it is an agonizing process. First, you are a truly beautiful person to want to do this for your dad and I. I am thankful that you found me and we will have the opportunity to know each other!!!!!

Next, your dad should not feel any regret over what he did. I do not hate him or have any baggage regarding the situation.

Rather I know and have always known that all involved did what they did out of love for me and doing what they felt was in my best interest. I have respect for my father for having to make that hard decision.

Today blended family are the norm but back then the term didn’t even exist. My life turned out exactly the way it was intend to turn out with a happy childhood and a great mom and dad. This is true because of the sacrifice of our father, who I am sure was a great dad to you.
I am happy with the way things are. I do not feel the need to fix anything because nothing is broken. I am sorry but I don’t feel like I need to meet and reconnect with my father. I just feel at this time to leave things as is. Please know my family (the whole blended newly realized conglomerate) is in my thoughts and prayers. I pray I have the done the right thing and your opinion of me hasn’t waned.

Please keep in touch and I hope all is well.
God Bless,
Jennifer

This was not what I expected. I can’t imagine finding out that someone so closely related to me is still alive, still cares, and wants to connect with me, but deciding against it.

She’s happy with the way things are. Yes, but what about my dad? He is heart broken and always will be. She, and she alone, could ease that pain just by making one phone call. Just by saying to him what she said in the email - that she understands and bears him no ill will. That alone would go so far.

I don’t judge her harshly for making this decision. But maybe I do judge her a little. I just can’t ever see myself handling such a situation in that way. I am by nature very, very curious. I would want to know more, even if it was difficult. Life could only get richer from knowing one more father. Life could only be sweeter, knowing there’s one more soul in the world that feels just a little lighter, for having its emptiness slightly replenished.

I believe that whenever we reach out and give a little more than we are required, we get back so much more in return. Kindness is multiplied. Joy begets joy. Spread love, because it’s a renewable resource. This paragraph sounds unbearably corny, but there you have it. My philosophy of life in a nutshell.

I am confused by her note, too. She does say that she and I “will have the opportunity to know each other.” So she’s not closing the door on our relationship continuing. Yet I feel so strange to get to know her, but know all the while that she is not interested in knowing my father. When he dies, she will lose that chance forever. I will mourn him while she will continue not knowing the person that we had lost.

Can sisters of one father be so different? Of course. We are only half sisters, and raised in separate families and in different places. Oddly enough, she was raised in a different county in the same state as me - not that long of a drive away. How hard would it have been, to have allowed a visit or two!?

She is not to blame for that, of course. But whoever felt that a child should not know her father — just because she has a new one — that person is so wrong. She’s right though, that such blended families were not considered normal or healthy back then. How different today’s world is!

I am far from reconciled with this news. I am just reacting to it now for the first time. I received her message less than an hour ago, and decided that writing about it might help me.

That’s another way that she and I are quite different. For her, writing is difficult and agonizing, whereas for me it’s another form of breathing, and something I might just perish without. For her to have put together a note to me, I am sure it took a great deal of thought and effort. I need to respect that.

All in all, though, I confess that I am very sad about her decision. I am trying to restrain myself from arguing with her. How alienating would that be, to have this pesky little sister come on so strong, out of the blue, demanding, wheedling, begging! And yet… part of me feels like I should argue with her, and persuade her to change her mind because it’s just so important to me, to my dad. I feel like I can’t connect with her if this is how she wants to leave things with dad. I feel a sense of anxiety, impending doom. This man is not going to live very long! Then it will be too late! Then I will have to live with the knowledge that I didn’t do everything in my power to convince her to give him this scrap of herself. A phonecall. A note. An email. Something, for crying out loud.

I am struggling with this. Who is to say, what the right thing to do is? Perhaps I should have just given my father her address and phone number and let him do with it, whatever he wished. I didn’t think of that, though. I thought the easiest way to get to know her was to call her, and let her know about contacting her dad. I thought for sure she’d take that information, sleep on it, and then wake up ready to add another relative into her life.

Instead, I ended up adding another layer of separation between them - now I know that she doesn’t want to connect with him. What if he’d just called her that night, instead of me? Did I make things worse? I am really unsure. This is hard, and sad, in such unexpected ways.

(Sniff. Cat still gone. Not going to write about it.)

