B.K. Jackson on Discovering Family Secrets

Read "Serendipity," B.K. Jackson's gripping new essay on how the search for her mother uncovered a whole new family

I first met B.K. (Kate) Jackson on social media where she happily shares the work of fellow writers—in other words, she’s a devoted literary citizen. This world of publishing is not easy, so good literary citizens always have a soft spot in my heart.

But just as importantly, Kate is a gifted writer herself. A journalist by training, she writes about social issues, health and wellness, and food and travel. But she’s recently turned her exquisite talents toward personal essays which have appeared in the New York Times, Visible Magazine, and HuffPost, amongst others. And she’s currently revising a memoir about searching for a mother she never knew.

Kate has a keen interest in our origin stories and exploring how who and where we came from impacts who we are now. I’m delighted to share her gorgeous essay that furthers this topic. In her fifties, Kate began searching for the mother who’d left when she was a small child and for whom, many decades later, Kate still pined. In addition to finding out about her mom, Kate learned there was more to her family than she’d ever imagined.

Beyonders, this essay will have you on the edge of seat and also remind you that there is much gigantic good in the world—which is the whole reason I started Beyond. If you’re a fan of Dani Shapiro or Nicole Chung, this essay is for you!

Serendipity

Neither of us remember why my husband, out of the blue one day 15 years ago, mentioned his old friend Toupy. But if he hadn’t, I’d never have solved an aching mystery of my life—nor would I have discovered that it was merely a prelude to another.

The first concerned my mother. When I was an infant and my brother was only four, she left and never returned.

No one talked about her when we were children. It was as if she’d never existed. The silence, we thought, could mean only one of two things: she was bad, or she left because we were bad.

Over time, my father—who knew no more than we did about what had become of her—doled out age-appropriate answers when we dared to ask why she left. Early on, his story was that she simply was young and not ready to be a wife and mother. Later, he’d share harsh truths, but in his gentle way, insisting it wasn’t her fault—that she’d been traumatized as the daughter of an alcoholic father and a mother with schizophrenia who cycled in and out of Philadelphia’s notoriously nightmarish asylums, leaving her 15-year-old daughter to fend for herself.

As we got older still, he sketched some backstory. About the time her mother was given a lobotomy, the success of which was fleeting, my mother at 17 had a son—my older brother—after an affair with an older married man. My father met her when she was 19 and they were wed soon after. The next year she became pregnant again, but the baby died three days after being born. By the time I came along the following year, their marriage was unraveling.

My father shielded us from her flaws and dereliction until we were nearly grown—that she lied often and wildly, but not always; that while he worked two jobs to make ends meet, she’d gamble the rent money at the racetrack and concoct fantastic tales to account for the missing funds; that despite being the smartest person he’d ever met, she had a slim grasp on reality. When the lights would go out, she’d swear she paid the bill or would suddenly remember she couldn’t pay the bill because her purse had been stolen. When she’d fail to show up for family gatherings or be home when she was expected, she’d insist she been stuck in a closet for hours or had gotten hopelessly lost in her own hometown.

My father believed his love and stability could change her, but he admitted defeat after coming home one too many times to find me wailing, my mother oblivious to my cries. He’d find wet diapers tossed into closets and me with scorched thighs from diaper burns. If I know anything about my father it’s that he’d have gone on making excuses for her, he’d have given her anything, forgiven her anything—except neglect—and so they argued.

When the tensions escalated—when I was six months old and my brother four years old—my mother escaped to Miami, taking me and my brother. Just temporarily, she said. She needed a break. Maybe there was nothing my father could do to keep her from taking us. Or maybe he believed a time apart would heal them. Instead, it ended them. She became involved with another man and got into trouble—just what kind has never been clear. Three months later, she asked my father to pick us up after she deposited us at—or we were removed and taken to—some sort of child detention facility. Just where and by whom was also never clear.

After they divorced and my mother made no claim for custody, my father adopted my brother and raised us on his own. For him, it wasn’t a chore. We were the lights of his life. Then, as always, he put us first and spoiled us with kindness, affection, praise, and attention—everything that should have made us feel secure, whole, happy. But his unwavering attention and unconditional love couldn’t erase our mother hunger or pluck away the shame we carried—like a tiny pebble in a shoe—over having been abandoned.  

Long past childhood and well into middle age, I still pined for her. I yearned to know why she left and where she’d gone. The blankness of her engulfed and bewildered me. I looked for her in every woman I saw and wondered what I’d done to make her leave. I towed her absence everywhere. She was my white whale—my holy grail—and I never stopped searching for her.

My brother didn’t share my obsession. I had no recollection of our mother—she was in my life for only nine months. But he remembered her, remembered having been her boy for four years, remembered her leaving him. He had flashbacks of Miami and of being afraid of a man in tall boots who wasn’t our father; of the police—or someone—taking us to an orphanage until we were picked up; of howling when they tried to separate us. So when I tried to interest him in my searches, he snapped, “Fuck her! She didn’t want me, so why should I care?”

