The Journeys of Bumbly Bear

by Jacqueline Kinnie

  Chapter 26

  Becoming a Daughter and Sister

  So here I was, Miss Katy Braidon of Strawberry Hill, California, daughter of Sue and Jack Braidon and sister of Kim. Little did I realize that day in the courtroom how many ways my life would change and become a dream I was to live as I grew up, and still do. As I think and feel my way back to those early family days, I remember the sessions of talking to myself sternly and telling myself I must be “the good Katy” and never revert to the “old bad Nutmeg.” Dr. Bob explained to me sometime around my 10th birthday that I had experienced what he called a major identity crisis. I wasn’t sure then what he meant by those words, but I did know that I was feeling strange and very conflicted feelings. Sometimes I loved my sister Kim, and we really did get along well. Other days, though, I wondered if she had something special I could never have because I wasn’t “really” theirs. I wondered if someday I’d hurt them all and become, like my biological mother, a crazy person and have to be locked up in a hospital as she was. I wondered who my real father was: I would never know, and still do not to this day.

  When I felt strange and confused, I knew I couldn’t really explain to Kim or my parents, so I would escape into reading a book. I was an avid reader of biographies, always trying to understand the author’s life and whether there was anything I could learn about how to live mine. I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books avidly, and while I was taken into the world of Laura Ingalls while reading, I could only wish to be like her in Little House on the Prairie. I was living in a very different time and place. I didn’t have a prairie or a farm and farm animals. But I did have a dog and a cat and all those wonderful birds. And I had parents I was learning every day to love more. In those ways I could identify with Laura. I loved her seemingly happy disposition, but worried about her moving from place to place. I fantasized about riding the western stallions her father bought, and I learned about making friends as Laura made friends. Laura was my friend and idol for several years until I was nearly 14 years old. I tried to be like her, and even wanted long pigtails like her. Unfortunately my frizzy black hair wouldn’t do pigtails very well.

  I also loved to read the encyclopedia. Call me strange, but an afternoon sitting in the pretty blue velvet barrel chair in my bedroom by the window with the Britannica or World Book was a quiet time I thoroughly enjoyed. My sister Kim really never understood my need for books and knowledge. She was an outdoors kid and loved to be with her friends racing through the countryside, the nearby national seashore, far more than I. At times, though she and I both enjoyed the seashore, the park nearby, and we did have many friends in common.

  Kim and I had many things in common which allowed us to enjoy each other. To this day we both love to fly kites in Golden Gate Park. We both loved going to the Pier with our parents and loved the street food, the sights and chance to see all kinds of strangely dressed people who spoke languages we did not understand. We’d guess where they might be from and fantasize long ocean voyages to strange lands and adventures. We both had vivid imaginations and made up stories which entertained us and our parents on these weekend jaunts together as a family. Today I take my own five year old to many of the same places and tell her how Kim and our parents and I used to watch the people go by. I tell her how we watched people in different styles of dress as we did then. Today most everyone wears jeans and tee shirts or business suits and ties. We don’t see the wide varieties of dress nor hear the music of many languages.

  Many favorite memories and special times of my growing up years are those of times spent in the sunny yellow kitchen of our Strawberry Hill home. My mom was a gourmet cook and loved to share her skills and talents with Kim and me. Just remembering being there with Mom brings back wonderful stories and the sounds of laughter shared, exquisite smells of chocolate ganache and brewing split pea soup on Sunday nights. We learned a lot from her about using spices in our food, and loved to go with her to the Tyler Florence shop in downtown Mill Valley, where the exotic spicy smells pricked your nose. To this day the smell of cardamom or lavender reminds me of Mom. Go into her kitchen today and you’ll still smell those wonderful aromas. Isn’t it strange what each of us remembers as we go back to our childhoods? Those were warm and wonderful moments. The other side of those moments was the fact that when Mom cooked, I swear she used every bowl, pot and pan in the kitchen. It was Kim and my jobs to clean up after all the cooking, and that wasn’t so much fun as we squabbled about who got to wash and who got to dry and put away the mirage of cooking necessities. Mom always made us do the pots and pans and bowls by hand: they were never put in the dishwasher because she might need them any minute as she thought of something more to eat!

