Barely promoted

Forty-year-old Scotch tape

It's odd, or maybe it isn't, to be using one's own face as a claim to identity. Photographs are crucial to every story I read of late-identified parentage. In my slow correspondence with William Taylor's sister, they have been crucial currency; she told me, a few weeks ago, that the new headshot on my work page (she can Google too of course), showed more potential family resemblance than anything I'd sent her.

So I've been opening up the boxes that followed me home after people died, looking for pictures. I finally found some in a box from Ray's New York apartment: my class pictures, second to sixth grades, and an album of early childhood pictures that my mother made to give to Ray for Christmas 1977.

During the summer of 1976, her parents lost their house in the suburbs and moved into an apartment. Annajane took me and moved to a tenement on East 14th Street; bathtub in the living room, bedroom the size of a closet with a window to a fetid airshaft. She used Ray's address, on Jane Street, to get me into P.S. 41. When she decompensated, in November 1976, she signed custody of me over to Ray. By Christmas 1977 she would have been living with her parents in their little apartment; she was in and out of hospitals, I believe, for the next couple of years.

Every picture is taped into the album. Four pieces of grimy Scotch tape (I think the fuzz dates to installation; the roach body parts and shit are the result of decades in Ray's apartment). Most of the pictures we remounted from elsewhere; they are wrinkled, torn, creased. There are heavy fingerprints over my face in many of the pictures.

A small picture of the two of us had been taped over the dedication.

When I removed the picture:

Ray wasn't my father. Sometimes she told me he was. I guess sometimes she told him he was, too, including when she gave me to him. But the bloodtypes don't work (she was O, he was O, but I'm B -- and I noticed that, when we tested in high school). The eye colors are unlikely (pale grey, spectral hazel, and dark brown). He never believed anything she said, anyway; and now there's a huge mass of DNA evidence in favor of some other guy, the one with the same name as she'd told me, and her mother, occasionally.

How did the picture get taped over? She gave Ray the album -- and didn't take it back.

Interior soundtrack

From mid-April: What was stuck in my head as I make that first latte:

• Hold Me My Daddy, XTC ("Hold me tight, hold me, like you was the baby...")
• Your Mother Should Know, The Beatles ("Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago... Your mother should know, oooooh-oooh, your mother should know.")
• These Days, Nico ("These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do...")
• River Man, Nick Drake (actually, I looked up the lyrics and I had them all wrong. Nick Drake is like that.)
• Hard Day, OMD ("When I walk I walk I walk all the time. I talk I talk about nothing at all. See I say it's hard to explain what I mean, to say... it's been a hard hard day, in my life. It's been such a hard day, for me.")

Late May: The Magnetic Fields are on Spotify, and I have just listed to The Wayward Bus for the first time in probably a decade. First: I hope it reprograms the interior soundtrack, which, thank God, has gotten a little less ominously Freudian lately. Second: this album maybe contructed what nostalgia is for me---gave it its passive-aggressive coloration, showed me how to revel in the stories of the flaws of the people in my early life.

Hello again. I am grieving. Let me tell you why.

Ha! Quick post! Ha!

Ray's sister sent ashes, which are still in the shipping box. I'm supposed to scatter them in Central Park. I will someday.

I did end up breaking into Ricky's apartment, once, after Marina had convinced him to sell a painting to some vampire art dealer she met at a nursing home. Ricky has gout and hep C and deep deep sadness, and I've paid $250 towards his rent this month and last month; I paid his 2015 tax bill, too. We have a little agreement that the payments all get tallied towards the nice paintings at $2000 a pop. Only one has come back to Ohindinois so far; a little oval portrait of a Civil-war era old lady. It's hanging over our clawfoot tub.

The kids are well. My gosh! They are well. They are beautiful and smart and growing like weeds; I give it two months until the older one is taller than I am. Beaker is well too, although he had a terrible health crisis in 2014; his physical recovery took months, and I was more traumatized than I realized.

Around that time my "service commitments" increased drastically, and the whole damn campus started going to hell. (Coincidence? I think not.)

A couple of months after that last post, I sent DNA to Ancestry and everyone else who would take it. I convinced Ricky and his brother to send in samples too. No close matches for a long time. I built out a huge tree for my mother's family.

Ancestry sold a shit-ton of kits over Christmas 2016; they're still processing them. Three weeks ago I got a close match who didn't match my uncles and had a tree. I recognized enough names from other weaker matches' trees to focus on a particular grandparent of hers.

Turns out that grandparent had another grandchild with exactly the common name my mother claimed my father had: let's say, William Taylor. Two years older than my mother. I built out a tree. After three days, I had more DNA matches traceable through that little tree than through my mother's. I found matches through all four of William's grandparents, even the medium-late immigrant lines. (He only had one grandparent in common with the initial match—they are half-first-cousins.)

