The hubby and I went to Happy Hour at a local Mexican restaurant a few weeks ago. We ordered a couple of house margaritas and some tiny tacos and settled in to chat.
Shortly after we arrived, an older gentleman sat alone behind the hubby. He looked and walked in such a way that indicated his age was beyond the 80 year mark. He reminded me of my grandfather; Grandpa would have been 94 this year. My attention waned there and I went back to my conversation. Until a few minutes later when a pint glass full of beer was set down at his table. My attention was captured again, quite suddenly, when I saw the man reach for the salt shaker and shske salt into his beer. I watched the familiar foaming of the beer and as soon as it began to settle, he took a sip.
When I was a little girl, my grandpa would come home from work every week night, make Gram a highball and open a can of beer for himself. In later years he switched primarily to highballs, but the bulk of the memories of my younger years include cans of Olympia beer, the discarded pull tab and the way Grandpa would make a funnel out of his curled up first finger and pour salt into the small opening on the top of the can. Often before he added the salt he would give me a very small amount of beer in my own glass, and I would shake salt into mine once he was done seasoning his can. I was only allowed a very small amount of beer, and of course it was many years before I understood the reasons for my small ration.
By now my attention was ping-ponging back and forth between my husband and the man behind him. I threw caution to the wind and approached the stranger. I excused myself and explained that I noticed he had put salt in his beer. He smiled, gestured toward his glass and asked, "Do you want some of my beer?" I laughed. Grandpa had also been quite a flirt. Even lying in a hospital bed hooked up to tubes and monitors he could make the nurses giggle. Born and raised in Arkansas, Grandpa left home in 1941 to join the Army Air Corp. and never lived at home again. Even outside of his home state, he could certainly turn on the southern charm.
I explained that no, I did not want any of his beer, but that my grandfather used to put salt in his beer as well. I wondered how the man had learned to season his beer. I told him about the small rations I was allowed to have as a child, and how I was often bereft at the parties I went to in my youth when the beer was plentiful but the salt was nowhere to be found. He laughed at that. He explained that his father and grandfather had put salt in their beers, so he simply followed what he had learned as a youngster. I asked him where he was from. He hesitated for just a moment; I could see him struggling to explain where he lived now, or where he lived before, but he ultimately settled on, "I was born and raised in Arkansas." There it was, the defining connection between the stranger in front of me and my beloved grandfather and their shared love of salty beer. We spoke another moment and I sat back down.
Grandpa's southern accent had faded over the 60 years that he had lived in California. I struggled for most of my childhood to hear the accent that my friends and family claimed he had. When I think back on the brief and pleasant encounter with the stranger in the Mexican restaurant, I realize that I heard no accent in his speech. I suppose that his voice, like his beer, was only lightly seasoned.
Lake Mendocino
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Increased Tensions
I am going into my fourth year of teaching at the community college level, and each semester the tension in the weeks leading up to the first day of classes is ratcheted up more and more. So much so that it now spills into the first two weeks of classes. Because of budget cuts and reduced class offerings, there simply are not enough seats for all the students who need classes.
Back in August at CCC, many more students were sitting in my classroom than were enrolled. Imagine walking into a classroom with 40 or so chairs, every one is filled and yet people are still trickling into the classroom for most of the class period hoping to add. Several times class was disrupted because someone opened the door an hour in and asked if there was room in the class. The cap is 30 students, and my roster was full, plus there were 10 people on the waiting list. I had been fielding emails from students for most of the summer who wanted to add the class. Most of the students were polite in their requests, a few were a bit more demanding.
The first day of class becomes a game of sharing standard lines. They say:
"By the end of the semester a bunch of people will have dropped."
"I really need this class."
"Without this class I can't transfer/graduate."
"I won't miss a class; I'm a great student."
My responses include:
"If I add more students than my limit I could get in trouble with my department, or fired."
"I understand, the situation sucks all the way around. This is happening to too many students."
"I can't give feedback on that many papers each week."
"Pedagogically speaking, there should only be 20 students enrolled for everyone to be able to pass."
"I was told if I add more students, the powers that be might very well cut more sections."
In the past there have been some conversations that became somewhat heated because I refused to add students and over-load the class. That led to students complaining to the dean and head of the department about me not allowing them to add an already full class. Yes, the administration backed me.
This semester was different. There was less anger and much more angst. One student in my night class offered to pay me $10 each week if I added him (I refused). Another in the day class tried to bribe anyone with $40 if they dropped the class so he could add. He upped the ante to $60, but there were no takers and I wouldn't support the transaction anyway. Some stayed after class and cried as they related their particular stories as to why they weren't able to register during open enrollment. Some returned for several days hoping that even one person would drop the class. One young woman stopped me in the hallway outside my office and began crying as she told me how not getting into my class would effect her educational goals.
Keep in mind that I am only relating the stories of the students who already live in economically depressed areas. Poor students are offering bribes. Poverty stricken students are desperately trying to claw their way out and are using education as a tool to improve their lives. I went to the dean to suggest the necessity of adding more classes only to find out that the school is already running in the red and the VP is asking the school to cut more sections.
Why don't I add them, you ask? Because if I took all the students who wanted to add, I would have more than 150 papers to grade and give feedback on every week. At an average of 15 minutes per paper, that is 37.5 hours each week (and that assumes that there is only 1 assignment per class per week) of just grading. That leaves no time for lesson planning, or teaching. My effectiveness as an instructor would diminish dramatically. It ultimately wouldn't matter if students added my class or not, they wouldn't learn what they need to move on. I would be undermining their education and my career all at once.
