My mother's final secret: Searching for the little sister I never knew I had

I'd been having dinner with my cousin Danny, in town for a few days on a business trip, when he lightly dropped the bombshell. We'd been talking about the usual things that families talk about — the trouble we'd gotten into as kids, the Thanskgivings we'd shared. Then I asked him what, if anything, he remembered about my father. Danny, seven years older than me, easily summoned fond tales of my mom's boyfriend horseplaying with him and his brothers. Of course, I'd never known that side of my father, I'd said, because he'd left my mother before I was born. "Well, yeah," Danny had replied, "he was gone, except for the thing with your sister." I sat in stunned silence for a moment, then flagged down a waiter and ordered another glass of Malbec. I had a sister. 

My mother was 21 when she got pregnant with me. This was before Roe v. Wade, and anyway, she was Catholic. So her parents did what any Irish Catholic parents would do at the time — they threatened to kick her out unless she got married. It lasted three tense months. That part of the story I'd long known. What I'd never imagined was the sequel. 

Danny described what he'd remembered — how, when I was three, my mother and I had decamped from our home in Jersey City to his in a quaint Boston suburb. He recalled his Aunt Bets getting "fat," and going off to the hospital with his mother one day. He said that years later, his father had told him they had offered to adopt the baby, but my mother would have none of it. 

When I called my uncle the next day, he didn't recall much. It was a long time ago, he said, and everybody had put it out of their minds. What he did remember vividly was how heartbroken my aunt was, how much they had wanted that little girl. And when I suggested that my flinty grandmother had probably insisted my mother give the child up, he said no. Something must have changed in the short years since my mother had been pregnant the last time. This time, my nan had very much wanted her to keep her baby. Instead, my mom came back home empty-handed. And then, for the most part, no one spoke of it ever again. The story was simple and unchanging; I was my mother's only child. Until, decades later, I wasn't.

I am now one of an ever-widening population of people whose lives have been abruptly upended by the revelations of long-held family secrets. The proliferation of at-home DNA tests has ushered in a tidal wave of skeletons shaken from closets, while generational shifts — and rising secularism — have made things that were once life-ruiningly shameful exponentially less taboo. I have an array of friends who learned later in life that their uncles were really their fathers, that Grandma had a whole other family back in the old country. Danny had only casually mentioned my sister because it hadn't occurred to him that I didn't already know.

I waited a year to try to find her. I needed time to prepare for whatever I might find. Then I went on all the DNA sites and adoption sites, and searched through vital records departments and local adoption services. I had only the vague memories of someone who had been a little boy at the time and someone who was a very old man now to go on, and nothing was coming up. "It's like I have this story," I sobbed in frustration to my family one day, "but no proof she ever existed."

This summer, though, I got a call from an adoption agency that, with the small shreds of information I had provided, produced a hit. They had the record of a woman who'd been born around the right time, in the right place. She'd been looking for her biological family. Her birth mother had named her Mary. "That can't be right," I said. "It happens all the time," Carol from the agency informed me. My mom sure knew how to keep a secret, but she had a real lack of imagination for nomenclature.

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Carol described the profile of the birth parents from the adoption records. I knew it was my mother and father from their ages and physical descriptions alone, but it was another detail — that the mother loved to dance — that made me cry. My mother loved to dance. She had won contests when she was younger. She wanted her child's new parents to know that about her. 

This other Mary had first reached out to the agency back in the early '90s. She'd written and called more times over the years, always in the hope that her birth family was open to connecting. This Mary had asked that the processing fee be waived, due to economic hardship. She later wrote that she had three children, the first born when she was just 20. She said she had a severe health condition, but declined to reveal what it was. In her last letter, 20 years ago, she wrote, "I am still trying to find out who I am."

For weeks this summer, the agency tried to reach her. Her phone number, for a landline, had long been disconnected. A letter was returned from an address where she no longer lived. Meanwhile, Carol remained discreet with the information she provided. I didn't have an adopted name or an address beyond the city where my sister had last lived — a run-down New England town whose primary claim to fame is its crime rate. The agency couldn't find any obituaries for her, which I tried to take as an encouraging sign. Maybe after years of frustration, she'd simply given up on her search. Then, in September, I got the call.

