The Lost Daughter: A Memoir

by Mary Williams

  CHAPTER 15

  AND YET I DIDN’T GO straight home. I took an assignment at a wildlife refuge in Alaska, thus fulfilling my dream to be bipolar. Then I took several more temporary positions in North Dakota, California and Oregon. It was while living in the caldera of a volcano in central Oregon in 2011 that I finally decided it was time to go home. After spending years obsessively traveling everywhere, except Oakland, the pull of home became a little too strong to resist. I’d made half-hearted attempts in the past, like an ill-prepared alpinist pushing for the summit of Everest, but each time I noticed that at even the faintest signs of trouble, I hightailed it back to base camp.

  My first attempt was after a colleague at an Alaskan wildlife refuge introduced me to Facebook. She thought the social network was tailor-made for folks like me who led reclusive and transient lives. She hailed it as the ideal way to stay in touch with friends and family. I never dreamed it’d be the vehicle that would propel me home.

  Soon after I set up my Facebook account, I found myself a bit embarrassed that after a little more than four decades of life I’d only managed to amass eighty or so friends, family and acquaintances that I could list as Facebook friends, compared to the hundreds, sometimes thousands that some of my friends, barely into the second decade of life, could boast. Out of a sense of inadequacy, I trekked deeper into the landscape of Facebook, and thus into my past, in search of more people I could lay claim to. That’s how I found Neome Banks, someone I hadn’t seen since childhood.

  Neome and I grew up as the children of Black Panthers. Like me, Neome was the baby girl of her family, raised by a single mother. As small children we spent most of our time at the Panther-run school, starting each day with a hot breakfast followed by calisthenics, classes and afterschool activities. After leaving the Party, we hung out in the tiny bedroom she shared with her two older sisters in her family’s apartment down the street. We listened to cassette tapes of Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, the Pointer Sisters and the Commodores while gossiping about the goings-on in the neighborhood. She was my first true friend.

  In her Facebook photo, Neome still closely resembled the young girl I once knew. I clicked on “Add as friend,” and, across space and time, she accepted my friendship. Again. Through our correspondence I learned that Neome was still in touch with one of my birth sisters, Teresa, who was also on Facebook. And so, after typing in Teresa’s name and seeing her picture pop up, I friended my sister too.

  Just like that, we closed the void. After high school, Teresa went on to college and graduate school to become a college professor. When our sister Deborah was killed, she had really stepped up, along with my mother, to help raise her two children.

  Teresa and I began sending each other Facebook messages and e-mails. She told me she’d recently divorced but was happy, and lived alone in a modest apartment by the sea; her daughter was now a tall young woman with long black hair and severe bangs. Then we reminisced about our family—a great-aunt who covered her sofas in thick plastic and kept hard candy in little crystal dishes on the coffee table in her living room. We coveted those brightly colored sweets but were admonished to only take one each. We recalled another great-aunt whose house always smelled of boiling chitterlings, and our mother’s father, China, who with his bald head and chubby body resembled the Buddha at birth and in old age. She told me our mother had stopped drinking and that they took a cruise together. She e-mailed a photo of them on the deck of a cruise ship. Our mother was plump, dressed in a purple pants suit paired with a loose pink blouse, sitting on a red mobility scooter. Her close-cropped hair was now gray, but her face was unlined. Though she wasn’t smiling, she looked fiercely happy sitting there in the sun on the deck of a ship headed for Mexico. My sister knelt next to her smiling a smile not unlike my own. Her hand rested on our mother’s arm.

  Seeing this picture made me weep. My mother looked vulnerable but regal, so different from the woman I remembered. Out of nowhere I fantasized about forging a new relationship with her and Teresa. We could travel together. We could recapture the good times before our family fell apart. I wanted to visit, I told my sister. Considering the lives they led now, and how they appeared so unlike the childhood snapshots in my head, I opened my mind to the possibility of a reunion. I bought a ticket to Oakland and Teresa invited me to stay with her. I couldn’t believe how fast and stress-free things were moving. Teresa gave me our mama’s phone number and told me to give her a call. “She’ll be happy to hear from you. You don’t know how many times she has cried missing her baby daughter.”

  Instead of warming my heart, this statement reignited my anger. “Misses me?” If she missed me, she would have reached out to me well before three decades slid by. I told my sister I didn’t believe I was missed. I told her I remembered well the abuse, the neglect. We argued.

  The possibility of a reunion fell to ruin in the wake of my rekindled anger. Defiantly, she withdrew her invitation of a place to stay. She told me that she was angry too. Angry with me for turning my back on our family. A few days after the fight I reached out to her again. I told her I was still coming and if she wanted to meet, I was open. She let me know she was no longer interested in seeing me. The night before I caught my plane to Oakland, I sent her one last e-mail, letting her know the dates of my trip and giving her my cell phone number in case she changed her mind. She didn’t respond. I thought that, at the very least, I’d get to see my old friend Neome.