Maybe I'm too empathetic, but saying no over and over again is very difficult. Dealing with their anguish and frustration is traumatizing.
I thought the coast was clear in week three, until a student showed up at the end of one class asking if I would add her. I started to offer a standard line about not being allowed to have too many students, and she told me that "the head guy" sent her over to talk to me. When I asked for clarification about the name of this "head guy" she copped an attitude and stormed out. *sigh*
Week four begins tomorrow and I'm hoping I can spend my energy just teaching.
Back in August at CCC, many more students were sitting in my classroom than were enrolled. Imagine walking into a classroom with 40 or so chairs, every one is filled and yet people are still trickling into the classroom for most of the class period hoping to add. Several times class was disrupted because someone opened the door an hour in and asked if there was room in the class. The cap is 30 students, and my roster was full, plus there were 10 people on the waiting list. I had been fielding emails from students for most of the summer who wanted to add the class. Most of the students were polite in their requests, a few were a bit more demanding.
The first day of class becomes a game of sharing standard lines. They say:
"By the end of the semester a bunch of people will have dropped."
"I really need this class."
"Without this class I can't transfer/graduate."
"I won't miss a class; I'm a great student."
My responses include:
"If I add more students than my limit I could get in trouble with my department, or fired."
"I understand, the situation sucks all the way around. This is happening to too many students."
"I can't give feedback on that many papers each week."
"Pedagogically speaking, there should only be 20 students enrolled for everyone to be able to pass."
"I was told if I add more students, the powers that be might very well cut more sections."
In the past there have been some conversations that became somewhat heated because I refused to add students and over-load the class. That led to students complaining to the dean and head of the department about me not allowing them to add an already full class. Yes, the administration backed me.
This semester was different. There was less anger and much more angst. One student in my night class offered to pay me $10 each week if I added him (I refused). Another in the day class tried to bribe anyone with $40 if they dropped the class so he could add. He upped the ante to $60, but there were no takers and I wouldn't support the transaction anyway. Some stayed after class and cried as they related their particular stories as to why they weren't able to register during open enrollment. Some returned for several days hoping that even one person would drop the class. One young woman stopped me in the hallway outside my office and began crying as she told me how not getting into my class would effect her educational goals.
Keep in mind that I am only relating the stories of the students who already live in economically depressed areas. Poor students are offering bribes. Poverty stricken students are desperately trying to claw their way out and are using education as a tool to improve their lives. I went to the dean to suggest the necessity of adding more classes only to find out that the school is already running in the red and the VP is asking the school to cut more sections.
Why don't I add them, you ask? Because if I took all the students who wanted to add, I would have more than 150 papers to grade and give feedback on every week. At an average of 15 minutes per paper, that is 37.5 hours each week (and that assumes that there is only 1 assignment per class per week) of just grading. That leaves no time for lesson planning, or teaching. My effectiveness as an instructor would diminish dramatically. It ultimately wouldn't matter if students added my class or not, they wouldn't learn what they need to move on. I would be undermining their education and my career all at once.
Maybe I'm too empathetic, but saying no over and over again is very difficult. Dealing with their anguish and frustration is traumatizing.
I thought the coast was clear in week three, until a student showed up at the end of one class asking if I would add her. I started to offer a standard line about not being allowed to have too many students, and she told me that "the head guy" sent her over to talk to me. When I asked for clarification about the name of this "head guy" she copped an attitude and stormed out. *sigh*
Week four begins tomorrow and I'm hoping I can spend my energy just teaching.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Time to Check in, Not Out
Each week I receive a report from a free site that follows the number of folks who land on my blogs. I can see which provider each visitor uses for internet access, what country, city and state they reside in, how much time they spent on my blog and how many pages they scrolled through.
I can also see which urls said visitors began at before clicking onto my blog. Some of those are weird. The Facebook links make sense, as do the ones that move directly from my website. But the "travel blogs" are odd. I can't even figure them out well enough to explain what I mean by "travel blogs," but there seems to be some random connection.
In my roundabout way I am admitting that I know that some folks check my blog fairly regularly to see if I have posted something new. A few wonderful folks check as often as a couple of times each week. I understand this because I am that kind of person myself; I will check for updates on certain sites often (i.e. several times each day) if that place offers something I find interesting. What is of interest to me can be as simple as the happenings in the life of a friend.
So, in order to honor the folks who are diligent about looking for new information, here is an update:
The new semester is upon me. I am teaching four classes. In the Fall I was teaching five. That last one did me in. I am hoping that taking the stress down a notch will enable me to write more often. This posting is a toe in the water.
I have still heard nothing from my sister. I do have the choice of dropping by the apartment where her mother-in-law lives, and I may pursue that. For now I refuse to commit; I am waiting for a sign. It feels closer than it has. We shall see.
Now that I can see beyond student papers, I am able to make some observations about the world around me. I'll try to keep those interesting.
I am still waiting to hear from the lit journal that agreed to publish one of my essays. In theory I should have a hard copy in my mailbox by the end of the month. (fingers crossed)
I will be applying to three schools this semester for full-time teaching work that will begin next fall. I'll let you know how that goes.
My toe feels fine. I'll make every effort to check back in soon.