I talked to my Dad a couple days before Thanksgiving. He had decided to stay put in Florida, rather than head back north to spend the holiday with his wife and her family. The reason? His health is too poor right now to travel. He’s feeling weak and short of breath, and his heart rate has dropped to a dangerously low level. And he’s ALONE. There’s nobody there with him in his mobile home; he says the whole park is deserted.

But he is not going in the hospital. He’s decided that he never wants to be admitted to a hospital ever again. He didn’t like being the ICU for nine days over the summer, and he just doesn’t want to do that again.

How am I supposed to interpret this? I figure it’s just his way of deciding how his last days on earth will be spent. I am wondering if I should hop on a plane and say goodbye or something, but that seems really morose and perhaps over dramatic too. Maybe he will be fine, and maybe not.

He and I talked on the phone for such a long time: two whole hours. It was a luxury that I don’t usually have, because I have children*.

I had this luxury of time and availability thanks to a fully charged cell phone, and the fact that I was sitting at a client’s home office (client was not home) busily resurrecting his computer, a task that required little brain power but lots of patience while I waited for various applications to reinstall. So there I was, reformatting a hard drive and chatting with Dad.

Dad told me he no longer believes in God, in heaven– in religion in general. He thinks it’s all made up in the mind of man (humankind, folks, not male folk). He see hypocrisy in all things religious, he is cynical about our country’s government, and is disillusioned and weary about life.

Now I know that religion is something that is a great comfort and source of strength and resolve among the faithful. It seems really odd to me that in the end stages of life, someone who’d been so steadily faithful would lose all faith in God.

Being non-religious myself, I’ve nevertheless continued to hedge my bets. I mean, there’s the argument that if there’s no god, and you believe in God anyway, you don’t miss out on anything, except perhaps eating bagels in a leisurely manner of a Sunday morning. But if there is a God, and you fail to file the proper faithful paperwork under some religion or another, geez, you could end up in hellfire or whatever. Which one seems the safer bet??

For myself, I’ve come to what I consider a decent compromise. Live life in a way that basically heeds the rules of most of the religions, avoid the biggies of moral turpitude, and try not to piss off God. If he’s as merciful as some folks say, I should be OK. This works for me, since, I figure that God or no God, I’d probably live this fairly decent life anyway.

But if I were sitting in a trailer, alone, with a low heart rate, pondering mortality and failing to get my butt to a hospital, I think I might just want to say a prayer or two. You know, just in case.

So much for faith. He must have some faith in his ability to keep living, though, since he still is dragging his feet getting together a new will. This is something that I’ve been nagging him about for about three years, ever since he married his current wife. He’d had a will hastily put together just before his cancer surgery, because there was a 50% chance he’d not make it out of the surgery alive. This will became invalid when he got married.

He claims that he and his wife have a verbal agreement about who gets what. I told him that’s worth absolutely bupkis in the eyes of the law, and if he wants to leave his home and all his assets, eventually, to his current wife’s children, then he need not worry about getting together a new will. But if he has any interest at all in passing his stuff on to me and my brother (and even my estranged half-sister whom I’ve never met) then he needs to get something put together, and soon.

Because one thing I know for certain is that you cannot write your will in the afterlife.

*(Those of you out there who spend large quantities of time caring for kids know exactly what I mean, but the rest of the world might be confused as to why being a mother might mean a lack of availability for long and serious telephone discussions. There is well-documented evidence that when a mother wants to have a phone conversation, she needs to conceal this fact from her children, because the placing of a telephone to the ear of a mother immediately triggers a need for her children to whine and beg for attention as if they never ever got a single moment of love and affection before. As a matter of fact, I had to stop working on this post for the same reason, and I came back to it after a long while.)

I apologize for the last post. It was really depressing.

Now, onto something a little more inspiring. Well, we’ll see. Let’s not count the comments before the post is written.

A while back, I posted about divorce and mentioned some of the difficult situations that I have been witnessing. My children have been playing a lot with M. She is seven, and being our neighbor’s granddaughter, we have known her since she was about a year old. M has finally been granted a custody situation that involves being able to go to school every day, live predominantly with the responsible parent, and still get to visit with her other parent on a regular basis.

