First Times

Meeting my mom’s birth mom for the first time feels like an alien encounter. This person, this fully formed 70-something-year-old woman named Pat, stands in front of me with arms hesitantly outstretched. I think I smile? I try not to look like I’m sizing her up. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone who can give me a hint of what my mom might look like in a few decades, the other side of my own genetic future.

My grandma was a twin, and she and her sister both couldn’t have biological children. The nuclear families of the resulting adoptees are pretty similar, but it’s immediately clear that the cousins of this generation do not genetically intersect. The women on my dad’s side of the family are all strong noses, full lips, almond eyes, substantial breasts, and arched brows, while the women on my mom’s side range from redheads, to tiny, to towering, to mousy, to easily sunburned and unsteady on their feet. And then there’s my mom: all olive skin and deep-set eyes perpetually lined with thick mascara. All glossed lips and hair primped to perfection. All long legs and one-time bikini model. The sore thumb simile doesn’t quite capture the stark physical differences that separate them.

And here is this woman who shares Mom’s angled nose, her pointed chin, her fluffed and gravity-defying hair. Granted, her eyes are a piercing blue, and her hair is more an ashy blond than deep orange-brown, but the resemblance remains unmistakable. In her, I see my mom with permanent crinkles around the eyes. I see my mom with age spots and a slightly sagging fold of skin under her chin. In this moment, I also see my mom’s small smile when she looks her up and down and thinks, huh, if I have this to look forward to, I’m more than good with that. Pat has Colorado hiker calves. Pat has lifts- heavy-boxes-at-her-convenience-store-job arms. Pat has a simple, clear beauty (a slightly Luna Lovegood beauty), while my mom has a Cindy Crawford beauty (according to my dad at least). And now she’s here, in our house, meeting our family for the first time. My high school sophomore self doesn’t know what to do with her hands.

My mom tells this story sometimes about one night when I was only a few weeks old. She had coaxed me to sleep in her arms and was sitting with me in an armchair, afraid to move even an inch and wake me, when my dad walked in and caught her crying. Disarmed, he asked her what was wrong. “She’s going to grow up and leave me someday,” my mom replied. My dad laughed at the unexpected statement’s silliness, but my mom kept crying, caressing my infant cheek with her finger.

I’m not even sure whether Pat held my mom after she was born. I assume she did, but that’s not something we talk about. Pat was nineteen when she became a mother (in name only), a college student nine years before Roe v. Wade. We don’t talk about the decision. We don’t ask if she struggled with it, if she had considered going on a trip that would make the problem disappear, if that had even been an option. We don’t ask what led her to adoption. We don’t ask about my mom’s dad, and she doesn’t volunteer any information (the still-missing piece of the puzzle).

While my brother and I were growing up, my mom’s parents cared for us while our parents worked long hours. Our grandparents took us to the park. They read to us, inventing new voices for each character. They listened to music with us. They instilled in me many of the non-specific memories of warmth that characterize my early childhood. When I was eight, my grandma died during open heart surgery. It happened the day before Easter, so my parents kept it from us until after the holiday, not wanting to ruin the day. I remember walking with my uncle to the neighborhood soda shop (a time capsule straight out of the 1940s, all marble countertops and black and white tile floors, the place we’d always go for a mint chocolate chip milkshake and a grilled cheese) to buy my family some of their favorite chocolate Easter eggs. I remember telling him, this one’s for grandma. Now, I wonder how he kept his composure, already knowing the news we would learn a few hours later.

My six-year-old brother and I wailed for what felt like hours in our mother’s lap. Then, my brother looked up at my mom and said, “Mom, do we have another grandmother? Just tell me.” Hearing this story now, I wonder if he meant, if we’re going to experience a loss like this again, please warn me so I can prepare. Or instead, Is there anyone who’s going to take her place? We did have another grandma, my dad’s mom, who was just as much a part of our lives at the time, but his grief-addled brain must have forgotten. The crazy thing is, my mom had just found Pat after years of searching. No one, not even my dad, knew about the investigation’s now fruitful results at that point. No one knew about the connection between Linda Brancato and the teenage girl who dropped off a baby named Heidi at an adoption agency in New York City the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law.