Thanks for reading.
xoxoxo
Ginny
I can also see which urls said visitors began at before clicking onto my blog. Some of those are weird. The Facebook links make sense, as do the ones that move directly from my website. But the "travel blogs" are odd. I can't even figure them out well enough to explain what I mean by "travel blogs," but there seems to be some random connection.
In my roundabout way I am admitting that I know that some folks check my blog fairly regularly to see if I have posted something new. A few wonderful folks check as often as a couple of times each week. I understand this because I am that kind of person myself; I will check for updates on certain sites often (i.e. several times each day) if that place offers something I find interesting. What is of interest to me can be as simple as the happenings in the life of a friend.
So, in order to honor the folks who are diligent about looking for new information, here is an update:
The new semester is upon me. I am teaching four classes. In the Fall I was teaching five. That last one did me in. I am hoping that taking the stress down a notch will enable me to write more often. This posting is a toe in the water.
I have still heard nothing from my sister. I do have the choice of dropping by the apartment where her mother-in-law lives, and I may pursue that. For now I refuse to commit; I am waiting for a sign. It feels closer than it has. We shall see.
Now that I can see beyond student papers, I am able to make some observations about the world around me. I'll try to keep those interesting.
I am still waiting to hear from the lit journal that agreed to publish one of my essays. In theory I should have a hard copy in my mailbox by the end of the month. (fingers crossed)
I will be applying to three schools this semester for full-time teaching work that will begin next fall. I'll let you know how that goes.
My toe feels fine. I'll make every effort to check back in soon.
Thanks for reading.
xoxoxo
Ginny
Sunday, November 6, 2011
And Then...
My last posting ended in an embrace with my long-lost sister. I haven't been able to bring myself to write about those next few days until now. My reluctance isn't because the few hours spent with her were traumatic or painful or unpleasant in any way, but because that was all they were: a few hours.
I'll try to share what I can:
The embrace ended only because my sister wanted to introduce me to her boyfriend. We walked into the apartment number I had been looking for and found him stretched out on the couch next to the fan. It had been an incredibly warm few days and heat had become trapped in the little apartment.
The living room and the kitchen formed an L, and the bedroom door opened to the living room. I noticed furniture that was all fairly modern. The television and DVD player sat on an entertainment unit next to a small table that held a cordless telephone. Some of the furnishings looked like things I would own, or had at one time. I assumed that the mild clutter belonged to the couple and was pleasantly surprised that some of it was newer. I found out later that my sister and boyfriend were sharing the apartment with his mother and his son. Five people were crammed into the small, but charming, space.
She was excited to show me off to her boyfriend. "Look, it's my sister!" To say he was stunned would be an understatement. He had encouraged to her to find me, and here I was. Once we had met and chatted a bit he left us alone for awhile, then proceeded to tell everyone they knew in the apartment complex that I was there. For a short time I was a celebrity. My name was repeated over and over again in a reverent tone.
She and I settled on the couch and spent some time in silence holding hands. Her hands were rough. Mine would be as well if I didn't put lotion on them several times a day. Her skin was clear and was missing the caked-on foundation that she used to wear as a teen. On closer inspection she looked a great deal like her father. We were two sisters who knew very little about each other. What do you say to a sibling you don't really know?
She asked if I liked movies, which I do, and we compared notes about genres.
I asked if she likes to read, and she does. The best revelation of all: She used to write poetry. My sister is a writer!!!! That was perhaps the best moment of all, knowing that she enjoyed writing, especially as she writes in a genre that I can't/don't.
We spent some time talking about where her life had gone and how she came to be in this little apartment and where she wanted to go. We talked about her kids, and she spoke many times about owning her own problems and choices. She was very clear that of the three of us siblings, she had fallen the farthest down some sort of awful hole. My fears that she would exhibit our mother's tendency to blame others were unfounded. It was very clear to me that she planned on staying outside of and away from the hole she had finally managed to climb out of.
When it was time for me to leave, she walked me to my car, and we kissed and hugged.
Two days later we had coffee. I think maybe the timing of our coffee date is why she has disappeared from my life again. I can only speculate because I don't know why she stopped returning my calls.
I wanted to see her regularly, weekly if possible. I wanted to spend a few hours a week or so slowly getting to know each other. I wanted to give her love and support. I suppose that what I wanted was not what she needed. We managed to connect with one quick phone call the following week, but she was doing laundry and promised to call me back outside of the laundromat. She didn't. I called the apartment a few times, but she was never there.
I didn't go looking for her again. She may or may not still be living in the apartment. Her need to pull away was a defense mechanism that I can understand, and I want to honor her needs.
My sister and I are both abandoned kids and survivors of childhood traumas of varying kinds. I have spent several years of my life in therapy working through my issues so that I can be comfortable enough in my own skin to function in a way that I want to. She freely admitted that therapy would likely do her some good. I understand that when confronted with old feelings and memories, retreating is often the safest thing to do. My sudden presence in her life brought up many old and painful feelings for her. She admitted as much while we sat on the couch holding hands.
I know that even as a healthy adult, there are times when I can't continue to move forward with a relationship. It can be a personal or business relationship, but if I feel put off or overwhelmed emotionally, I will pull way, way back and metaphorically disappear. I am aware of my emotional limitations enough to work through them, such as when I was abandoned by a graduate school mentor. Instead climbing into myself and quitting the program, I complained loudly enough that the school assigned me another mentor, and I was able to move forward and complete the program. Another time I was working for a friend and found that the friend was not a great boss, to the point that I felt emotionally abused; after repeated attempts on my part of rectify communication problems, I quit the job.
