SHARON ~ part 1

When i was a preteen, i recall noticing that the hole in my heart [which had been there since my dad left when i was7] had grown. for years i had pushed the pain of missing my dad away from me and tried to fill the hole with food. when i was around 10 or 12 i began to realize that the pain there was increasing.. again comfort came from food .

[must do a post on that food thing]

I have no idea why i am not addicted to alcohol and / or drugs actually w/such behavior.

But nothing could fill that vacuum and i had no idea why it was there.
my thoughts were of why i felt so empty when so many my age were out having fun and seemed not to notice how hard it was to just exist.

And to fit in? not likely. but it was more than the requisite teen angst - it was an intuiting that things were not right, not as they might be: in my life, in my family, with my mom.

confused and hurt i became convinced that i was adopted! why? what did i sense? i became absolutely certain when my biology teacher said that 2 blue eyed parents could not conceive a brown eyed child [& of course my mom and dad both had deep blue eyes- in fact i was the only brown eye in the family].
i went home in tears that day & told my mom that i knew i was adopted. she must have totally freaked out in her head because of what she had been thru - what i did not know; she manged to show only anger though.

she took me by the hand back up to school and demanded to see the teacher. He then mentioned the part of the lesson he'd left out = recessive and dominant genes, etc.
reluctantly i accepted it, tho i was suspicious that he might just be saying it because he was afraid of my mom...she was VERY angry.

now ~ warp speed, reader, to early 2005.

mom is in hospital again - broken hip this time. By this point she has been slipping in and out of the alzheimer thing...i believe it was that hospital stay that included strangling the nurse; and my staying up all night with her because we [nursing staff and i - doc would have none of it]discovered she had sleep apnea and i had to reset the alarm each time she stopped breathing.

she had fought so hard when we tried to get the c-pap [an oxygen supply mask] on her that we all gave up on that. she accused me of trying to kill her and the nurse tried to give her an injection ... so she was trying also to kill her.

durng this stay, B had been pickng up her mail and helping with her bills etc, reading cards to her.
had she been able to do it herself we never would have known the TRUTH!

I do not believe in coincidence - i do believe in miracles.

it happened that this one special day - and i mean special- he intercepted a letter and started to read it to her when he says he stopped and wadded it up , put it in his pocket telling mom that it was probably an ad.

when he got home he called and read the letter to me.
it was from a woman searching for her bio-mom. mainly she said she needed to know if there were med/health issues she should be aware of as she had a child & wanted naturally to know.

she said if mom did not want a relationship that it was ok as she understood it was a difficult situation & did not want to cause upheavel in the family.

it sounded sincere. and she had so many details of our lives in 1960, her birth year, that we both knew there was something to it. back in those days, in the 60's, there was no hippa. the doc had given the adoptive parents a lot of info. info that fit us to a t, including where we lived, that the bio-mom had 2 other, older children, that they had a different father, that the mom worked in accounting in dallas...and on.

the delivering doc had taken over for the original OB when he became ill - and, yes, the ob who delivered my bro and me was the original doctor she had used.

Plus she was one of 5 Mary Bartons in FW to whom the letters were sent...but the only Marynell Griffin Barton!

after reading this letter, B asked how i felt and i told him i have no guide for an appropriate response to a news like this but my heart felt great joy, just joy. no fear or anxiety. no apprehension, no resistance.
he said "oh, good, cause that's how i feel too!".

now one might wonder just how unaware were these 2 kids whose mom was pregnant for 9 mos and delivered a baby in july of 60.

As B and i have relived that period in our lives it became clear to us both that we did feel something even more disturbing during that time.
mom had gained and lost weight repeatedly all my life so the size did not tell us anything.

her mood tho was very down - depressed. we picked up on it and took it as our own...B recalls beng called out of class several times to explain why he was crying [he was only 8, i was 11] .. he replied he did not know, he just felt like it.

i recalled a deep sense of some mysterious, secret event, some fear and depression.

also during that time from around september '59 - summer's end '60 we moved many times / went to 3 different elementary schools that one year. mom changed jobs at least 3 times that year. i believe now that she was so intent on keeping the pregnancy from everyone but the dad and doc, that when folks at the job suspected or noted a change in her condition, she changed jobs. and we moved; again.

she cried when she did not know i saw her - and i felt great pain from and for her.

In 1960 having a child 'out of wedlock' carried a real stigma and we think the father [who was the man she 'dated' for several years] convinced her that child services would take all 3 of us from her if she kept the baby. Truth was that he had another family and did not intend on a new one...she did not know he had a wife and kids until after she became pregnant.

she did not want to go along with it. but she did and the result was our little sis was taken from us w/o our even knowing it.

We only felt it ~ the loss, grief.

that is why we had joy in our hearts when we got that letter. we once again had hope and the missing piece from our lives was being replaced.

the doc said mom stayed at the hospital for 3 days crying and begging to have her baby back. i ache to my bones when i think of it.

how hard must that decision have been? keep 2 by giving up 1, or keep the baby and maybe lose all 3 childrenMy God, the depth of despair she must have experienced.

[see next post for the continuing saga]