I wanted one simple answer.
That was the trouble.
I wanted Rebecca to explain everything in a few sentences.
I wanted the letter to tell me exactly what happened.
I wanted to understand how the baby I had mourned for fifty-five years could be standing in front of me.
But the more I tried to understand, the more questions I found.
I looked at Rebecca.
“Were you surprised when your mother told you?”
She gave a small nod.
I waited.
She looked at the paper in my hands.
“I didn't know everything she had kept.”
I thought about the box.
It had belonged to her adoptive mother.
The woman had kept papers about Rebecca's beginnings and given them to her before she died.
I wondered what it had cost her to keep those things private.
Then I stopped myself.
I didn't know that woman.
I didn't know what she had been afraid of.
I didn't know what she had been told.
It would have been easy to make her responsible for everything I had lost.
But I had no reason to believe she was the person who decided I should think my daughter was dead.
All I knew was that she had raised Rebecca.
And eventually, she had told her something about the past.
I looked down at the letter.
“Was she good to you?”
The question escaped before I had thought it through.
Rebecca looked surprised.
I almost apologized.
It was a personal question.
We had barely met.
But it mattered to me.
If this was my child, I needed to know that someone had cared for her.
That she hadn't spent her childhood feeling unwanted.
That there had been someone to hold her when she cried.
Rebecca looked at me for a moment.
“She was my mother.”
I nodded.
The answer was enough.
I didn't ask her to explain her feelings.
I had no right to make her choose between the woman who raised her and the woman she was looking for.
I understood that without needing anyone to tell me.
She had lost her adoptive mother only three months earlier.
That grief was still close.
Mine was standing in a casket at the front of the church.
Neither of us had come to this conversation without losing someone.
I looked at her hands.
They had stopped shaking quite so badly.
Perhaps she was beginning to feel that I would listen.
I hoped so.
I wanted her to know that whatever questions I asked, I wasn't trying to make her feel unwelcome.
“I'm glad someone was there for you,” I said.
Rebecca's eyes filled.
I looked away.
I hadn't intended to make her cry.
Again.
But I was beginning to understand that nearly everything we said would carry more weight than ordinary words.
I had missed fifty-five years.
If Rebecca was my daughter, there was no way to speak about those years without feeling what had been lost.
I thought about 1971.
I had remembered that year in the same way for so long that it seemed fixed.
My daughter had been born.
Mama told me the baby had died during the night.
I believed her.
After that, I lived as someone whose child had died.
There had never been another version of the story.
Not until now.
I looked toward the casket.
“Your mother told you I believed you were dead?”
Rebecca nodded.
“Yes.”
I felt my throat tighten.
That was the part I couldn't get past.
Not simply that Rebecca believed she had been adopted.
Not that her mother had kept papers.
But that she knew the particular lie I had lived with.
She knew I had been told my child died.
That was not something a stranger would easily guess.
It was the detail that had made me reach for the pew when she first said it.
I could still feel the hard wood against my fingers.
I didn't think I would ever forget that moment.
“Did she understand what that meant?” I asked.
Rebecca watched me.
“I think she understood it would hurt.”
I nodded.
It had hurt.
It was still hurting.
But I didn't know whether hurt was the right word.
Hurt was what I felt when I thought about my baby dying.
This was different.
This was the possibility that the loss I had spent my life accepting had been forced upon me.
That somewhere, a child might have grown up believing another woman was her only mother.
While I believed there was no child left to find.
I tried to imagine the two of us living through the same years.
Me thinking she was gone.
Her growing older somewhere else.
I couldn't put those lives together.
They seemed too far apart.
I looked at Rebecca's face.
She wasn't a little girl waiting for her mother.
She was fifty-five.
There was a whole lifetime behind her eyes.
I knew almost nothing about it.
That realization made me feel ashamed, even though I didn't know whether I had been given any chance to change it.
I heard myself ask, “Have you been looking for me long?”
Rebecca looked at me.
“For years.”
I lowered my eyes.
Years.
She had carried the letter for years.
She had been searching.
I had been going through my ordinary days without knowing there was anything to search for.
That difference was almost unbearable.
I wanted to explain why I had never looked.
But explaining meant saying the same thing again.
I thought she was dead.
It sounded like an excuse.
It wasn't.
It was the only truth I had.
“I didn't know,” I said.
Rebecca nodded.
“I understand.”
“I really didn't.”
“I believe you.”
I closed my eyes.
Those three words affected me more than I expected.
I believe you.
It was something I hadn't yet been able to say to her without hesitation.
But she had said it to me.
I opened my eyes.
“Thank you.”
She gave a small nod.
I looked down at the letter.
The paper was growing warm in my hands.
I had held it too long.
I wondered whether Rebecca was tired of waiting for me to understand.
Whether she had hoped I would look at her and recognize her immediately.
Perhaps she had imagined the first conversation differently.
I was afraid to ask.
I was already ashamed of the way I had pulled away when she first called me Mother.
I had done it because I was frightened.
But she couldn't have known that.
All she saw was a woman refusing to believe her.
I looked at her.
“May I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
“When you first spoke to me, I thought you had made a terrible mistake.”
“I know.”
“I thought you were confused.”
She nodded.
“I understand.”
I swallowed.
“I didn't want to believe you.”
Rebecca didn't answer.
I looked directly at her.
“Not because I didn't want a daughter.”
Her eyes filled again.
“Because I couldn't bear to think that everything Mama told me might have been wrong.”
The words were difficult.
I had never said anything like that about my mother.
Not in public.
Not beside her casket.
And certainly not to a woman who was telling me Mama had hidden the truth.
But it was what I felt.
I could no longer pretend otherwise.
Rebecca looked toward the front of the church.
I followed her gaze.
There was Mama.
The woman who had raised me.
The woman whose death had brought us together.
I wondered whether she had ever imagined this conversation happening.
Whether she had thought about the child she told me was gone.
Whether she knew Rebecca might one day find me.
Those questions had no answers.
Mama couldn't speak.
I looked back at Rebecca.
For the first time, I wanted to stand closer to her.
I didn't move.
I didn't want to frighten her with a sudden change after keeping my distance for so long.
But I allowed myself to look at her without searching for a reason to reject what she was saying.
She had my dimple.
She knew my nickname.
She knew what Mama had told me.
She had a letter from the woman who raised her.
None of those things alone explained everything.
Together, they made it impossible for me to dismiss her.
“I don't think you're lying to me,” I said.
Rebecca's face changed.
I saw relief.
Then she began crying again.
I reached toward her before I could stop myself.
This time, I didn't pull my hand away.
Click here to continue reading: PART 7: For the First Time in Fifty-Five Years, I Looked at a Grown Woman and Wondered Whether She Had Always Been Mine
I Was Standing Beside My Mother’s Casket When a Stranger Asked for the Name I Had Used All My Life
Part 6 of 10