My theory is that my sister needed to pull back from a relationship with me for her own emotional health. I sent her another message through Facebook, this time telling her that I love her, and that I am here when she is ready to have a relationship.
My fears were unfounded, but so, it would seem, were my dreams.
I'll try to share what I can:
The embrace ended only because my sister wanted to introduce me to her boyfriend. We walked into the apartment number I had been looking for and found him stretched out on the couch next to the fan. It had been an incredibly warm few days and heat had become trapped in the little apartment.
The living room and the kitchen formed an L, and the bedroom door opened to the living room. I noticed furniture that was all fairly modern. The television and DVD player sat on an entertainment unit next to a small table that held a cordless telephone. Some of the furnishings looked like things I would own, or had at one time. I assumed that the mild clutter belonged to the couple and was pleasantly surprised that some of it was newer. I found out later that my sister and boyfriend were sharing the apartment with his mother and his son. Five people were crammed into the small, but charming, space.
She was excited to show me off to her boyfriend. "Look, it's my sister!" To say he was stunned would be an understatement. He had encouraged to her to find me, and here I was. Once we had met and chatted a bit he left us alone for awhile, then proceeded to tell everyone they knew in the apartment complex that I was there. For a short time I was a celebrity. My name was repeated over and over again in a reverent tone.
She and I settled on the couch and spent some time in silence holding hands. Her hands were rough. Mine would be as well if I didn't put lotion on them several times a day. Her skin was clear and was missing the caked-on foundation that she used to wear as a teen. On closer inspection she looked a great deal like her father. We were two sisters who knew very little about each other. What do you say to a sibling you don't really know?
She asked if I liked movies, which I do, and we compared notes about genres.
I asked if she likes to read, and she does. The best revelation of all: She used to write poetry. My sister is a writer!!!! That was perhaps the best moment of all, knowing that she enjoyed writing, especially as she writes in a genre that I can't/don't.
We spent some time talking about where her life had gone and how she came to be in this little apartment and where she wanted to go. We talked about her kids, and she spoke many times about owning her own problems and choices. She was very clear that of the three of us siblings, she had fallen the farthest down some sort of awful hole. My fears that she would exhibit our mother's tendency to blame others were unfounded. It was very clear to me that she planned on staying outside of and away from the hole she had finally managed to climb out of.
When it was time for me to leave, she walked me to my car, and we kissed and hugged.
Two days later we had coffee. I think maybe the timing of our coffee date is why she has disappeared from my life again. I can only speculate because I don't know why she stopped returning my calls.
I wanted to see her regularly, weekly if possible. I wanted to spend a few hours a week or so slowly getting to know each other. I wanted to give her love and support. I suppose that what I wanted was not what she needed. We managed to connect with one quick phone call the following week, but she was doing laundry and promised to call me back outside of the laundromat. She didn't. I called the apartment a few times, but she was never there.
I didn't go looking for her again. She may or may not still be living in the apartment. Her need to pull away was a defense mechanism that I can understand, and I want to honor her needs.
My sister and I are both abandoned kids and survivors of childhood traumas of varying kinds. I have spent several years of my life in therapy working through my issues so that I can be comfortable enough in my own skin to function in a way that I want to. She freely admitted that therapy would likely do her some good. I understand that when confronted with old feelings and memories, retreating is often the safest thing to do. My sudden presence in her life brought up many old and painful feelings for her. She admitted as much while we sat on the couch holding hands.
I know that even as a healthy adult, there are times when I can't continue to move forward with a relationship. It can be a personal or business relationship, but if I feel put off or overwhelmed emotionally, I will pull way, way back and metaphorically disappear. I am aware of my emotional limitations enough to work through them, such as when I was abandoned by a graduate school mentor. Instead climbing into myself and quitting the program, I complained loudly enough that the school assigned me another mentor, and I was able to move forward and complete the program. Another time I was working for a friend and found that the friend was not a great boss, to the point that I felt emotionally abused; after repeated attempts on my part of rectify communication problems, I quit the job.
My theory is that my sister needed to pull back from a relationship with me for her own emotional health. I sent her another message through Facebook, this time telling her that I love her, and that I am here when she is ready to have a relationship.
My fears were unfounded, but so, it would seem, were my dreams.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Part 3: A Premonition and A Push
I don't claim to be truly psychic--cause I'm not--but I do on occasion experience a form of premonition. It doesn't happen often, but I have learned to share the occasional odd thought out loud as a kind of fact-checking. If I say it out loud and it happens, I feel safer calling it a premonition.
That being said, in January the following occurred:
I often share familial stories with my community college students. I use them as a way of modeling how our lives do actually have connections to the literature, and to each other. At the beginning of the Spring 2011 semester I was teaching a class at the Santa Rosa campus of the junior college on Mondays and Wednesdays. I was about to share some story about my strange family configuration and where I am in the sibling line-up (see Storyscape Journal archives for the whole story) when it suddenly occurred to me that if either my brother or sister were on campus taking classes, they might hear a bastardized version of a story that isn't terribly flattering when told first hand. I jokingly asked the class if they knew any of my family; they laughed and shook their heads. It nagged at me for a bit and I even told the hubby about it. I wondered if either sibling would ever take college classes. Then I wondered if I would recognize either of them if I saw them on campus. When I saw my mother for the last time in May of 2004, she gave me a picture of my grown brother. At that time I hadn't seen him since he was 17 years old. In the picture he was in his mid-thirties. I cried because I would not have known him had I seen him on the street. I don't even have the benefit of a recent picture of my sister.