M also happens to be African American. She was hanging out with us yesterday and decided to try to teach me to talk black. We’d been talking about birthday money, and C was going on about how she’d gotten $107 from her granddaddy for her 7th birthday, but it was in her bank account. So M asked me which bank, to which I answered “Bank of None of Your BizNess”. She guffawed, and said I had gotten the phrase wrong. “It’s supposed to be None A Ya BizWax,” she told me, “like our color says it,” as she gestured at her own face, giving me one of her characteristically adorable grins.

It was hilarious, being coached by her. Her personality is so sparkly and bubbly that you just can’t feel blue when she’s around. She’s also the kid who told me I was like, eighty hundred thousand percent COOL a while back. What a great kid.

I was really blown away when she made reference recently to the fact that she is different from us — ie, not white. It’s not something I would ever directly refer to. I am not sure why that is, since I live in a neighborhood that is quite mixed racially, as far as black and white. In my immediate block, I’d say of the 5 closest neighbors, two families are white, and three are black. We live side by side, greet one another, our kids play, our block is friendly and comfortable. It’s a kind of racial paradise.

In fact, the neighborhood that I live in is known for its tolerant attitudes. There are many bi-racial families; and families with two moms, or two dads; there are Quakers, and Catholics, Jews and Protestants. There are Muslim families, too, though no Mosque that I know of. There is a Hindu Temple and a Jewish Center within a quarter mile of each other, just down the road from the Lutheran Seminary. We all live side by side; it’s peaceful here.

In spite of all this lovey dovey living together that we try to do here, I have always felt a strong sense of the other. Or maybe of being an outsider. It’s hard to explain. I think it’s because I grew up in such a racist environment, where blacks and whites were quite segregated. (Obviously, I did not grow up here in Philadelphia, though I’m told that not all neighborhoods of our city are as cozy as the one we live in. I rarely leave the zip code, though, so I have this lovely illusion of living in a harmonious glade.)

The small town I grew up in was mostly white, with a small part of town that was kind of like a small town ghetto block where the blacks all lived. The schools I went to, public schools all, had different educational tracks - ones for kids headed to college and ones for kids who were destined to start working right out of high school, as say, hair dressers, mechanics, office assistants, or other jobs that don’t require a higher education. There were no local black kids in my ‘honors’ classes (that’s not strictly accurate, as there was ONE though she was not a local kid, but came from a neighboring affluent area that was so sparsely populated that they do not have a high school of their own). The blacks kids did not hang out with white kids. They just didn’t. We didn’t compare the way we talked, or chat about common things, or feel at ease with each other. Ever. I walked around with this tense feeling that dictated that we are all same and our color doesn’t matter, which was neither comfortable nor true.

So that is why it’s so heart warming that I find myself feeling included, feeling appreciated, feeling that I can be who I am and at the same time enjoy the company of others who aren’t the same as me. I love being able to embrace and accept the differences that we have in this region. When M talks about ‘her color,’ she speaks of it with pride and pleasure, which is just as it should be. When I think of the diversity of my neighborhood, I’m not just giving lip service to the politically correct Diversity concept. I just love that we can and do get along and not in the “good fences make good neighbors” way.

I hope that my children are learning that crucial lesson that is put so succinctly in The Muppets Take Manhattan:

Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?

I tried to drive home this easy to remember phrase (Peoples Is Peoples!) some weeks back when we were shopping at the discount store. My daughters were kind of taken aback at seeing a woman shopping, dressed head to toe in black robes, her face showing only the tiniest strip across her eyes, for she was clearly of the Muslim faith and was choosing to dress quite conservatively. The younger one stopped and stared, and started to point. This made me feel just terrible, because my instinct was that I felt the kids should be polite, not stare, and act as if nothing was different. But that’s silly, because obviously, the woman shopping dressed in her Islamic garb is different from us, as any little kid can tell you.

The Peoples Is Peoples line jumped into my head and I pulled my girls aside. I spoke quietly to them, and reminded them what I’d told them in the car the last time we chanced to see some women dressed this way. “Underneath her clothes, that woman is just another person like anybody. People are people, no matter what they happen to be wearing. Don’t be afraid, but please also don’t point or stare because that is not a polite way to behave.”