Google told me that William died about 10 years ago, when he was 66. His wife died about 3 years ago. He has a brother and sister still alive, and a daughter; I couldn't tell whether the wife was her mother but it seemed somehow unlikely. He'd started at two colleges (the first one quite good), lived in several cities, never really seemed to hold jobs for long. He was a journalist, but it was achingly difficult to find any clips. (Do you see where this is going? I saw the shadows, but.)

Quite quickly, my new DNA match contacted me. She's lovely and kind. She understood the DNA evidence; she also saw that the biggest missing link was whether William had been in New York at the right time. She talked with her cousin, William's sister, and then she sent me the sister's e-mail address.

The sister, Linda, is unsentimental and direct. (My kind of potential aunt, especially since we had to meet like this.) She was: well, not unconvinced. And invited me to ask questions about her brother.

I first described my mother's mental illness, and then said I hoped I was ready to hear just about anything—but also understood that some things are too hard to talk about.

Linda confirms that William was in New York at the right time. She is sure because she visited him at Bellevue, where he'd been taken after having a psychotic break; diagnosis of schizophrenia. From what she's told me so far, it sounds like he never decompensated as badly again, but always had trouble living independently; he finally moved back in with his widowed mother when he was about 50. He was consistently difficult to get along with.

Let me be clear: My parents probably met as psychiatric patients. They both suffered from major mental illnesses.

I've been pretty torn up the last few days.

I asked for pictures. One evening, as I was hacking away at a necessary memo that will anger many of my dear colleagues, Linda kept sending them, one in each e-mail, every five minutes, for a couple of hours.

I finally cried at a picture of William's proud and tentative young mother holding her tiny newborn baby. Was he a bit of a preemie? Did his mother look just like my younger daughter? Did she die as exhausted and bitter as my mother's mother did, after decades of letting her dreams for her oldest child drift away?

Let's not mention the Lewis Carroll obsession

I am supposed to write something for an "homage" that Ray's sister is sending out -- in place of a memorial, or anything like that.

I am totally blocked. It's not really clear who this is for. His siblings, the one co-worker who's still alive? His life proceeded in disjoint episodes, and so little followed from one to the next. I was one of them. My mother was perhaps three.

His sister and I spent two days at his bedside, talking while he gasped, apparently unconscious. She's an ancestry.com fiend. She located both his ex-wives almost trivially; figured out that the four-year-old son who drowned had been in Santa Monica, not New York; and so on.

While procrastinating I have poked around enough to be moderately certain that one of my great-great-great-grandfathers died about 10 mines north of Granolaton, in 1852 -- about a year after he'd arrived from Ireland. And my grandmother's aunt, from whom she'd been estranged for forever? Buried in the same Catholic cemetery in the New York suburbs. Oh, and the patents on early (I am not making this up) toilet bowls -- joint between a great-great-grandfather and a great-great-uncle. It feels like there's a lot more on line than there was the last time I tried, probably two years ago.

I haven't joined Ancestry yet. It's horribly tempting. But then I hit the: I can only ever know half, right? wall.

I've also been thinking about 23 and me. Beaker sent in samples a few years ago (why yes, he is a delta f 508!). Are there any third cousins I don't know about? Is there a wide enough sweep yet? Both my mother's parents were only children, and ended up cut off from their cousins. Again, not to mention the brick wall on the other side.

The contrast with the death of my mother has been hard. Then near strangers were overcome with sympathy -- it was my mother, after all. And all that word carries. But when I tell people my foster father died? What must that mean to me? No one can guess. (Of course, I don't really know myself.) The condolences are minimal. I change the subject.

Miss T. is the same age now as I was when I went to live with Ray. That's overwhelming.

I have not cried over Ray. (I think his sister disapproved.) But I have been vague and spacey, and been getting choked up over some painfully obvious pop culture artifacts: the end of, and the epilogue to, Knuffle Bunny Free. A Music Together song about how the people who take care of you (they are scrupulous not to limit that to parents -- I think that may be the precise element that makes the cheer so sinister) will come back, "because they always do." Good Christ, I am getting choked up even running the lyrics through my head now.

Stretched

My foster father Ray is dying. In a nursing home in a small city in northern California. He is demented and cancer-ridden. He started hospice yesterday.

I am planning to fly out there on Wednesday. His (much younger, half) sister Colleen is discouraging the trip. He probably sexually abused her two daughters -- certainly took pictures of them in their panties when they were in elementary school, which some would already consider abuse. I think Colleen was present, though. (Fuck the seventies.)