Six months later:
I am trying to decide what to do about contact with my sister. I have experienced a pretty wide range of emotions. I responded to her invitation to call her by asking when was a good time to call. She didn't answer.
I asked for advice on Facebook and the overwhelming response was to do a background check. So I paid the $19.99 to an online company (there are a ton) and got back very little information: A couple of phone numbers (one of which matched the one I had), three different addresses (all in Santa Rosa), one hit from criminal background (with very little information). I was about to give up the idea and not call her when I decided to take one more look at her FB page.
She had 9 friends listed so I checked out their profiles. None of them seemed particularly scary or off-putting. A couple seemed interesting, some even seemed like people who might be in recovery. This was a hopeful sign.
Then it occurred to me that if my sister had a Facebook page, then she also had some access to computers and that could be a very good sign. It has been my experience that as ubiquitous as computers and the internet are, not everyone is online. Many of my students struggle with the technology available to them. A surprising number can't quite get the hang of email. Many use their cell phones for only texting and phone calls, not for Facebook or Twitter or email.
So I made some calls and did some web crawling and found a page of information that said my sister had been a student at Santa Rosa Junior College. IN JANUARY!! She had had classes on campus when I was teaching. One of her instructors was my friend Anne Marie whose class was on the same floor and building and at the same time I had been on campus. I called Anne Marie, but realized that my sis had dropped the class after the first two weeks of classes. My friend had no memory of her. But the fact remained that my sister and I had been on campus at the same time I was wondering about her.
This was a very good sign and all the push I needed. Suddenly all of the reservations and fears that I had about seeing or talking with my sister fell away. I was compelled to see her.
Immediately.
The feeling was so strong, in fact, that I did a new online search to find her most recent address, confirm that the phone number she had given me was a land-line and was off the couch changing my clothes and getting ready to head out the door before my poor hubby had any idea what was going on. I took a few minutes to retrieve her earrings.
Haven't I mentioned the earrings?
My sister was a flower girl in both of my first two weddings. For the second I bought her a pair of faux gold and diamond earrings. After the ceremony was over I offered to hold onto them for safekeeping. The guilt at keeping her earrings from her was kind enough to stay within the confines of the jewelry box most of the time, only coming out when I came across them or the handful of times I wore them myself. It's as if all of the remaining guilt I had carried with me as a child had clung to the earrings. I cleaned them and found a tiny decorative oval metal box to put them in. If I was going to see my sister, I was going to return her earrings. All the while I was getting ready, I felt a really strong sense of urgency as if I had a finite amount of time to accomplish my mission.
The earrings and box went into my front pocket with my phone, my wallet was locked in the glovebox, and I was on my way. I left the house alone and drove the 18 miles to Santa Rosa. I tried to imagine what she would look like. She is ten years younger than me. She was always slender, her hair was a dirty blonde when we were growing up. She loved sweets and I wondered if that had changed her metabolism. Had she inherited the body type from Gram's side of the family (who I favor physically) or retained the slenderness from youth? After giving birth to three babies, anything was possible.
The closer I got, the more I envisioned a reunion from a movie. I imagined parking outside a tiny rental house with young children playing outside. A woman would happen to walk out of the door to check on the children and would look up at me, a seeming stranger on their quiet street. We would lock eyes. I would say "Bambe?" and she would say "Ginger?" and we would run into each other's arms. The fantasy didn't go beyond the hug but it did repeat itself over and over in my head as I inched closer to her street. It was occasionally interrupted by the voice in my head that would point out that the simplicity of that reunion was highly unlikely. Impossible in fact. I needed to stop that nonsense and focus on finding the street and the address.
Just as I reached the street she lived on, my phone rang. I jumped about a mile and answered my phone as I pulled over. It was my son who was quite intrigued when I told him that I was stalking my sister. My siblings are a bit of an abstract concept to my children. They are aware they have an aunt and uncle, but apart from a few pictures, a few mentions in my writing, and the very few stories I tell about my childhood years, they have only fuzzy pictures of the reality of these two people. The phone call required me to pull around the corner and ultimately drive around the block to return to the house numbers where I thought she lived. Once off the phone I found a parking space closest to the spot I believed I would find her house.
As I pulled up to the curb, and a woman walked out from between two buildings toward the street. I noticed then that the two buildings faced each other creating a kind of long courtyard between them, all doors face toward that yard. The address I had for my sister could easily be marked on one of those doors. I looked back at the woman and saw how slender she was; her face was very thin which was highlighted by the long pair pulled sharply back into a ponytail/bun. At first I only saw a brief profile and her back. She had on short black shorts and a tank top. Her arms were lightly tanned beneath various tattoos that were scattered on her arms, back and neck. She disappeared momentarily behind the backside of the building farthest from me and reappeared to speak to someone in a small pickup truck who pulled up after I parked. I wondered if I was witnessing a drug deal when the door opened and it looked like something passed between the woman and someone in the cab. I looked away.
I took a breath and decided to find the address. I stepped out of my car and walked behind it to the sidewalk. I looked back at the woman who had moved back again toward the far building and was holding a cigarette. Ah, no drug deal; she had simply bummed a smoke. Logically it would make more sense to ask where I could find the address than to wander into people’s yards.