"I have some sad news," Carol told me gently. My sister died 10 years ago. 

I have her full adopted name now, and birth and death dates, but not much else. I can't find any obituaries or death notices. I've scoured digitized yearbooks from the local high schools, and they've yielded nothing more than a lot of late '80s hair inspiration. I don't know how she died. I don't know what she looked like. I may never know. The agency wisely warned me off directly contacting her now adult children; they gave me the name of one of them and described his lengthy and at times violent arrest record. I'd like to think that's from his father's side of the tree. But in his multiple mug shots, I swear I see a shadow of my mom's eyes.

Lately, I find I have more compassion for my mother than ever before, and that I'm angrier at her than ever before. I can't imagine what she went through, with two messy, unplanned pregnancies under her belt before she turned 25. I can't imagine her shame and pain. I can't imagine the relief she might have felt when it was all over and she could go home. It's clear that the second time around, she knew my father was not staying in the picture. I don't know if he ever even knew about the baby. What I do know now from other family members is that my mother's other sister, back in Jersey City, regularly and vindictively threatened to reveal her secret. It must have been horrible for my mom, carrying around something so big for 50 years and always being afraid that it would be weaponized against her. 

Yet I also feel, on a primal, physical level, the pain of knowing this other Mary and I were kept apart our whole lives, neither of us ever knowing the other existed. Consequently, I've spent the past few weeks crying a lot. Can you grieve for someone you never knew? It sure seems that way. You can definitely mourn for all the possibilities that a death decisively obliterates. I recall author Gina Moffa explaining once that this is where "the deeper grief lies… in those little moments of 'What if?'" 

What if? What if my mother had been able to tell me the truth, way back when my sister wrote her first letter to the adoption agency, back when there was still time? Would this Mary have eventually become a burden, hitting me up for bail money for my nephew and fighting over our mother's end-of-life care? Then again, what if knowing each other had made everything different and better from then on, for her and me? What if, on a spring morning a lifetime ago, my mother had decided to bring a baby back home with us? (I'd hope Mom would have reconsidered the name, at least.) It likely wouldn't have been great — my mother wasn't great and I doubt another kid would have made her better — but other Mary would have had a big sister to protect her. And maybe we could have grown up with shared memories, a healthy amount of sibling rivalry, secrets and inside jokes, like sisters do. 

I have two daughters of my own, and I've spent years looking at them looking back at me, the older one with her arms proprietarily encircled around the younger one, the younger one in a posture of complete trust she reserves for no one else in the world. My sister and I may have had harder upbringings than my daughters did, but what if we could have had something of their kind of love too? I had a father I never knew. He gave me a sister I never knew. I am still trying to find out who I am.

All I have now — and it's not nothing — is the liberating consolation of honesty. A few weeks ago, I had dinner with my mother's sister-in-law and her daughter. We'd barely ordered chips and guac when I blurted to my Aunt Brigid, "Did you know my mother had another child?" She drew in a breath and answered slowly. "Yes," she said. "I did." She had seen my mother, a ridiculously pregnant elephant in the room, on a visit to my aunt's house. And nobody had acknowledged her blatant fecundity in the slightest, which is such a peak Irish Catholic family move I've got to respect it.

After my aunt told me her story — and my cousin picked her jaw up off the floor — something at that table shifted and lightened. No truth could hurt my mother now, and we were all free to put down at last her painful secret. I hadn't even known how heavy it was until I watched it dissipate before my eyes.

The little I know of the other Mary's life sounds hard — financial troubles, illness, at least one kid on the wrong side of the law. I'm sure there were beautiful parts too. I still hope I can discover them. What I do know is that we had the same biological parents and vastly different lives. I know that she spent years fruitlessly searching for her birth mother. Her mother. My mother. Our mother. I'm not sure if she'd have been thrilled with what was on the side of that curiosity — a difficult woman who struggled with her mental health, who estranged herself from her family before slipping into a haze of dementia. But I think she had the right to know that. Long ago, when she was a young woman with a lot of questions, she said she was trying to find out who she was. I wish I could have given her the answer. And I wish I could have told her, it took such a very long time, my little sister, but I found you.

Note: The names of the living people in the story have been changed for privacy.