Marina left Ricky a few weeks ago -- and good for her, but he is falling apart. She waited until he'd paid off his multiyear debt consolidation loan, then disappeared, with all her stuff, while he was at work. She's living in Queens, presumably with friends. I have refused to give him money to pay his rent. I am sort of seriously considering going to New York and breaking into the apartment while he's out driving his taxi (70 hours per week) to save -- no, to take, they're his according to the will -- the family pictures: little miniatures on porcelain of my grandmother's grandparents, and of her as an infant; photo albums from when her family was rich.

It's that life-sucks-now-I'm-back-at-work post, oh yeah

It's all, you know, enough.

The snow (every day).

The stomach flu (me and Miss T.: Sunday. Beaker: Monday. Miss V.? Not, uh, yet.)

The cold (Miss V.: ongoing and worsening. Beaker: ditto. Me: ditto. Miss T.? Not, uh, yet.)

The lack of sleep (see last two items).

Percentage of anticipated child care hours actually used, since classes started: approximately 33.

Percentage of pumped milk Miss V. is actually drinking: maybe 8? Only from Dada, though.

Percentage of students registered for my seminar who actually showed up: approximately 42.

SOB.

testing ... testing...

Ahem?

Geez! It felt like I had to break into my own account! What the &^%* is all this new Typepad %$#&?

We are well.

Viola Jane Maple was born on May 24, at a stunning 8 pounds 11 ounces. A smooth and fairly rapid unmedicated and midwife-managed hospital birth -- with a moment of shoulder dystocia, rapidly resolved, for extra excitement.

She is now a solid little chunk of muscle who wants only two things in life: MORE NUM, and to learn to walk.

And otherwise? We are all well -- although the end of my leave is coming up. First re-engagement with the world: a conference in California, mid-January, that may involve seeing both my doctoral advisor and my frail and fading foster father.

Appropriate units of measurement

Height of stack of remaining grading: inches.

Dilation: centimeters.

Time until grades are due: days.

Time until birth: days (I hope).

Folks: don't try this at home, no matter how much you'd like to really max out your institution's parental leave policy.

_______________________________

I do feel a bit of (survivor's?) guilt with respect to how it all looks to outside observers, most especially junior female ones. Look, I wasn't trying to do this. Really.

It's on my list to update here

So, past midnight, let me tell you: I am well.

Huge. Intimidated by the new semester. Snowed in. Craving chocolate and vegetable puree soups.

Nesting like crazy. (When a pregnant woman asks for a label machine for Christmas? Worry.)

I had my 20-week ultrasound just before Christmas. All is well; the wee beastie is a little on the small side (which may bode well for my making it through finals), and appears to be another girl. Yay!

P.S. I want a Kindle! For nursing, y'know! And this made me feel really bad about kind of wanting one of these, even though I've gotten my by-now-quintuply-used Pump-In-Style Advanced back, and even though I'm going to have, effectively, the longest maternity leave ever -- like, nearly 8 months.

Picking at scabs

I have a terrible problem with scratching open mosquito bites until they bleed. I also chew either nails or cuticles -- one or the other, typically, for months. My nails are grooved from the cumulative damage.

(Miss T. already is getting hangnails -- perhaps there is some built-in tendency for the skin to split, especially on the thumbs -- and she chews on them. I don't know if she's seen me do it, or if it's just the obvious thing to do. I can't bring myself to criticize her for it, so I offer sympathy when she complains, trim down what I can, and try to get thick lotion on them before bed.)

 

__________________________

Now, I'm reading the comments to the big Alex Kuczynski piece on the birth of her child through surrogacy. The editors certainly stirred the pot through their choice of photographs! and the author is as honest about her classism (and that of the surrogacy "industry" -- they don't want surrogates who are, you, know, actually poor) as she is about her grief and later her joy.

(How different would reading getupgrrl have been, if there had been pictures? She was so careful in the details she chose to include.)

On the one hand: we spent our money and took our chances for exactly the same sorts of selfish reasons: to have a child who is genetically Beaker's. And there are a lot of (mostly appalling ignorant) people over at the Times who are saying "SCREW YOU, SELFISH BITCH!"

On the other hand: every time I sat in that Cornell waiting room (where Kuczynski starts her journey) I knew I didn't fit --  we could only fake it enough to be there by living off two incomes in a cheap damn state. So each comment that picks up another detail of the outrageous presumption of privilege tickles a little -- and I keep reading.
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During our peaceful Thanksgiving dinner at home, there was a blizzard of kicks.

Since then, nearly none -- and definitely none so distinctively kick-y. I know it's still early, but I can't help panicking. Were those death throes? It's so easy to slip back to the disoriented sadness of October.

Eleven days until my next midife appointment. I'd rent a Doppler, but if I didn't find a heartbeat it would kill me.

Maybe -- presuming it goes well -- I'll get one after the next appointment.