The woman was watching me so I walked toward her. I wondered if it was Bambe and searched her features for something familiar. It was in that moment that I noticed the haunted look pass over her face. Her eyes were wide and only mildly frightened, as if the ghost in front of her was a welcome sight. And I suppose that I was.
I carry many of our mother’s features on my face; there are only a small number of people alive who react to me in the way she did at that moment. But I wasn’t sure yet if she was my sister, so I walked toward her and said, “Can you help me?” Her reaction was too close to the fantasy that had run through my mind on the drive.
“What are you looking for?” was the reply I heard. She may have asked who I was looking for.
“I’m looking for 492.”
That was when we knew.
“Ginger?”
“Bambe?”
She dropped her cigarette and ran to me at full speed. I moved toward her as quickly as I could. The impact our bodies made is not the sound you typically hear in the movie scene. It was very clearly the sound two bodies make when they hit; less noisy than the impact on a football field, more so than two lovers meeting in a field of daisies.
We held each other through that impact. Tight. Hard. We stood there with our arms wrapped around each other. And stood there. Neither wanted to loosen her hold or let go.
“How are you?” She said as if making regular conversation with someone she had seen the day before. Neither of us let go.
“Good. How are you?” I answered.
That being said, in January the following occurred:
I often share familial stories with my community college students. I use them as a way of modeling how our lives do actually have connections to the literature, and to each other. At the beginning of the Spring 2011 semester I was teaching a class at the Santa Rosa campus of the junior college on Mondays and Wednesdays. I was about to share some story about my strange family configuration and where I am in the sibling line-up (see Storyscape Journal archives for the whole story) when it suddenly occurred to me that if either my brother or sister were on campus taking classes, they might hear a bastardized version of a story that isn't terribly flattering when told first hand. I jokingly asked the class if they knew any of my family; they laughed and shook their heads. It nagged at me for a bit and I even told the hubby about it. I wondered if either sibling would ever take college classes. Then I wondered if I would recognize either of them if I saw them on campus. When I saw my mother for the last time in May of 2004, she gave me a picture of my grown brother. At that time I hadn't seen him since he was 17 years old. In the picture he was in his mid-thirties. I cried because I would not have known him had I seen him on the street. I don't even have the benefit of a recent picture of my sister.
Six months later:
I am trying to decide what to do about contact with my sister. I have experienced a pretty wide range of emotions. I responded to her invitation to call her by asking when was a good time to call. She didn't answer.
I asked for advice on Facebook and the overwhelming response was to do a background check. So I paid the $19.99 to an online company (there are a ton) and got back very little information: A couple of phone numbers (one of which matched the one I had), three different addresses (all in Santa Rosa), one hit from criminal background (with very little information). I was about to give up the idea and not call her when I decided to take one more look at her FB page.
She had 9 friends listed so I checked out their profiles. None of them seemed particularly scary or off-putting. A couple seemed interesting, some even seemed like people who might be in recovery. This was a hopeful sign.
Then it occurred to me that if my sister had a Facebook page, then she also had some access to computers and that could be a very good sign. It has been my experience that as ubiquitous as computers and the internet are, not everyone is online. Many of my students struggle with the technology available to them. A surprising number can't quite get the hang of email. Many use their cell phones for only texting and phone calls, not for Facebook or Twitter or email.
So I made some calls and did some web crawling and found a page of information that said my sister had been a student at Santa Rosa Junior College. IN JANUARY!! She had had classes on campus when I was teaching. One of her instructors was my friend Anne Marie whose class was on the same floor and building and at the same time I had been on campus. I called Anne Marie, but realized that my sis had dropped the class after the first two weeks of classes. My friend had no memory of her. But the fact remained that my sister and I had been on campus at the same time I was wondering about her.
This was a very good sign and all the push I needed. Suddenly all of the reservations and fears that I had about seeing or talking with my sister fell away. I was compelled to see her.
Immediately.
The feeling was so strong, in fact, that I did a new online search to find her most recent address, confirm that the phone number she had given me was a land-line and was off the couch changing my clothes and getting ready to head out the door before my poor hubby had any idea what was going on. I took a few minutes to retrieve her earrings.
Haven't I mentioned the earrings?
My sister was a flower girl in both of my first two weddings. For the second I bought her a pair of faux gold and diamond earrings. After the ceremony was over I offered to hold onto them for safekeeping. The guilt at keeping her earrings from her was kind enough to stay within the confines of the jewelry box most of the time, only coming out when I came across them or the handful of times I wore them myself. It's as if all of the remaining guilt I had carried with me as a child had clung to the earrings. I cleaned them and found a tiny decorative oval metal box to put them in. If I was going to see my sister, I was going to return her earrings. All the while I was getting ready, I felt a really strong sense of urgency as if I had a finite amount of time to accomplish my mission.
The earrings and box went into my front pocket with my phone, my wallet was locked in the glovebox, and I was on my way. I left the house alone and drove the 18 miles to Santa Rosa. I tried to imagine what she would look like. She is ten years younger than me. She was always slender, her hair was a dirty blonde when we were growing up. She loved sweets and I wondered if that had changed her metabolism. Had she inherited the body type from Gram's side of the family (who I favor physically) or retained the slenderness from youth? After giving birth to three babies, anything was possible.
