I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter

I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter

Author:Barbara Rae-Venter [Rae-Venter, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00


* * *

Sometimes, I was learning, the desire to be part of a family can be the most powerful and defining force in a person’s life. I learned this from both the adoptee and criminal cases I was working, and from a story from my own past.

Nearly a year after a German plane shot down my father’s Spitfire and forced him to crash-land in a field in 1943, my father received a letter delivered to him at the Stalag Luft III prison camp. It was from the woman who was his fiancée, and she had important news.

My father was, she told him, the proud father of a newborn baby boy. The baby, she said, had been born in England almost nine months to the day after my father was shot down.

Eleven months later, when my father was repatriated, he tried to find his fiancée and the boy he believed was his son. But by then another family in the UK had adopted the child, and the adoption could not be reversed. As for the boy, who was named Robin, he was told his father was Jack Rae (my father), a war hero who perished in combat.

Many years later, when Robin turned twenty-one, he was finally entitled to see his adoption records. When he obtained them he learned that the man he had been told was his birth father—Jack Rae—was actually still alive and living in New Zealand.

Robin contacted my father, who by then was married to my mother and had his three children with her, including me.

My father, who frequently made it known that he wished his firstborn child had been a son instead of me, was delighted by the apparent revelation that he did indeed have a firstborn who was male, and he was quite happy to hear from Robin and wanted to bring him over to New Zealand to live with us. My mother was dead set against the idea. I remember my parents fighting bitterly about someone named Robin, though I had no idea who this person was.

In the end, my mother persevered in keeping Robin out of our home.

But Robin did not give up. He believed he had a father who was a war hero, and he held on to that belief tightly, almost desperately, for the next thirty years.

At one point he brought his wife and two children to New Zealand to see my father, a visit that did not end well (the children were rude to my mother, who threw them all out of the house). In 1980, when I was living in Texas, Robin asked to meet me. My brother Grant had a home in California at the time, and he and his wife flew to Texas to join me, and we all hosted Robin at my home. Robin looked nothing like my father (for one thing, he was six foot three, while all the Rae men were short), and I became skeptical that he was related to us at all.

Around the year 2000, Robin asked my father to acknowledge his paternity.



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