The woman overheard my little speech and came over to us. I felt a little nervous; had she been offended? Had my kids seemed disrespectful and ignorant? Was my little pep talk too inane, did I fail to impart some important lesson? Not at all. She said to me, “I really appreciate that you took the time to talk to your kids and tell them that.” She opened her veil so that my girls could see her face, and she smiled at them. “See,” she said, “your mama is right. I’m just a regular person under here!”

Something about that encounter brought tears to my eyes. It was very emotional. I felt like if people would just talk to each other and not make assumptions, we could all breathe a little easier.

Back to my lessons on how to say None of Your BizWax properly… Maya didn’t think much of my inflection and intonation as I tried to copy her phrases exactly, but I did the best I could, and we were all amused. She told me to practice on it a while and get back to her. As Miss Mary Lennox, that sour girl who grows healthy out on the moor in The Secret Garden, says of the broad Yorkshire dialect: I’m learning it as if it were French. My kids just say we’re learning to talk Philly. I like that.

That’s how cool we are, according to our neighbor’s grand-daughter, Maya.

Maya, 6 years old, going on 16, comes over a couple times each week to play with my daughters. Her parents are divorced and her father is battling for custody of her.  She spends a lot of time over our house.

Today she and I and my younger daughter, A, were sitting around the table having a snack and chatting about butterflies.  I told her about how we’d found a dead monarch butterfly, which she saw up in C’s room (it’s beautiful, and is in a little plastic container).  C maintains that she never opens the container because it stinks.

Maya: Does that butterfly really stink?

Me: C says so, but I wouldn’t know. When I find a dead butterfly, I don’t go up to it to smell it.  I just look at it, and put it in a container because it was beautiful, but you won’t see me going around sniffing it.

Maya (cracking up): People would think you were crazy if you did that!

Me: Well, actually I am a little crazy.

Maya: Well… just a teeny tiny bit. (gesturing with her thumb and pointer in a tight pinch)… But you’re cool.  Y’all are all cool.  You’re cool from Africa to China and back, 800 thousand times. That’s how cool y’all are. 80 hundred thousand percent COOL.

That’s just what I needed to hear. Earlier today I’d been feeling like a total slacker. I was really tired and fell asleep on my elder daughter’s new loft bed.  It’s really cozy up there. Then I realized at some point that it was already 2 PM and I hadn’t prepared any lunch.  When I’d been hungry myself, rather than take that as a cue to get lunch together, I munched some tortilla chips. Looking back on that, at 2 PM, I really felt like a lame mom.  I mean, really, #1 job responsibility is feeding the kids, isn’t it?*

Meanwhile, on the “career” front, I’m excited to report that I had a Job Interview for the first time in a long while, and have a 1 in 3 shot at getting a really challenging, fun, rewarding job working with kids in an after school program.  And back to reality, the job I currently have, that of running a web hosting and design business is on hold but the clients don’t really know that. I have to return some phones calls and I’ve been putting it off because I am not really sure what I want to say.

I want to have some kind of plan about what to say, because I fear I’ll just act on gut impulse if I don’t plan it ahead. They wants answers not more hedging.  I’ve been putting off these people for long enough.  Sure, I’ll have two weeks of child care in a couple weeks, but is that enough to work on the projects?  And what if I get the JOB I just interviewed for?  I feel like I just can’t commit to the work, even though turning down two grand is kind of hard to swallow.

Think. Think. Think.

Well…. At least I’m cool.

* These days, I’m struck with the irony of how hard people say it is to breastfeed… I found that pretty easy. But preparing meals that are nutritious and delicious, 3 a day, for the whole family, especially when each person’s tastes vary… that really takes a lot more effort than rolling over and pulling the hungry little mouth to my breast.

On top of the effort it takes to feed ‘em all properly, I don’t think there is any consensus on what the Right food for us to eat is, whereas, when my lil ones were babes, I was told repeated that I was providing the Perfect food. Wow, perfect. Yeah, and it was free and pretty easy too. And I could do it in my sleep. )

… we had shorter life spans.

I was chatting with someone recently who pointed out to me that marriages didn’t last that long back in the old days either, because “till death do you part” was much more frequently the reality. Is it reasonable to say that people would not have trouble committing to being married with someone until death if they knew that person might not live very long anyway?

Think about it - death from childbirth, disease, infection, Read the rest of this entry »