I understood, but I persisted, sometimes with my father’s help. I consulted private investigators, cracked phone books in cities all over the country, and, when the internet emerged, leaped eagerly into its vast rabbit holes. But it’s not easy to find a woman who moves frequently, covers her tracks, and changes her name more often than most women change their hairstyles.

By the time serendipity pointed the way toward my mother, I was 54 years old and convinced I’d live my days knowing little more than her name. She’d always be a ghost.

It happened like this. After something triggered a memory of his friend Toupy, Gary recalled a rumor that she’d died. I went upstairs to my office, opened my laptop, and tapped her name into the Social Security Death Index. It took seconds to find her. She died years ago.

I’d used the index before to see if my mother was listed, but not having a current last name I had no luck. In the past, I’d never noticed that there was an advanced tab—that in addition to a name I could enter a date and place of birth.

I did, and as quickly as I’d found Toupy, I learned my mother had died three years earlier.

It shouldn’t have been shocking—she was 73. Of course she could have died. But I was dumbstruck.

That fast, the index shattered a dream that one day I’d meet her face to face. Still, I needed to know more. My fingers fluttered over the keyboard as I Googled the elusive fact the index provided—her last name. Within seconds I had a link to her obituary, but it was behind a paywall. Hopelessly disorganized, I couldn’t find my wallet. I darted around the house cursing and tossing the contents of drawers and closets. I yanked jackets from hangers and fingered the pockets. I upended purses, letting change and lipstick and crumpled shopping lists spill everywhere. I slipped into my sneakers and ran out the door, trying not to trip on my laces or fall as I skidded on the icy walkway to the car, where my wallet sat on the front seat.

Gary looked at me quizzically as I blew back inside, breathless.

“What are you —”

I held up my hand, palm out to stop him, and rushed to my office, prying out my credit card as I bounded up the stairs. With shaking hands, I entered my card number as if it were the combination that would unlock a safe that held a fortune.

It was. My mother’s obituary filled the screen.

I read that she’d earned a degree in sociology, had been a member of the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, and—a Floridian—an avid Gator fan. The only thing shocking was how utterly ordinary she seemed.

But then this: “Survivors include three sons, three daughters, 12 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.”

Blood pounded in my ears. It must have rushed to my brain, because I couldn’t move, my limbs like concrete. As soon as I could, I bolted up, grabbed the laptop, and scrambled downstairs.

“I can’t believe it!” I screamed, giddy as I slid across the slick floors and tripped into the sunroom. “I found her,” I shouted at Gary, which must have seemed a weirdly joyful response to the confirmation that his friend had died.

As my words tumbled out, the weight of this new knowledge crushed my thrill. I’d always envisioned my mother as like Amelia Earhart—alone on an island amidst the wreckage of her life. That she would have more children, strangely, had never crossed my mind. I wanted to be happy for her, but a rising anger simmered; tiny pinpricks of resentment and self-pity popped my euphoria. My brother and I had been expendable, yet she went on to raise half a dozen other children.

My mind throbbed with questions. How had she reared these kids after discarding us? Was she a good mother? Did she tell them about us?

Although my feelings flipped from exhilaration to outrage in an instant, they landed on hope. I’d always wanted a sister. And here was the promise of more family.  

But would they want me?

The obituary noted my siblings’ names and towns, but a Google search yielded only an email address for the eldest, Jessie. I froze, trying to decide what to do. Did they know? If not, would I disrupt their lives? And how would I feel if Jessie didn’t respond or, worse, if she rejected me?

 Just then, a coworker messaged, and I shot back a reply about my dilemma.

“Certainly you’ll write,” she answered immediately. “They’re your family. They’ll be lovely.”

I wasn’t so sure, but it felt like permission.

“I imagine this will be a shock,” I wrote, “But if your mother was born in Philadelphia on May 24, 1932, she was my mother too.”

As soon as I sent the letter, a wave of remorse swamped me. How would I feel to get such a message? What would Jessie think of her mother now? And as for me, if she didn’t reply, I’d spend the rest of my life obsessed with the siblings I would never know as I’d been about the mother I’d never known.

She was blindsided. My mother had never told these kids about her first children. But I needn’t have worried. Jessie was all in.

“I’d love to know everything about you,” she replied. When I sketched a brief bio, she wrote, “I want more, more, MORE!!!”

With my letter I’d sent photos my father had given me of our mother as a young woman and photos of myself at the same age so through our resemblance she’d know I wasn’t delusional. In turn, she sent photos of an older version of our mother—one in whose weary eyes I saw my brother.

