Part II: Reluctance

According to two converging pieces of family lore, after my mother left me with at my grandparents’ house (I was somewhere around three years old), my grandmother tried to take me to the doctor to get my immunizations updated. The doctor kindly informed Gram that because she had no legal rights, that they could not give me any medical attention no matter how well intentioned she was.

So a lawyer was contacted and temporary custody papers were drawn up. Gram drove to a house in Sonoma or Boyes Hot Springs where my mother was staying. My father was also in the house, although they were long since separated and the divorce was in full swing. The house was apparently full of people they both knew. He was willing to sign the papers and felt that is was important that my mother sign them also. She refused. My father told her that he would beat every person in the house until she signed the papers. Yes, he threatened her and coerced her into signing away temporary custody of me. There were no contradictions years later in their separate accounts of the details of that day. He felt strongly it was for the best. She disagreed but ultimately acquiesced. She insisted for the rest of her life that she did not agree to completely give up custody of me. She only agreed to a temporary custody situation.

My mother’s version of this story was told over and over while my siblings were growing up. They heard it far more often than I did, but we all understood the moral of the story. The implication was clear: signing even a temporary order will guarantee loss of custody. You will be cheated out of what is yours. I suppose on some level my mother felt both complicit and cheated. For her there was an underlying truth that she could be cheated out of her own child simply by signing one piece of paper.

From my perspective, that piece of paper had little or nothing to do with the where I grew up. I lived with Gram and Grandpa because my mother left me. A piece of the custody story that my mother perhaps didn’t tell my siblings is that she dropped me off at my grandparent’s house for another long weekend of babysitting. My grandfather told her not to bother coming back for me: the implication of course was that he wouldn’t let me go. My mother protested and a verbal argument ensued. But, and this is an important piece, she left me there. Instead of walking back into the house and taking me with her, she left me. Instead of going directly to the police department and telling them her father refused to hand her daughter over, she left me. Instead of contacting a lawyer, she left me. Presumably she left on her weekend away and followed Grandpa’s advice not to return for me.

Fast forward a generation. My sister has given birth to her third child. When the baby is born my sister is an inmate at a women’s prison. My mother and her husband are there and take the baby home with them. My sister refuses to sign any papers allowing my mother any legal rights of guardianship. The state did have some authority and gave my mother temporary custody of the baby anyway. Later, in argument between mother and daughter, my sister told my mother that there would be no signing of any papers and that my mother had better not take the baby away from her mother, although my sister did not claim her daughter once released from prison. Sometime before she died, my mother obtained legal custody of her granddaughter. Upon her death my brother became the baby's legal guardian. So the cycle, punctuated by great irony, continued.

These stories and many more began circling through my brain as I attempted to decide how exactly I wanted to proceed with contacting my sister, or if I really wanted to proceed at all. I had learned very different lessons from the stories of custody papers and signatures than my siblings had. I believe that they had learned how easy it was to become a victim and that perpetuating that sense of victimhood somehow gave them a sense of justification for their actions.

Over the years I had several arguments with my mother about her life choices. There always seemed to be something else she needed in her life in order to make it better or to be happy. She needed a new place to live, or a new husband, or a new boyfriend. She spent her life wandering from situation to situation led in large part by her addiction to alcohol. Because both women gave up custody of all three of their children, it seemed logical to me that they would have the same attitude about those choices.

My first impulse was to call my sister. My second came so quickly on the heals of the first that there was no time for impulsive actions. And I was driving, I had no headset and a bad signal, so I only had time to wonder what she was like. That took me to a very uncomfortable place. I attempted to reconcile the little girl I had known who desperately wanted love and was terrified that people were angry with her with the woman who had ended up in prison. The conversations I conjured didn’t go well from the onset. It was easy to imagine the stories about how she had been wronged by the system, or her son’s grandparents, or her oldest daughter’s father, or our mother and brother.

I live my life so vastly differently from the way my siblings live theirs. I live in a nice house and drive a fairly nice car in a town less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. My brother lives in a double-wide in Lake County. I have been pretty happily married for more than 20 years. Neither of my siblings has married. I can go to the grocery store and buy steak whenever I want. My siblings grew up on food stamps, and so far as I know their incomes haven’t improved much in adulthood. Most importantly, I raised my own children.

When I was a kid, I carried a fairly heavy burden around: I felt guilty that I lived with Gram and Grandpa and had a better life than my siblings. I believed it was better because we didn’t move often; we had nice things; my grandparents didn’t drink to excess; my clothes were often new and didn’t have stains or cigarette burn holes in them. Our house wasn’t furnished with remnants from the garbage truck my step-dad worked on. In my school pictures my hair was always combed and I looked clean and well dressed. I somehow felt responsible for what my siblings lacked because I was the one who ended up living with Gram and Grandpa.

I eventually came to realize that I had no control over the situation and was able to shed the coat of guilt I had made for myself. But shedding the fear that they resented me was much more difficult. This is really the crux of what made me balk at calling my sister right away. That and the fear that she was as immersed in her own victimhood as our mother had been.