The closer I got, the more I envisioned a reunion from a movie. I imagined parking outside a tiny rental house with young children playing outside. A woman would happen to walk out of the door to check on the children and would look up at me, a seeming stranger on their quiet street. We would lock eyes. I would say "Bambe?" and she would say "Ginger?" and we would run into each other's arms. The fantasy didn't go beyond the hug but it did repeat itself over and over in my head as I inched closer to her street. It was occasionally interrupted by the voice in my head that would point out that the simplicity of that reunion was highly unlikely. Impossible in fact. I needed to stop that nonsense and focus on finding the street and the address.
Just as I reached the street she lived on, my phone rang. I jumped about a mile and answered my phone as I pulled over. It was my son who was quite intrigued when I told him that I was stalking my sister. My siblings are a bit of an abstract concept to my children. They are aware they have an aunt and uncle, but apart from a few pictures, a few mentions in my writing, and the very few stories I tell about my childhood years, they have only fuzzy pictures of the reality of these two people. The phone call required me to pull around the corner and ultimately drive around the block to return to the house numbers where I thought she lived. Once off the phone I found a parking space closest to the spot I believed I would find her house.
As I pulled up to the curb, and a woman walked out from between two buildings toward the street. I noticed then that the two buildings faced each other creating a kind of long courtyard between them, all doors face toward that yard. The address I had for my sister could easily be marked on one of those doors. I looked back at the woman and saw how slender she was; her face was very thin which was highlighted by the long pair pulled sharply back into a ponytail/bun. At first I only saw a brief profile and her back. She had on short black shorts and a tank top. Her arms were lightly tanned beneath various tattoos that were scattered on her arms, back and neck. She disappeared momentarily behind the backside of the building farthest from me and reappeared to speak to someone in a small pickup truck who pulled up after I parked. I wondered if I was witnessing a drug deal when the door opened and it looked like something passed between the woman and someone in the cab. I looked away.
I took a breath and decided to find the address. I stepped out of my car and walked behind it to the sidewalk. I looked back at the woman who had moved back again toward the far building and was holding a cigarette. Ah, no drug deal; she had simply bummed a smoke. Logically it would make more sense to ask where I could find the address than to wander into people’s yards.
The woman was watching me so I walked toward her. I wondered if it was Bambe and searched her features for something familiar. It was in that moment that I noticed the haunted look pass over her face. Her eyes were wide and only mildly frightened, as if the ghost in front of her was a welcome sight. And I suppose that I was.
I carry many of our mother’s features on my face; there are only a small number of people alive who react to me in the way she did at that moment. But I wasn’t sure yet if she was my sister, so I walked toward her and said, “Can you help me?” Her reaction was too close to the fantasy that had run through my mind on the drive.
“What are you looking for?” was the reply I heard. She may have asked who I was looking for.
“I’m looking for 492.”
That was when we knew.
“Ginger?”
“Bambe?”
She dropped her cigarette and ran to me at full speed. I moved toward her as quickly as I could. The impact our bodies made is not the sound you typically hear in the movie scene. It was very clearly the sound two bodies make when they hit; less noisy than the impact on a football field, more so than two lovers meeting in a field of daisies.
We held each other through that impact. Tight. Hard. We stood there with our arms wrapped around each other. And stood there. Neither wanted to loosen her hold or let go.
“How are you?” She said as if making regular conversation with someone she had seen the day before. Neither of us let go.
“Good. How are you?” I answered.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Part I: First Contact
I began my day bewildered. Roughly two weeks before my birthday, which historically is about the time that a black cloud begins its yearly formation above my head, I found the back of my office chair resting on the top of my head. The fattiest part of my bottom suddenly ached and it was several moments before I realized that I was sitting on the floor, my legs straight out in front of me, the seat of the chair at my back.
I belatedly remembered hearing the crash as the chair tumbled. It came back to me like an echo. I felt disoriented and confused. Disorientation is an interesting word. It amply describes the feeling of not knowing which way is up or down, yet it is so subdued a word as to be inadequate as a descriptor. In a way I knew where I was, the familiarity of the place and the space had altered enough that for a moment I questioned my understanding of my little world, and for a briefer instant I questioned my sanity.
Not the best way to begin any day at work. Certainly for me not a great place to find myself in the middle of June. Sitting under the umbrella of my chair suddenly, I wondered if this was an omen of things to come.
I had been stretching my legs out in an attempt to soothe some back muscles while sitting in front of my work computer. The desk is much too large and deep to comfortably use while typing on a keyboard that won't move more than a few inches away from the monitor located at the back of the desk. The result is that in order to type or use the mouse it is necessary to hunch forward in the office chiar. Apparently the stretch went too far and the wheels of the chair rolled out from under the seat’s bottom as well as my own.
A few hours later the feelings of disorientation returned.
My drive home from the community college I am working at this summer is actually quite a beautiful way to spend an hour. The stretch of pure freeway is only about ¼ of the drive; the rest is over or beside water or rolling hills or a road whose eucalyptus sentinels hold their leaves protectively over the road.
Like many people who live in this age of technology, my email, twitter and facebook updates arrive on my cellphone accompanied by a small icon. So at stoplights I usually glance at my phone for a very brief update. I wasn’t surprised to see a Facebook message. I was, however, stunned that it was from my sister. A sister I have not seen or spoken to in twenty years.
