Rejection #4 (2020)
Deep down I know this will be my last attempt. I know because time moves mercilessly on -my birth mother is turning 80 next month. I know because I am ready to move forward, I can feel it in my bones. I’ve done a lot of healing in the last four years and it’s time. Life is short and precious, this is not how I want to spend my remaining time. I know because I’m facing open heart surgery and am ‘getting my affairs in order’ just in case.
Is she still alive? My instincts say yes and my friendly genealogist is quick to confirm with a new address in yet another town. I write a letter, in many ways the same letter I’ve written before but its spirit is different. There’s more peace, less yearning. I speak less as a needy child to an indifferent mother and more as a fellow traveller on life’s crazy journey from cradle to grave. Even putting the letter in the post box is enough; I’m done.
What happens next catches me out. She calls. My heart aches. Perhaps I’m not as healed as I think. She tells me that, after all these decades of hiding, she has finally told her husband of my existence. The impact of this is profound. I feel seen. I belong. I am no longer her shameful secret. I think she has told him for entirely pragmatic reasons. It seems illness means she relies on him for reading and writing. It doesn’t matter why; he knows – I am known.
The call goes on. It’s more than an awkward dance around the handbags of our shared truth. We talk normally. She tells me about her life, her illness. I tell her about my life, my surgery. She asks what I want. Without realising I ask if I can visit her. She is not sure what’s best for us. She says she will reflect and then write.
A week later I receive a letter typed by her husband. She doesn’t feel well enough to face into a relationship with me. There’s no fear or anxiety in her words, just weariness. I feel compassion, proper full on, wholehearted compassion. There’s still a voice in my head begging for contact, saying she’s being selfish. But it’s a tiny voice, one that I can acknowledge and own without feeling a servant to. I write back with more grace than I imagined I had to accept her choice and to leave my door open. She replies quickly and kindly, but with a firmness of mind that I respect and appreciate.
It's finally over. I am both happy and sad. But it’s much, much bigger than that. She doesn’t know the gift she has given me. Telling her husband, having one lovely phone call, it’s enough – I feel whole, I feel healed.
There’s a sting in the tail of all this. My friendly genealogist is insistant I have no siblings on my birth mother’s side; I trust his expertise and thoroughness. But she let’s slip she has a son. She insists I promise not to contact him and I agree. How can this be? Who is this mystery man? Perhaps it is my burden to never know, to carry the incomplete nature of this with me as a reminder of what it was I experienced for all those years.