***

Pat’s suitcase is small; she packs light. She goes on long walks around our suburban neighborhood each morning. We take her to the nature preserve, and she can name every species of tree we pass, every bird that darts across our line of vision. She shows us pictures of her at the summit of a rushing waterfall, looking down over the cliff, surrounded by towering green trees. Her voice sounds like a cartoon character, and I can picture her reading to young children. Her laugh is indescribably kooky, part wholesome and jolly, part oblivious and dreamy. Her husband had just died a few years earlier. When the time came, they could never have children of their own.

My mom calls her Pat (“I already have a mom,” she says. “Getting to know Pat is just a nice addition to an already full life.”), and my brother and I can’t wrap our minds around the title “grandma.” We try to generate enthusiasm for the things she loves, but we’re a binge-watching family. We’re a Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Miles Davis, Ravi Shankar, all of the above at the same time family. We’re a hearty Italian meal family. She’s a spends-hours-bird-watching kind of lady, a sun salutations every morning kind of lady. As it turns out, she immediately clicks with my mom’s cousin Tim, who works for the EPA and shares her enthusiasm for pointing out passing birds and losing herself in meditation. And it doesn’t really matter that we’re not all that similar because knowing my mom, she’ll try her absolute hardest to give her the warmest welcome possible. It’s more about the grasping desire for some natural, easy connection that doesn’t immediately come.

I try not to get caught up in the hypotheticals, the questions of nature versus nurture. I wonder what my aggressively Type-A mom would be like if she had grown up in middle-of-nowhere Colorado, outside a seasonal tourist town with her nearest neighbors a distant, forgettable presence. I wonder how Pat would handle my mom’s New York City subway commute, the surge of bodies pressed close, sweat mingling in the hurtling, AC-less metal box. Neither of them can sit still for very long, but my mom’s frenetic energy is compulsively channeled into small, productive tasks around the house, while Pat’s bursts forth in sudden laughter, limitless endurance, and intense curiosity about seemingly insignificant details. I wonder what she would’ve been like if she’d raised my mom as her own. I wonder what it would’ve been like with her as a grandmother. I wonder how I would’ve been different.

***

When I am nineteen and a month post-virginity, my period is a week late. I try not to get caught up in the hypotheticals. What if I’m pregnant? What if the few times I let him shrug his way out of forgotten condoms may mean the complete derailment of my life? What if his religious family insists I keep the baby? What if this baby shares his incredibly rare genetic disorder? What if he, the 24-year-old, decides he’s not ready and leaves me, the college sophomore, alone? Why is it that the prospect of choice is so paralyzing?

And I think about Pat. I think about the choice that may not really have been a choice. I think about being nineteen in 1964, without the means to fly away somewhere, and without the courage to endure an attempt at my own or another’s hand. Could I get an abortion, knowing that if Pat had had one, my mom wouldn’t exist?

I think about a lineage of women. Jean, Joan, Tracy, Eileen, Kelly, Kristi, Cathy, Heather, Holly, Shirley, Denise, Assunta, Susan, Dana, Julie, Maureen, Tina, Allie, Linda, now Pat. I think of the women who raised and shaped me.

I think of crossing an ocean, from Sicily to the Bronx, a decade before the Depression. I think of Assunta’s tenement neighbor, the one who took care of things, the one with the locked doors and stifled screams, the sterilized medical instruments spirited away in between hospital shifts, the carousel of pale and shaking girls.

I think of the one-in-three statistic.

The trickle of rust-red preempts the voyage to the drug store, the death knell phone call, the confrontation with her scrutinizing eyes. An exhale, followed by a gush, a tide.