This particular sister is not family by choice; she is family by birth. We share the same mother and the same abandonment issues. I was a toddler when my mother left me with my grandparents. My sister was eight when Mom left her. We also share a brother; he is the middle child of the three of us and so was equally abandoned.
The three of us were fairly close when we were young; as close as kids can be who aren’t raised in the same house and who see each other irregularly. I already had my two children when her son was born a few months after her eighteenth birthday. She came by our house to borrow money several months later. That was twenty years ago.
I know a bit about her life, although not a lot. Her son ended up with his paternal grandmother. She had two other daughters. One lives with the father. The other lives with our brother.
The FB message was in response to one I had sent her three weeks before. I have been searching for information about her on the internet for several years. I occasionally find a tidbit of information on sites such as MyLife or Spokeo. I don’t trust most of the information (such as one site listing her as male) so I don’t bother to follow up. The last time I did a FB search, I came across a number of women with her name. For some reason I fixated on one person who had no picture posted and less than a dozen friends and sent a message that said, “I'm looking for my sister who is originally from Sonoma, CA. (or Boyes Hot Springs, CA). Could that be you?” It is easy to become conditioned to nearly instant responses when communicating online, so when I heard nothing in the first few days, the attempt at contact floated quickly and easily to back of my mind.
The response was clearly sent that afternoon, “yes its me call me its me bambe your sister.” It was accompanied by a phone number. I have a strict personal policy that happens to align with law enforcement: I don’t text or email while driving. My head set was lost so I couldn't call as I drove. So I had to put my phone down as soon as the light turned green. My first impulse was to cry, which I managed to stuff down. My second was to pull over and call her immediately. This was stuffed down as well.
Instead I drove home while a very large and growing cloud of thoughts and feelings swirled around me; it surrounded me and wrapped me in a blanket of emotion. Old pains and memories filled my head and my heart as I tried to imagine who the little girl I once knew had become. I ended my day much like I began it, disoriented, bewildered and not a little lost in my own body.
I belatedly remembered hearing the crash as the chair tumbled. It came back to me like an echo. I felt disoriented and confused. Disorientation is an interesting word. It amply describes the feeling of not knowing which way is up or down, yet it is so subdued a word as to be inadequate as a descriptor. In a way I knew where I was, the familiarity of the place and the space had altered enough that for a moment I questioned my understanding of my little world, and for a briefer instant I questioned my sanity.
Not the best way to begin any day at work. Certainly for me not a great place to find myself in the middle of June. Sitting under the umbrella of my chair suddenly, I wondered if this was an omen of things to come.
I had been stretching my legs out in an attempt to soothe some back muscles while sitting in front of my work computer. The desk is much too large and deep to comfortably use while typing on a keyboard that won't move more than a few inches away from the monitor located at the back of the desk. The result is that in order to type or use the mouse it is necessary to hunch forward in the office chiar. Apparently the stretch went too far and the wheels of the chair rolled out from under the seat’s bottom as well as my own.
A few hours later the feelings of disorientation returned.
My drive home from the community college I am working at this summer is actually quite a beautiful way to spend an hour. The stretch of pure freeway is only about ¼ of the drive; the rest is over or beside water or rolling hills or a road whose eucalyptus sentinels hold their leaves protectively over the road.
Like many people who live in this age of technology, my email, twitter and facebook updates arrive on my cellphone accompanied by a small icon. So at stoplights I usually glance at my phone for a very brief update. I wasn’t surprised to see a Facebook message. I was, however, stunned that it was from my sister. A sister I have not seen or spoken to in twenty years.
This particular sister is not family by choice; she is family by birth. We share the same mother and the same abandonment issues. I was a toddler when my mother left me with my grandparents. My sister was eight when Mom left her. We also share a brother; he is the middle child of the three of us and so was equally abandoned.
The three of us were fairly close when we were young; as close as kids can be who aren’t raised in the same house and who see each other irregularly. I already had my two children when her son was born a few months after her eighteenth birthday. She came by our house to borrow money several months later. That was twenty years ago.
I know a bit about her life, although not a lot. Her son ended up with his paternal grandmother. She had two other daughters. One lives with the father. The other lives with our brother.
The FB message was in response to one I had sent her three weeks before. I have been searching for information about her on the internet for several years. I occasionally find a tidbit of information on sites such as MyLife or Spokeo. I don’t trust most of the information (such as one site listing her as male) so I don’t bother to follow up. The last time I did a FB search, I came across a number of women with her name. For some reason I fixated on one person who had no picture posted and less than a dozen friends and sent a message that said, “I'm looking for my sister who is originally from Sonoma, CA. (or Boyes Hot Springs, CA). Could that be you?” It is easy to become conditioned to nearly instant responses when communicating online, so when I heard nothing in the first few days, the attempt at contact floated quickly and easily to back of my mind.
The response was clearly sent that afternoon, “yes its me call me its me bambe your sister.” It was accompanied by a phone number. I have a strict personal policy that happens to align with law enforcement: I don’t text or email while driving. My head set was lost so I couldn't call as I drove. So I had to put my phone down as soon as the light turned green. My first impulse was to cry, which I managed to stuff down. My second was to pull over and call her immediately. This was stuffed down as well.
Instead I drove home while a very large and growing cloud of thoughts and feelings swirled around me; it surrounded me and wrapped me in a blanket of emotion. Old pains and memories filled my head and my heart as I tried to imagine who the little girl I once knew had become. I ended my day much like I began it, disoriented, bewildered and not a little lost in my own body.
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