Jessie’s enthusiasm, like mine, was unwavering. We began a passionate, relentless correspondence, each impatient with questions, hungry to know everything. Jessie promised to tell me about our siblings and assured me she had much to tell me about our mother. Still, once she absorbed the shock of my existence, she had to reckon with the way it upended everything she thought she knew about the woman who raised her. In one blow, I’d knocked her beloved mother off a pedestal.

Within days, Jessie proposed that she come from Florida to Pennsylvania for a weekend in June—more than three months off.  “If it’s too soon, I’d understand,” she wrote.

It wasn’t soon enough.

Days later, she dangled another proposition. “I promised to treat my sisters to a seven-day cruise in September. Since you’re a sister, we’d love it if you would join us.”

How could I refuse?

“B.K. says yes!!!” she wrote to the others.

With every message, I was falling in love with my sister. I swelled with feelings I imagine a parent has for a child—with the certainty, for example, that I’d singlehandedly lift a bus if my new little sister were under it.

When we met, we fit like pieces of broken pottery. And after meeting the others, I felt as if I’d known them all my life. I couldn’t wait for any chance to see them again. We began to gather once a year at a cabin in North Carolina where we’d talk late into the night about our mother. From scraps of stories a shadowy picture emerged of a woman who resembled the girl my father described—loving but unstable; wickedly smart, but lacking judgment; impulsive and heedless of consequences. From all accounts she was a caring but deeply flawed parent. There were years of reckless drinking, numerous affairs, questionable men who abused her. I’ve cycled through feelings of resentment, pity, anger, and bitterness toward my mother—emotions that evolved with each bit of new information—but now, ultimately, all I feel is tenderness. I don’t have it in me to punish her for her failings; I believe she spent her life punishing herself, her secrets and her guilt twisting inside her, a constant rebuke, and her shame a penitence.

***

It was at one of those reunions that another random comment blew a hole in my hard-won satisfaction over finally having solved at least part of my life’s driving mystery—if not why my mother left, at least what had become of her. Worse, it leveled the sense of identity I’d constructed by bonding with my siblings and learning about my mother. And worse still, it left me with another maddening mystery.

Someone speculated that since my siblings didn’t look alike, perhaps there’d been more than one father. This was about their paternity, not mine. But knowing that my mother lied easily and often, soon it was all I could think about. Jessie and I had already taken DNA tests hoping to find a girl our mother had relinquished for adoption. When we didn’t find the girl, we didn’t give the tests another thought. My dad, believing the girl was his (she wasn’t!) had offered to test as well. Now I took him up on his offer, only to be cratered by the results: he wasn’t my biological father. The unimaginable truth was that I’d never known either of the people whose genes I carry. What’s more, on closer look, Jessie’s test, too, showed her dad wasn’t her father.

We were blindsided and reeling, but we had each other.

We shared our shock and bewilderment and worked together over nearly two years not only to piece together our mother’s history but also to solve our paternity puzzles, finding that both of our biological fathers had died many years earlier. We’ve learned their names and a few facts about them. We’ve seen their photos—ourselves mirrored back to us. But these men will always be unknowns—a quiet enduring ache we each carry.

After learning that my dad wasn’t my father, I had to rearrange everything I thought I knew about myself, shake up the puzzle pieces and put them back together to form a new picture of me. And when a few years later through DNA I discovered another sister—the daughter my mother relinquished for adoption—I also had to revisit and revise, yet again, what I knew or suspected about mother and her secrets and lies. It reignited, for example, the preoccupation I’d finally let flame out—speculating about why she left. Now I had to wonder. Had she noticed when I was a baby that I had her lover’s eyes? When I was six months old, had she seen his smile creep up one side of my face? Was that why she didn’t stay to see how much of him might leak out of me by the time I was one year old, like a stain?

That mystery will abide, and there may be other skeletons I’ll never excavate. But since that random conversation with my husband 15 years ago, I know my own truth. I know where I come from. Just because Gary thought of his old friend one day—and happened to think it out loud—I’ve gained four sisters and four brothers, only one of whom—the sole sibling from my father’s side—hasn’t welcomed me. I have more nieces and nephews than I can count and at least two dozen openhearted close cousins. And it didn’t end there. A new brother recently appeared in my DNA match list—a gift from the biological father neither of us knew—and we’re getting to know each other. For all I know, there might be more.

What would have happened if Gary’s old friend hadn’t come to mind that day? If instead we’d talked about politics or the weather? I try to imagine what it would have been like if my life had gone on as before—to still never know what had become of my mother, to have no idea these siblings and cousins exist, to never have learned that I’m not half Ashkenazi Jewish but half Sicilian, to never have seen my own face looking back at me from a photograph of my biological father.

I can’t. And I owe it all to Toupy.  

Tell me…

Have you ever solved mysteries about where you come from? I’d love to hear some of your story!