Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.
~Anthony Brandt
I sat with my husband and three children in a hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, where we visit my husband’s relatives each winter. But this year was different. This time, I would be seeing my family. Any moment, my sister would arrive from her home ninety miles away. As I waited in the lobby, my cell phone rang every few minutes. “I’m almost there!” she’d say. Finally, a black SUV pulled up.
Alexa jumped out and into my arms. I had been waiting for that hug for thirty-eight years.
Alexa and I had not seen each other since she moved away from Massachusetts when I was eight years old and she was one. That also was the last time I saw our father.
And now, all these lost decades later, we were hugging and crying outside a Florida hotel.
My parents divorced when I was three and my brother Ethan was one. For the next five years, I cherished my father’s occasional visits and phone calls, even though he often let me down. I met his new wife and loved playing with their baby daughter, Alexa. But when I was eight, my father moved his new family to Pennsylvania and eventually to Florida.
I felt loved and cared for by my mother and her parents, who we moved in with. But a deep sadness was with me always. My father had left us. He did not know me as I grew up, and I did not know him. I felt different from other kids, but I would not let it show. I inherited my mother’s determination and realism, which helped me. And I was glad she was always open with me about her efforts—relentless, but unsuccessful—to get child support; about my paternal grandparents, who lived nearby but had almost nothing to do with us; and, in my teens, telling me that my father had a wife and two sons before us.
When I was growing up, we occasionally heard from my father’s sister. That is how we knew he was no longer married to Alexa’s mother. He had married a fourth wife and had three children with her. We never heard from him. That didn’t stop me from wishing that I could know my father, but I could not bring myself to call or write. It never felt like the right time to reach out. “It’s not supposed to be me looking for him,” I thought. “He is supposed to be taking care of me.”
I was an adult with children of my own when Ethan went to a wake for our father’s uncle, hoping our father would be there. He was not, but Ethan had taken a step toward re-establishing contact with our father’s family. A few days later, at my aunt’s request, I visited her for the first time in twenty-seven years. For the next eight years, I sent her a holiday card each year, and she responded with an update on my father.
Still, I could not bring myself to contact my father, even when she told me that he was sick. I had three children of my own by then, and I knew the power of love between a parent and child. How could he throw it away? It didn’t make sense. I never stopped wondering why he left me and my brother.
When my father died, I could not cry. I wanted to mourn, but no emotions came. That bothered me, and I sought guidance from my rabbi.
“Your mother and your grandparents were your parents. They raised you,” she said. “He was your father only biologically.” And she suggested his behavior was that of an unhealthy person.
This opened up a different way of thinking for me. Maybe I had mourned him long ago with all those childhood tears. Still, I felt shock that he was truly gone. I had always held the thought deep down inside, and especially since becoming a parent, that any day my father would call me. With his death, I felt that it was over. I felt closure... or so I thought.
What I did not know then was that my oldest half-brother, Dan, had sought out our father and established a relationship with him in the years before his death. After our father died, Dan got in touch with me. We lived just a few towns apart and arranged to meet in a seafood restaurant not far from our homes. After forty years, I was finally making a connection to my father.
I wanted to hear every detail, to piece together a picture of our father as a person. “What was he like?” I asked. “How did he act?”
Dan told me that he was friendly and charismatic and easy to be around. “And he loves chocolate ice cream,” he added. My heart jumped. I am a fiend for chocolate. It was a connection, however small.
What I had not expected was the connection I felt to Dan. It was so easy to talk to each other. We shared the same circumstances—we had both been left by our father as children. In other ways, we were so much alike. I had a new half-brother.
A few months later, I was styling a bride’s hair. She was so excited that her half-sister was travelling a great distance to attend her wedding. Suddenly, I ached. I had a half-sister, too. But I didn’t know her.
I asked my aunt about Alexa. Her mother had recently died. I got Alexa’s number and dialed.
From that day on, Alexa and I talked every two weeks. I reached out, and she reached right back. Alexa opened up doors for me into the life of my father. He was a good father to her, even after her parents divorced. He was involved in her life, supportive, and attentive. I was glad he could be so nice. All my life, I’d wondered, “Does he have a heart?” But I also learned that he was a womanizer who liked to drink and gamble.
Of all my half-siblings, Alexa was the one I’d longed for. I had a late-1960s photograph of me standing behind her, holding her hands as she toddled forward toward the camera. Alexa kept a photo of me, too, cradling her in my arms.
Suddenly, here we were, grown women hugging outside a Florida hotel. After six months of phone calls, we had decided to meet. With our husbands and children, we spent two wonderful days together. The new cousins got to know each other, laughing over the similarities in their moms—in our upbeat personalities and more.
In Florida, my aunt showed me photographs of my father throughout his life. She also had a framed picture of me that my grandmother always kept and another in a locket of my grandfather’s. I had never known they even thought of me. Looking at those pictures, I didn’t feel so forgotten. But I still wondered, “Why didn’t they reach out to me all these years? How could they have just ignored us?”
The biggest question of all lingered for me: “Was my father sorry?” Dan never asked him directly, but he sensed his regret. That gives me a little peace. I know he would have liked me. And I would have loved him—even though I think he was a coward.
With my half-siblings, there is no such baggage. We are innocent people in the irresponsible, kooky, maybe even wicked life of our father. He never took responsibility.
With my father’s death, I have found a new family. When he was alive, no one was willing to challenge him or ask him questions. He kept such secrets. But his death opened things up. At first, there was just me and my brother. Now I have all these people in my life who love me. They have formed a circle for me—Dan and his brother, then Alexa and her family, and maybe others I will eventually meet. And I trust them one hundred percent, in a way that I never could have trusted my father. They give me so much more than he ever could.
I can’t dwell on the past or be sad about it anymore. I have so much more now that is new and blooming. During my Florida visit, I kept staring at Alexa, thinking, “She’s half me.” Each day since, I marvel, “I have a sister!” These are words I have not said or thought since I was eight years old. How lucky I am to be able to say them now at age forty-six. And it is also easy to say: “I love my sister.”
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