“Why didn’t you marry my father?”
“He was already married.”
“He was?”
I was having a hard time believing that my uptight mother, the mother who had preached to me since I was a toddler about maintaining a good reputation, would have an affair with a married man. But then, I never thought she’d have a child out of wedlock either.
My whole world seemed to be falling apart. Not only was I illegitimate but my own father was a married man when he slept with my mother, and he had rejected me completely.
“Why didn’t my father ever come to see me?” I asked, tears rolling down my cheeks.
“He never knew about you. I never told him.”
I stared at my mother, not believing the words that had just come out of her mouth. “You never told him? Why not?”
She sighed. “When I discovered I was pregnant, I told the one friend I knew I could trust. She told me he was married and had five children. I was horrified. I was afraid if I told him I was pregnant, he’d leave his wife and kids and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. So I left town and he wasn’t any the wiser.”
All this information was making me dizzy. My real father wasn’t named Engel. That wasn’t even my real name. And my real father didn’t even know I existed.
“Do you know where my real father is now?”
“He’s dead. He died when you were three years old.”
“How did he die? How did you find out?”
“Well, that’s interesting,” she said, brightening a little. “You actually had a nightmare about him the night he died. You woke up screaming. You told me a plane had crashed in our backyard and you were trying to rescue someone who was important to you but it wasn’t me. Do you remember that?”
I nodded. I did. That nightmare had stayed with me all these years. I even remembered the kind of plane it was. I’d seen a picture of it in my encyclopedias when I was little.
“Well, a friend of mine—the same friend who told me he was married—sent me a newspaper clipping about his death. He’d died in a plane crash the night you had your nightmare.”
I was speechless. In just a few minutes time I’d learned so much information—far too much to absorb all at once. I sat in silence for a few minutes, taking it all in. But then another question popped into my mind: “What was my father’s name?”
But my mother had reached the end of her confession. She had wanted to bring me down off my high horse and she had succeeded. Now she wanted nothing more to do with me.
“That’s enough about all this,” she said. “Don’t you have homework to do?”
As all this new information sank in, it all began to make sense to me. My mother didn’t hate me because I was such a bad kid, because I caused her so much trouble, or because I was this bad seed; she hated me from the start because I was a burden to her— an inconvenience, something that got in the way of her living her life the way she wanted to live it, free from entanglements and conflict. Someone who kept her from being able to walk away to freedom whenever she wished. Unlike her two husbands, she was stuck with me, stuck with the responsibility of raising a child, stuck trying to get along with another human being.
On top of all that, I was probably a constant reminder of her shame about the affair and getting pregnant out of wedlock. I wasn’t the worthless, unlovable child she had made me out to be. She couldn’t love me because of what I represented to her, but that didn’t mean someone else couldn’t love me. It was her shame I was carrying around with me. Her shame she was projecting onto me. It wasn’t my fault she had gotten pregnant— it was her mistake. And just because I was her mistake didn’t mean I was a mistake.
As horrible and ashamed as I felt about learning that I was illegitimate, somehow all this new information made me feel a little more free of my mother. I’d always felt inadequate around her, like I could never measure up to who she wished I would be. I could never be as beautiful, elegant, and popular as she was; I was always the servant and she was always the queen. But now she didn’t seem so perfect. Now she didn’t seem so much better than me.
Years later my mother apologized for telling me about my father the way she did.
“I did it for your own good, but I did it the wrong way,” she explained. “I was afraid you were getting a big head, that you were becoming conceited. I knew what that was like. I was the biggest spoiled brat you ever knew. My mother was always having to cut me down to size.”
I couldn’t imagine how my mother could possibly think I was conceited. I’d felt so much lower than other people all my life. It wasn’t until that year that I had even begun to find my way or feel good about myself. But what she told me about her mother having to cut her down to size made sense. My mother seldom complimented me on anything. And I had never understood why she always played down her looks. Whenever anyone complimented her, she’d laugh it off with, “You’ve got to be kidding; this old dress?” or “You’ve got to be blind as a bat, don’t you see all these wrinkles?” My mother had been raised with shame, the same way she’d raised me.
chapter 35
It was finally my senior year, the year I’d waited for forever. I could see my future taking shape and I was excited about it. My plan was
