If I could physicalize how that news hit me—of my father not being my father and Ruthie not being my mother—I’d describe it as a crushing blow that sent me reeling into another stratosphere. Suddenly at six years old, the world I understood, thought was mine, was no longer true. I no longer belonged, nor had the key fundamental figures that any child needs to survive, a mother and a father. These facts were further verified by the fact that after my father remarried, Ruthie never came around, never rescued me as I’d always prayed she would.
My stepmother and I used to play a game of sorts, when my father went out; she would rifle through the paperwork in his top dresser drawer, looking for information about my identity. She came back one day and announced, “Your mother was 5' 10" and your father was 6' 4". She was light brown and he was dark-skinned. Their last name was Mills. He played basketball. They were from Virginia, but they came to Boston as students. They were young, that’s why they gave you up.”
It was top secret information. I had no way of verifying if what she said was true, but I held onto those descriptions for the rest of my life. If the analogy was drowning or trying to survive, their names were a raft tossed to me. Also, she said, don’t ever search for them; it will kill your father.
There are two significant stories I must tell, both are important to my identity, and both involve waiting. Before my father met my stepmother and remarried, he was a single parent, a young man who wanted to play the field. For these reasons and also while he worked, my grandmother, his mother, Pearl, often babysat me. Once or twice a year, at school there was a PTA night where teachers gave interested parents in-person progress reports. I had been so good in kindergarten, I had the capacity to write and spell long before the school taught me, because of my father’s at-home lessons. He would sit me down at a table and teach me the alphabet. I copied him as he wrote out I-L-A. I know how important this was to my father, who didn’t have a high school diploma.
I could not wait for my father to go to the PTA night and for teachers to tell him how good I was. But the evening of the meeting he was on a date. In the living room of my grandmother’s house was a huge rectangular picture window. From it I saw down to the end of the street, the Daniels school park with the small hill we kids sled on during winter. I could see the solitary tree on the hill. As we grew up it was the tree we sat under and shared deep conversations, experienced a first kiss. From my grandmother’s window, I saw the entire side of Daniels elementary and junior high school. It was a red colonial building with a long Lego modern wing attached. Beneath my grandmother’s window was an old fashioned silver radiator. On the eve of the PTA meeting I perched my five-year-old self on the silver radiator, like an owl on a branch. I sat and stared out and looked for my father. Hours passed, my father never appeared until finally the school lights started to go out. Every time a light went out in the elementary school and then the junior high, disappointment fell onto my shoulders like two ton bricks. When my father finally arrived home, he was drunk and my grandmother, who I’d rarely seen angry towards him, said in a low voice, “She waited for you all night, why did you do this to her?” I couldn’t hear his response.
The other significant event which shaped me involved waiting for Ruthie, my first mother. Unlike on a PTA night, the waiting wasn’t contained to a few hours or an evening but extended decades, almost a lifetime. Ruthie had dark brown skin and moles that covered her face like freckles. She worked at a beauty shop. She was a hairdresser. In the fashion of many African American women of her time, she wore silver bangles that went up her arm almost to elbow, and were collected from different and exotic places like Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad. Once on a trip to Bermuda after she and my father divorced she bought me a silver bangle like hers, which she instructed should never be taken off. I was so impressed at that age of being able to be like my mother and having a bangle like hers. Eventually though, the bangle which I did take on and off, bent and was lost.
When my father first remarried, Ruthie stayed in contact. There were gifts, occasional cards, but eventually without warning or explanation they stopped coming. I knew that I shouldn’t ask why. So, I sat down by the window like the same little girl perched on a radiator on a PTA night and waited for my mother.
For the seventeen years I lived in my parent’s house, I sat often in front of the window on the corner of my bed and dreamt I saw Ruthie, my mother coming up the drive to rescue me. Pretty close to my eighteenth birthday I realized Ruthie would never appear and that dream like lights in the elementary school on PTA night long ago, faded. I suppose the final nail in the coffin my relationship with Ruthie came when my stepmother confessed without guilt to having burnt all of my baby pictures, pictures of Ruthie and me, which attested to life before her.
My name