  When Dad would arrive home from work we’d run and jump at him, and he’d catch us both, toss us in the air and carefully catch us on the way down. He didn’t do that so much as we grew older, but we got great bear hugs, and secretly he’d often palm a chocolate truffle from the wonderful Rocky Mountain Candy shop in San Francisco near his office. I suspect Mom knew he was doing that, but she never let on. It was just our delicious secret.

  School Years

  Kim and I graduated with honors from Pleasant Valley Elementary and went on to the Mill Valley Middle School where we were both enamored of our 7th grade science teacher. A tall dark handsome guy with sparkling eyes and a swaggering walk, we just thought he was gorgeous and fell totally in love, both of us. It never occurred to us then that we couldn’t both have the same man: we both planned to marry him! Kim and I daily shared our fantasies: we’d all live together in one house and raise a dozen kids, have a happy home life and lots of chocolates. We learned he liked chocolates, too, and each of us saved some of the truffles Dad brought home for us and left them on his desk, anonymously, of course. You have to admit, sharing chocolate truffles is real love.

  In Middle School I got into gymnastics, volleyball and a beginner’s debate team. I don’t know whether I enjoyed volleyball or the debate team more. As I look back, I realize that these activities gave me a sense of competence and competitiveness that allowed me to go on to gain more and more skills. I loved to argue in those debate team events, and I often won. As an advocate for children today, I still use those skills and I still love to win!

  Kim began to seriously develop her artistic skills, and was a favorite of the art teacher, Miss Johnson, who spent a lot of extra time with Kim after school hours. She began submitting her paintings and art work to various shows which allowed students to enter, and she often won best of show.

  Though many of our interests were different, we were both eager to win in our activities, and we still are. Kim today takes prizes in national gallery shows and gets commissions from some pretty famous people.

  We both entered Tamapais High School and here we did not see as much of each other while in school. My schedule of advanced academics precluded spending much time in the same areas and classes as Kim, who was majoring in the arts, but we enjoyed sharing our experiences at home evenings. We continued to share a bedroom and were often told to hush late nights as we chatted on and on. We loved the same movies, had crushes on the same Hollywood stars, but now occasionally fought over who would get which one. Kim was a blonde, blue eyed, tall beauty and was extremely popular in her class. She had a bevy of boyfriends in high school while I did not. Instead, I ran with a small group of high achievers on the debate team, both boys and girls. We weren’t ready for exclusive dates and going steady, while Kim was continually going steady, breaking up and starting another relationship. We continued to share a few friends we had known since grade school, and continued to feel close as sisters, seldom fighting. On our sixteenth birthdays a year apart, we were honored with “sweet Sixteen” parties in Golden Gate Park. I remember writing to Helen then, begging her to come back to California for my sixteenth birthday. She could not, but we sent her a video of the party and she wrote back that she was delighted.
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br />   My parents remained in the group of other foster parents they had first trained in for all the years of our schooling, and I think that even today they occasionally meet some of them for sharing “how the kids are doing.” During our high school years, Kim and I really got close to several of the kids in that group of foster homes. We looked forward to the group picnics which were held every couple of months on the National Seashore at Inverness. Kim fell in love in her senior year with one of the foster boys. They ended up going to the same college, though they ended that relationship in their sophomore year.

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  Not everything was rosy and delightful during those high school years, however. I got into a real funk during my 15th year. I was determined to see my mother, to try to find out who my biological father was. I had learned to use a computer pretty well by then and I tried everything I could online to try to discover more about my heritage. Looking back, I cannot imagine how my parents put up with my wailing and crying some days and nights, but they were incredibly understanding about my need. I even ran away for a couple weeks during a spring break from school. I know now my parents would have understood and tried to help me with this problem, but I felt guilty when I thought about talking with them. They were wonderful parents, and I loved them dearly. I felt somehow that expressing my anguish, hurt and curiosity about my biological parents and roots would somehow hurt them, and I didn’t want to hurt them.

  I emptied my bank account unknown to my parents and even Kim, took the bus to San Francisco and got myself a room in a very seedy hotel. Little did I know that the Mission District was where the pimps sent their girls to find their johns for the night. I learned my way around the city those two weeks in ways I’d rather not discuss, but I did manage to stay invisible to the cops, so that my frantic parents had a terrible time.

