I'd been having dinner with my cousin Danny, in town for a few days on a business trip, when he lightly dropped the bombshell. We'd been talking about the usual things that families talk about — the trouble we'd gotten into as kids, the Thanskgivings we'd shared. Then I asked him what, if anything, he remembered about my father. Danny, seven years older than me, easily summoned fond tales of my mom's boyfriend horseplaying with him and his brothers. Of course, I'd never known that side of my father, I'd said, because he'd left my mother before I was born. "Well, yeah, "Danny replied, "he was gone, except for the thing with your sister." I sat in stunned silence for a moment, then flagged down a waiter and ordered another glass of Malbec. I had a sister.
My mother was 21 when she got pregnant with me. This was before Roe v. Wade, and anyway, she was Catholic. So her parents did what any Irish Catholic parents would do at the time — they threatened to kick her out unless she got married. It lasted three tense months. That part of the story I'd long known. What I'd never imagined was the sequel.
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Danny described what he'd remembered — how, when I was three, my mother and I had decamped from our home in Jersey City to his in a quaint Boston suburb. He remembered his Aunt Bets getting "fat," and going to the hospital with his mother one day. He said that years later, his father had told him they had offered to adopt the baby, but my mother would have none of it.
I flagged down a waiter and ordered another glass of Malbec. I had a sister.
When I called my uncle the next day, he didn't recall much. It was a long time ago, and everybody had put it out of their minds. What he did remember vividly was how heartbroken my aunt was, how much they had wanted that little girl. And when I suggested that my flinty grandmother had probably insisted my mother give the child up, he said no. Something must have changed in the short years since my mother had been pregnant the last time. My nan had very much wanted her to keep her baby. Instead, she came back home empty-handed. And then, for the most part, no one spoke of it ever again. The story was simple and unchanging; I was my mother's only child. Until, decades later, I wasn't.
I am now one of an ever-widening population of people whose lives have been abruptly upended by the revelations of long-held family secrets. The proliferation of at-home DNA tests has ushered in a tidal wave of skeletons shaken from closets, while generational shifts — and rising secularism — have made things that were once life-ruiningly shameful exponentially less taboo. I have an array of friends who learned later in life that their uncles were really their fathers, that Grandma........