The gift of family revealed
In October this year, at the age of 69, I got what could be considered an early Christmas present. I found out I have a younger brother I never knew about.
No one else in the family did, either, except possibly my father, who sired him. The news came as a (relative) surprise after Ancestry.com sent me a notice that it had found a connection to another sibling. My “new” sibling.
It was my sister who found out just before I did after she got the same notice from Ancestry.com. She called and asked me if I was sitting down. Then she told me our newly revealed half-brother’s name. I immediately knew who his mother was. She worked in the same plant as my father 50something years ago, and our two families, back in the day, had spent quite a bit of time together.
At first I didn’t know how to react. I did know that, in the 1960s “Mad Men” world, my father had cut a wide swath through the forest of femininity. My mother knew it, too, and of course wasn’t very happy about it. But there was little she could do, except endure it. My parents were IrishCatholic immigrants to America, arriving in New York with 2-year-old me and my infant sister in 1951.
In those days, women weren’t yet liberated, their husbands firmly ruling the roost and often able to get away with skirt-chasing. Though, it turns out, my father did more than merely chase.
By the time I was in high school I knew that he knew, in the Biblical sense, several women. And at the time there wasn’t much I could do about it, either. I did tell a parish priest who was close to our family, and he did press my father about the head of a household’s responsibilities, but nothing came of it.
My mother, like many women at the time, didn’t drive a car, didn’t work outside the home, didn’t question my father’s non-work whereabouts — in short, she lived in relative isolation and silently put up with his philandering as well as his drinking. Her role was that of homemaker, and her dual focus was on the family and her religion.
And what could she possibly have done about his infidelity? To her, divorce was out of the question.
I got a chance recently to speak to my half-brother, who lives on the other side of the country. It was a friendly, polite conversation. He told me he wasn’t angry at the revelation, but rather surprised. While he did remember my father, he never truly knew him. He went on to say that he felt the parents he grew up with were his real mother and father.
Then he asked me how I felt. I told him I had known that my father wasn’t perfect, but that he was a good father and I loved him, though I was disappointed.
But what can you do? What happened can’t be changed, even though I wish it hadn’t happened. It was so many years ago that, by now, it’s lost any significant consequence to my life.
Christmas will soon come and go, and we’ll all go on with our lives. Our changed lives, with a new take on what “family” means, I suppose. And while things will never be the same, we all know they won’t change all that much, either. For me that knowledge is a comforting gift.