I didn’t know he existed until 2006, when I met him at his graduation from Fort Benning. His “Turning Blue” ceremony.
My nephew Johnny.
His mother is my sister, but I didn’t know her between the time that I was 5 years old, and the time that I was 41.
Funny, how families are, when the divorces are as numerous as the kids.
His mother is my sister from my dad’s second marriage. We were separated when I was five, and she and her twin sister were three. Their mother took them to Arizona, and I and my two older sisters were taken to Connecticut by our mother shortly thereafter. Meantime, our dad married a third time and had another daughter, who lived in New York.
Fast forward to the next century, when out of the blue, our father dies, back in 2003. No one gets in touch with my dad’s second wife, to let her know her ex-husband is gone. So the twins have no clue that their dad is dead.
Three years later, their mom goes online to the Social Security website to update her own information, and lo and behold, she discovers her ex-husband passed….and no one told her.
Made the rest of us, in my family, look like shit, no?
Yes.
But this woman, who only remembers three little girls from her husband’s first marriage, has the guts to call the oldest daughter out of the blue, after getting that eldest daughter’s information from the online obituary, and the rest is history.
She tells us that not only did she bring our two little sisters up on her own out west all these years, but that she and our dad conceived a 7th daughter a few years after their divorce.
No one in my family is able to handle this news, but me. I have no problem believing that my dad could cover this up, and so I embrace my newly found sister, and am invited to my 19-year-old nephew’s graduation from Fort Benning at the same time.
I meet my nephew, I meet my sisters, and discover that the one who was conceived after my dad had already divorced her mother and married another woman and had another daughter (my little sister in New York, who I thought for years had been my dad’s last) is indeed my sister, and I love all of them and they all seem to love me and everything is hunky dory.
Until I get home and have to fight the vitriol of the youngest daughter from my dad’s third marriage, who refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the youngest daughter from his second (not to be confused with me, who is the youngest daughter from his first). And what’s really weird is the youngest daughter from the second marriage looks like my twin, only a few years younger. She looks more like me than the youngest daughter from my dad’s third marriage does. (And BevD has the nerve to wonder why I drink and write lousy poetry late at night….Ha!).
So I have these battles in my life. Over my father and whether this youngest daughter is really his (as if she weren’t for Christ’s sake, when she looks just like me). Meantime, Johnny graduates from Fort Benning, moves on to another training camp for special training, and now he’s in Iraq.
I met him for one weekend, but he’s the reason I’m fighting our occupation of Iraq. He’s the reason I turned Dem. He’s the reason I hate Republicans, when I grew up a Republican through and through.
Families get torn apart sometimes. Countries do, too.
But the people in those families, and the people in those countries, they have lives too.
Don’t discount them. Don’t think “that’s someone else’s son/nephew/grandson/husband”.
They are our kids. They are our family.
Don’t think “that’s someone else’s country. They are some other person’s problem”.
We haven’t met them yet, but they are our own.