  The clear, warm beauty of the Oakland weather belied the storm brewing in me. I was waiting to meet Neome at the train station when I saw her approaching on foot with a small boy. She recognized me instantly and we embraced. She was tiny, thin and not much taller than she was as a young teen. She still possessed flawless ebony skin and a radiant smile.

  Her seven-year-old son, Josael, was biracial, with caramel skin and thick, curly black hair. He stared at me with his mother’s almond-shaped eyes, shyly hiding behind her. Neome and I had very difficult family dynamics growing up. Yet Neome still lives near her mother. They spend holidays together, visit often and are fiercely loyal to each other. Neome even left her children with their grandmother so we could spend a few hours alone. How did two girls so alike end up so different? I wanted to ask Neome if she would have accepted the opportunity of a better life, if one had come along, even if it meant leaving her family behind. But I was afraid of how she might answer.

  Teresa waited until the last day of my trip to call, which pissed me off.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You sound like me,” she said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Teresa. Funny how our voices sound alike.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “So, how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, I was just checking in.”

  “Great. I’m kind of busy. So . . .”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  Click.

  It was an awkward and unfulfilled end to my first real attempt to reconnect with my family. Though it stung, I was also relieved. There was obviously still a great deal of pain and unresolved anger that needed to be aired. I wasn’t sure I wanted to wade into that particular cesspool. So I chalked up the experience as a valiant effort on my part that was not realized through no fault of my own. I figured it would have to do as the closure and validation I needed to support my decision to stay away.

  • • •

  I went back to the Bay Area the following spring to work as an environmental education teacher at the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge was less than an hour by public transportation from Oakland. Though I would be in the Bay Area for the next four months, I had no intention of trying again to reconnect with my birth family. I did make a few stealthy trips into San Francisco and Berkeley to visit friends and a few museums, always praying that I wouldn’t run into anyone I was related to.

  So there I was. Again. So close and yet so far, and totally cool with that. I was s
till licking my wounds from being shut out by my sister. Instead I wrote about my ill-fated reunion, a piece that was published in O, The Oprah Magazine, and by means of that writing, I felt I had, for the most part, processed decades of trauma in eight thousand words.

  When I first went to live with Jane, one of the first heart-to-heart talks we had was about anger. I had a hard time dealing with the emotion. My coping strategy was to completely repress it. The problem with this was that when I did get upset, my anger was way out of proportion to the situation. A stranger inadvertently nudging me on a busy street or a perceived snub from a waiter in a restaurant would have me seething with anger that I’d immediately wrestle back into the little cage within I’d created for it. While I was often bubbling with barely contained anger, I was good at keeping it concealed behind a façade of equanimity. Jane knew this about me and encouraged me to deal with my anger rather than repress it. She even went as far as to tell me that it was OK to be angry with her. “No matter how angry you get, let it out. Even if it is at me. I can take it.” I believed she was underestimating just how angry I could get and I vowed that I’d never turn my anger on her.

  Throughout my teens, twenties and thirties, I was able to keep the beast caged, but as I entered my forties I found it more and more difficult to cloak my anger. I dubbed this period my Terrible Forties. I was an emotional chimera of a two-year-old and a sulking teenager, extremely sensitive to even the most benign criticism or perceived insult. Even Jane was not exempt. Where previously I had been open to any and every bit of advice and constructive criticism she had, now her advice and even the sound of her voice grated. I’d never missed our family holidays, and now I began to boycott them. And when Jane failed to invite me to her seventieth birthday party in Argentina, I became so enraged I partially lost my vision for a few hours and suffered a massive migraine that lasted for days. When I recovered enough to respond to this slight, I sent her an e-mail informing her that she was no longer my mother. And I meant it. I was thoroughly ready to throw away my relationship with Jane and be completely motherless.

  Jane responded by e-mailing and calling repeatedly to say, “I am your mom!” I deleted all of the messages and consigned any messages from her and her office to junk mail. She continued to e-mail and call. It was weeks later before I agreed to meet with her. She flew out to Arizona to talk. When I saw her, she looked so worn out and confused I immediately felt bad for my behavior, but my anger quickly overrode those feelings. We were both in tears and she apologized for not inviting me to her party. I told her I accepted her apology but it would be another two years before I truly let it go. I remained contrary, passive-aggressive and distant whenever we were together. She remained patient, open and loving. Every waking moment of those years, I was angry, sometimes openly, though most times it hummed through my body like a low-grade fever. But it was always there until I realized that I wasn’t mad at Jane. I was really mad at my birth mother. I was torching Jane in effigy of my mother.

  CHAPTER 16

  IN THE FALL OF 2011, I was sitting in bed at three A.M. reading Mary Karr’s memoir The Liars’ Club, which chronicles the author’s experiences growing up in a family struggling with alcoholism but also incorporates wonderful moments of humor and familial warmth. As I read, thoughts from my own childhood began to intrude. Not dark memories but pleasant snippets, mostly about my mother. The memories carried me from my bed and deposited me in a chair at the kitchen table in the little yellow house. Mama was at the stove stirring a huge pot of gumbo. The memory was so vivid I could smell the spices, sausage and shellfish. She was wearing her royal blue muumuu with yellow hibiscuses. She was still young, tall, powerfully built, thick-legged, wide-hipped and busty.

