Christmas Cards

  I’m writing Christmas cards to people I’ve never met.  I send them off nice and early to give the recipients time to send me one back, because the novelty of seeing the handwriting of people other than my descendants to whom I am related, has never diminished.  My brother in England, my late birth mother’s husband in England, her sister and family in Ireland.

  When we first connected three years ago, it was as heady and full of promise as the beginning of a love affair.  Would my dream of a warm house full of my people be about to come true?  People I could get to know, people who wanted to get to know me, and love me like they love the rest of their blood kin, people to welcome me home.  People in whose faces and features I could see my own.  People I could give to my children, my grandbabies, the bloodline, the culture, the language, their roots.

The image of the crowded, warm, bright dream home has been always been in my heart, alongside the bone-deep knowledge that the energy for such a home that could welcome me in that part of my line was too shattered, too fragmented. I would have to create it myself if I wanted it, and I did. My home, the table, the family I hold the space for is the pride and joy of my life.  My adoptive parents gave me the gifts of themselves and their love, and more precious than gold, their honesty.  I lived 54 years with the knowledge of a handful of bare facts.  That my father abandoned her, that she ran away when approached by my parents’ solicitor, that I was born in a maternity home in London. 

As well as those facts, and three or four sheets of paper, there are the cellular memories.  My lifelong deep and unshakeable comprehension of the brokenness of their union.  The secret nature of my existence.  The shame.  The place where their cultural shame became their personal shame, that seamlessly became my shame at my own existence in a physical form.  The recognition that despite living 54 years as an only child with no suggestion or proof to the contrary, there was always a clear awareness that other raindrops than just me, had dangled and fallen like tears from that web of union spun by my sire with her.  Just like I have the feeling that if my tentacle didn’t uncurl itself over the Irish Sea and land with a wet, sickening smack on the doormat in Holy Cross twice a year, there would be no further communication.

I don’t know if my mother’s husband has made it through another year.  I don’t know if he will live long enough for me to persuade him to show me the graves of my mother and little sister, or to let me see the inside of her house, my mother’s house, her home, just one time.

I don’t know if my brother will ever find a way or a wish to meet me in person. 

 And so my little stack of cards goes off, to stand on mantle shelves I may never see, or to hide in drawers, or maybe to burn in a fire of shame, our secrets returning like shadows, to dust.