another reposting..

“Better by half” or “we are family”
April 19, 2007 by singlechristianman
So, I get a call last night from someone wanting to know if I am that Charles so and so who used to live in Michigan … it is from my youngest half brother, with whom I have had not had any contact for, perhaps, 18 years if I do my sums correctly. Nor have I had such with any of my siblings in my maternal line. He has been looking for his older brother.

By the end of the evening I had spent an hour or two on the phone talking and a few hours off the phone crying; and had spoken with my older half sister and all three half brothers of my mother’s side (I also have a half sister in my paternal line, with whom I was raised and with whom I am close. She lives in Michigan).

(Remember Star Trek Voyager’s adopted Borg played by Jeri Ryan, whom they called “7 of 9?” I am jokingly going to think of we four brothers as numbers 1…2…3… and 4. I would be “2 of 4″ in this fanciful naming .

How did this happen? It’s a tangled, jumbled, and human story. It’s not like there was a big rift over who got the nice china or anything, but there was a lot of pain involved. A great deal of pain, in fact, for me. Some you will have to hear by the fire with a bottle of wine between us when I am in the mood to speak of it.

My biological mom had four sons and one daughter over the space of perhaps 12 years, with four different husbands. I was not raised with my maternal siblings and in fact did not even know of one of them until I was a young adult. I was separated from my older brother and sister at a very young age, and I was discouraged from seeking contact with them, and also with my mother, by my stepmother (who has passed on this past year.)

I basically met my birth mother when I was sixteen on the occasion of a funeral, when my maternal grandmother died. I have only a few scant memories from my youngest few years when I was with my older brother and sister, and the most time I have spent with any of them has been spent with brother number 3, whom I did not meet until I was 23. If I take out the time I have spent with #3 the time I have spent with all the rest might together fit into just a few weeks.

After meeting my birth mother I made several bus trips to Chicago to visit with her and brothers #1 and #4, and my sister. This continued when I was stationed in Milwaukee and also a few times when I was living in Michigan early in my first marriage. In retrospect this morning, I can see it was the death of my mother which marked the time in which I drifted away, for whatever reason, from contact with my siblings.

Certainly it would be a facade for me to think of my maternal relations as only “biological” — else why would this experience provoke such a strong emotional response? Are we biologically hard-wired to do this, or is some of my past coming up from the emotional depths, iceberg-under-the-surface fashion, to reveal itself to me? I’m heading to Chicago soon.

Each of my siblings independently told me last night: “You are family.”

I am not under any illusion that simply being genetically related can produce, Athena-from-the-head-of-Zeus fashion, the kind of relational threads that make up the warp and woof of the fabric that we call “family” in the sense that word is usually used.

(And my own experience being divorced tells me that a person’s will can rend and tear that fabric called “family”, even if it cries out against one’s being. My ex vacillated between reconciliation and going to her new husband; and even just today the events of last night have helped me to understand that what looked to me like purposeful string-pulling might have in fact been simple evidence of how difficult it is to tear that fabric.)

Nor am I hell-bent-for leather going to try to force things to happen which will not happen naturally of their own accord. But neither am I going to ignore those natural feelings that come up from within me, which is why I’m setting off for the midwest soon. As I told one of my colleagues once, the reason one travels is so you can meet yourself. This particular trip is not going to be any different.

As the country song says: “I have no shame, I’m proud of where I came from …this is me.. This is who I am.”