  I smiled, put my book aside and powered up my laptop. I retrieved the picture Teresa sent me over a year earlier of our mother and her on the Mexican cruise ship. Though I had looked at the picture dozens of times, it struck me for the first time how old and frail my mother looked and how little time she had. How little time we all had.

  It took years for my pent-up anger to drain away enough to free me to reconnect with my birth mother. I was for the first time able to remember her clearly and not through the haze of my pain and anger. My birth mother was not a monster who failed me but a woman who did her best in the face of poverty, addiction and social injustice to raise her children. My anger was gone and in its place a newfound respect for the woman I’d hated for most of my life. I was finally ready to go back.

  For fun I decided to Google her to see what popped up. I typed in her full name and poked the Enter key. My heart stopped when Google slapped me with an obituary for Mary Nell Kennedy. In a panic I opened the link and was relieved to see, instead of a photo of my mother, a picture of a bespectacled, gray-haired white woman in a plaid jacket with a huge red bow around her neck. Definitely not my mama. But the thought that it could have easily been her unsettled me.

  I e-mailed my sister Teresa. It’d been nearly a year since my last awkward phone chat with her. I was tired of fighting. I needed to let her know where my heart lay and I wrote:

  Hello Teresa,

  I’m writing to let you know that I will be in the Bay Area in early 2012 and would love to try and meet again. I’ve carried a lot of anger and regret and I’m proud that I am at a point where I no longer feel the need to carry it anymore. I know that our mother did the best she could with what she had and in retrospect she did an amazing job. While life was far from rosy she made sure we were fed and clothed and had a roof over our heads. About a year ago I visited our old house in Oakland and I thought it would stir up bad memories. But the opposite happened. I remembered us playing Monopoly, making rock candy by heating water and sugar in a spoon over the stove, playing Pac-Man.

  I’d forgotten the good times we had. I’ve also been thinking that our mother is getting older and I would hate to lose the opportunity to see her and get to know her. And to let her know I have thought of her and truly appreciate the struggles she faced in trying to raise us.

  I would love to meet with you, Mama, Randy, Deborah’s children, everyone eventually, and try to rebuild a positive relationship.

  Best,

  Mary

  The minute I sent the e-mail, my anxiety lowered. I placed my laptop on my nightstand and picked up my book again, not expecting to hear back from my sister until the following afternoon if at all. A few days later she responded. I sat staring at her e-mail in disbelief but unable to open it, scared that she’d reject my offer. Scared that she wouldn’t. In the end I decided to shut my computer down without opening her e-mail. It felt like slamming the lid shut on a box of vipers.

  When I mustered up the courage later that day to read her response, I found an open invitation. She gave me our mother’s phone number and suggested I give her a call on Christmas Day, which was a few weeks away.

  “She’ll like hearing from you. You don’t have to talk long if you aren’t able. Just say hello.”

  I got a sheet of copy paper and wrote “Mama,” “Christmas Day” and the phone number on it in big block letters with a black Sharpie and stuck it to the refrigerator. Not because I was afraid I’d forget to call but to get used to a daily reminder over the next few weeks that I was finally going to hear my mother’s voice.

  When Christmas arrived, I waited until the early afternoon to call. I dialed the number and was relieved when an automated voice told me to leave a message. I hung up before the beep. I called back a half an hour later and after three rings was about to hang up again when I heard,

  “Hello?”

  Other than sounding a bit crackly and out of breath, her voice was the same.

  “Hey! It’s Lawanna.”

  “Lawanna?”

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  “You sound like Deborah’s daughter. I thought this was Deborah’s daughter. You sound just like her!” she said with a chuckle.

  “No. It’s me. I got your number from Teresa. I wanted to wish you a M
erry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas to you too!”

  “I also wanted to let you know I’ll be in the Bay Area in the New Year. I was thinking I’d come and see you.”

  “You gonna come by?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK! If you got a pen I’ll give you my address!”

  “No. I don’t need it right now. When the time comes I’ll call again and get it from you.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “Well, I just wanted to say Happy Holidays and I’ll see you soon.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  (Awkward pause.)

  “Well, I have to go but I’ll see you soon.”

  “Lawanna?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  “Uh . . . love you too.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I hung up the phone completely dazed. That was the first time I ever remember my mama saying she loved me. I said I loved her too because that’s the appropriate response, but I didn’t completely believe that. I said it because a part of me did love her. Never stopped loving her.

  The lady I had just spoken to sounded like my mama, but the sweetness and openness that the voice carried was new. The overall impression I got was . . . cuteness. A cute little old lady taking a holiday call from her middle-aged daughter as if they had never spent more than a few days apart.

  Was it possible that the drunk, angry, depressed mama had mellowed into a sweet-hearted granny? My rational mind was not easily convinced, but my heart had softened. The weeks leading up to my Bay Area trip suddenly seemed less daunting.