The Girl with Three Birthdays by Patti Eddington

Author:Patti Eddington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

Chapter 15

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE

Inevitably, when people learn I found my biological families, their curiosity is piqued and they want to know the “how.” My stock response is something like, “Well, I found my biological father’s family thanks to the human genome project in 2018, but I’d already found my biological mother’s family back in 2004. It’s a story way too convoluted to even try to explain.” It’s just the easiest thing to say because I’m sure they’d think I was strange if I told them it could all be tracked back to a severe case of menstrual cramps. It had been a stressful time, even without the monthly discomfort. Our good friend Jackie’s father had just died, and she was grieving and dealing with an irascible mother. Soon after her father’s death, Jackie set out from the small city of Fremont—home to Gerber Products Company, manufacturer of the baby food— to drive the forty-five miles to the larger city of Grand Rapids to help make funeral arrangements. Suddenly she was overcome with nausea. Thinking it was brought on by nerves and stress, she pulled the car over to recover but became violently ill. She turned around and drove herself back home. She was admitted to Gerber Memorial Hospital and almost immediately underwent an emergency appendectomy. She was weak, sick, and sad because she ended up missing her father’s funeral.

Jim and I visited her in the hospital, taking her husband Dick—Jim’s best friend and Molly’s godfather—a Subway sandwich, which he ate sitting hunched in an uncomfortable fiberglass hospital waiting room chair. Something about the imagery of seeing our dear friend frightened, alone, and worried about his beloved wife just got me. I was already forty-four years old, but it was the first time life’s inevitable changes and overwhelming losses smacked me in the head.

On a windy, stormy day later in the week, unable to focus on the school district newsletter I was designing at work because of the white-hot clenching of my internal organs and the mental anguish I was feeling, I noodled around on the internet and saw an ad for a magazine geared toward teenage girls. I flashed on something that had happened when I was fifteen.

Reading sprawled as always on the living room floor, I’d come across an article about a newly crowned beauty queen (no surprise I was reading that) who had been adopted. The queen expressed her love for her parents so eloquently, I ran to find my mother and read it to her, my voice quavering with emotion. As usual, during one of our potentially life-altering talks, she was puttering in the kitchen.

“That’s how I feel, Mom,” I said, teary eyed.

“You know, there’s something I should probably tell you,” she said.

My mind raced and, of course, ended up in an unrealistic place.

“Mom! Are you telling me this girl, this queen, is my sister?”

Her lips quivered a bit and her eyes twinkled, but she held herself together and told me no, but I did have sisters.

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