  Of course my parents called the police when I didn’t come home on Thursday before Good Friday after school. I learned later that they gave Kim a really hard time, assuming that she knew something about my whereabouts, which she did not. I saw my picture on TV and my pitiful parents begging someone to bring me home. Apparently they’d decided I’d been kidnapped. I called home then, and they were ecstatic to hear my voice. They said they’d come and get me. I refused, saying I was on an important mission I had to do by myself and I’d be home within ten days. I refused to give them the public telephone number from which I was calling, as well as where I was staying. I promised if I had any problems I’d call them. Kim got on the phone and pleaded with me to come home now, but I was determined to do this alone.

  During the next ten days I spent a lot of time in the library on Bartlett Street trying to learn about black history and trying to find genealogy that might relate to me. I did learn a lot about blacks in America, about slave trade, the Civil Rights movement, and the lives of blacks in America for two hundred years, but I didn’t find anything relating to me. I was not only disappointed, I was angry. And I was hungry for my mom’s good cooking and homesick for my home and sister. When I did go home on a Saturday morning, I was greeted with warm hugs, and too many questions about where I’d been and what I’d been doing. I didn’t want to share my excursion into black heritage, but Dad finally got it out of me a week later. It was then that he and Mom decided to try to help me to see my biological mother who was in Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital.

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  You cannot imagine my fear of finally meeting once again the mother I had not known since early infancy. I’d no idea what she looked or sounded like, who she might be, whether she wanted to meet me. I was intensely curious and frightened out of my mind for the weeks between my heritage jaunt to the city and my trip to Langley Porter with my parents. I saw Dr. Bob several times in those few weeks, and later after my visit with her. He helped me to begin to face the reality of a mother unknown, schizophrenic and really out of contact with the world much of the time.

  It wasn’t easy meeting this frail, pitifully thin, skin and bones, bent over woman with wild unkempt hair in a faded blue bathrobe and old silk slippers – this was my mother. Somehow I’d imagined a pretty woman, with sparkling eyes and good energy. She was not that. Her dark shadowed eyes, mostly cast down to the floor, occasionally peered up at me, without recognition. The nurse told her I was her daughter Katy. She did not respond, but sat silently on the chair where she’d been led by the nurse. And then she began to wail. To this day I will never forget that keening sound, so pitiful. I couldn’t stand it and ran to my Mom for comfort. The nurse nodded toward the door and we left quietly as the nurse said: “She’s not here with us today. I’m sorry.” That scene still plays in a bad dream now and then, but for weeks after meeting her, I relived that scene every night in my dreams.

  My parents still believe they should not have taken me to meet her, but I was an insistent 15-year-old who wouldn’t take no for an answer. And how do I feel about it now some 27 years later? I still shudder at the memory, but that experience left me intensely aware of the pain of mental illness and the effects it can have on a child. That pain drives me to protect children who go through our courts, and to work very hard to ensure that they find safe, loving, lasting homes. That experience along with my awareness of other foster kids and their families led me to my current profession as a child advocate attorney.

  For many months and a few more years I worried about becoming like my mother. I seldom talked about those feelings with my family, but I did a lot of exploring and wondering with Dr. Bob for several lengthy sessions. I couldn’t get forget the deadness in those dark eyes, the keening wail of a woman in pain. I didn’t want to ever be like her, yet I wanted her somehow to love me. It took a lot of years for me to be resigned to the fact that she’d never know me, nor I her.

  Today I am mother to an adorable five year old little girl named Cynthia, after the grandmother she will never know. My husband, the nephew of Dr. Bob, who remains in our lives now as family member as well as advisor, both professionally and personally, is also an attorney, and shares the care of Cynthia. We live in the City, but still not far from the home where I grew up __ where my parents still live in the same wonderful home, and we visit often. Cynthia is already learning to cook and “do dishes” with her grandmother, and I smile as I watch Dad pick her up and swing her around, dropping a chocolate truffle secretly into her little hands. Life has been good to me, and the good really began when I met Miss Helen at Children’s Garden. I only wish for every child the chance I had.

  The End