Wes and Dana and Why I Missed a Day

A story within a story within a story

            Yesterday after the Jo-Mama Book Club met online from 9 to 12 to discuss Lion in Winter (yes, the 1966 play!), I headed for Oakland for the monthly get-together of what I call the all-star KAST (Kathy, Suzy, Tina), and after hearing about Kathy’s cruise of the Caribbean with Irish music on board and Suzy’s difficult co-worker and eating a delicious Mexican soup, Kathy asked, “Have you heard from Dana?” and Suzy and I both responded with a defeated “No.”  She didn’t return our calls.  She didn’t pick up for us. 

            “But she did call a while back to get Aunt Virginia’s telephone number,”  I added.

             Aunt Virginia is the last living of the family I found in the mid-1980s--the family Mom didn't know she had--and I wrote about that and about Dana back in December in what I called “Awful Good.”

            In a study of men and what led to their feeling of fulfillment or non-fulfillment, one man credited his mother for the fact that his life had been happy and fulfilling.  He described his mother as warm, accepting, and encouraging of creativity.   Another man blamed his mother for the fact that his life had been disappointing and his dreams unfulfilled.  He described his mother as cold, rejecting, and rigid.  These men were brothers.  They had the same mother.  But of course, no two siblings really do.  So much is in perspective.  So much is in a “match.”

            So as my sister  Dana and I were leaving Aegis after Dana’s first visit with Mom in a couple of years, the woman at the front desk asked, “How did it go?” and Dana and I answered simultaneously.

            “Awful!”  Dana said.

            “Good!”  I said.

            This wasn’t the first time Dana and I had a totally different reaction.  One of the times was when I was doing a search for our mother’s biological family so we would know our medical background.  I loved our Grandparents Robison, the ones who’d adopted Mom, and considered them our “real” grandparents.   But our brother David had epilepsy, and our sister Missy had a speech impediment.   Dana, Missy, and I had children. We needed to know our biological make-up. 

              I’d done most of the investigative work, but I couldn’t have done it without the original, supposedly sealed, birth certificate, which Dana had gotten in Kansas City, Missouri, where she had gone with her husband to a psychiatrists’ convention.  She’ d walked in and filled out the form with Mom’s original name, Natalie Virginia Stephens, which was on the adoption document we’d had for years along with Nadine Virginia Robison, the name given her by her adoptive parents.

            The clerk handed the original birth certificate over to Dana without a question.  Apparently it hadn’t been sealed after all!

            Thanks to Dana, we now had the name of our mother’s birth mother, Helen Stephens, and her date of birth.  That made possible all the rest of the investigation I did.  But this was in 1982, before the Internet, so the process of the investigation involved going to the Federal Archives, getting microfilm, looking at all the federal census reports since 1896, sending for telephone books, and making calls.   After months of doing this fascinating, all-absorbing “detective work,” I located a woman I thought was an important link, and Dana and I made plans to fly to Norman, Oklahoma to meet her.  Dana would fly in from Chicago.  I’d fly in from San Francisco.  We’d meet at 7:00 PM at the motel I’d reserved,

            I turned down a $500 voucher when the airlines were overbooked on my flight because it would mean arriving two hours later, and I didn’t want to be late for Dana.  But she wasn’t there at 7:00 PM.  She didn’t come in at all that night, and I was worried.  There were no cell phones in 1982 (except for the one Robert Wagner used to call Stephanie Powers  in a television series, “Hart to Hart,”  about rich people who had such devices).   I kept calling her home, but the line was always busy.  This was also the time before cell phones.  I didn’t sleep at all that night.  Then the following morning Dana came in with her husband, who’d driven them down to Norman, Oklahoma from Chicago.  It hadn’t occurred to her to call me to let me know that she had changed her plans and wouldn’t be coming in until the following day.  But that bothered me less than what she said after we met the woman I thought was a link.  The woman denied knowing anything about Helen Stephens.

            “Tina thinks that woman is lying, that she’s really related to us, but I can tell she’s not.  Tina’s wrong.”

            That “Tina’s wrong” dismissiveness stung.  

            It was such a put down that it felt really good when, continuing to link this woman to our past, I found three sisters and a brother my mother never knew she had.  I also found a brother, no longer living, whom our mother’s birth mother had abandoned before giving birth to my mother and giving her up for adoption.  This brother had epilepsy.  When I contacted his daughter and we exchanged pictures of our brothers, she said, “Your brother looks more like my father than my brothers do!”  The thrill of finding these “roots” was almost equaled to the thrill of proving to my dismissive sister that I hadn’t been wrong and shouldn’t have been so quickly dismissed.

            But that was a factual matter.  There’s usually no way of proving “insights,” interpretations, or even memories.  That became evident when in 1986 we decided to have reunion for Daddy, who’d had heart surgery the previous year.    My son Jonathan and I, Missy and her children, Suzy and her husband were gathering with Dana, her husband and their two sons at her home in Chicago.

            “This is my punishment for having the biggest house, “said Dana, whose beautiful Victorian took up a whole block.

            But I thought she’d soon feel better about having us there because I’d found the perfect gift for her.   At a time when there wasn’t the plethora of movies now available in DVDs, I had found a video (VHS) of  White Christmas, a movie we had seen one magical Christmas shortly after moving to Iowa, where our family was staying in a motel until our house was ready for us.  She and I had seen a lot of musicals together—many of them at the Idaho State Hospital, where our father was Chief Psychologist.  Among the “perks” of his job were free rent on our house, discounts at the commissary, and complimentary tickets to the Friday night movies the patients saw, many of which were musicals.  But that Christmas our parents drove us to a movie theatre near the town square where the snow and lights gave everything an enchanted glow, and we got to see that wonderful movie, White Christmas twice!  There was even a funny song about sisters. “Lord, help the mister who comes between me and my sister, and Lord, help the sister who comes between me and my man.”    I associated that show with one of the brightest Christmases in our childhood, brightened considerably by that musical that kept playing over and over in my mind, helping drown out the sound of very bitter, very noisy fights between our parents.  

             So when I presented the video, I was startled by my sister’s reaction.

            “Oh, yes!  I remember that experience.  Mother and Daddy drove us through all kinds of slush and dumped us off at some crummy little movie theatre because they wanted to be alone, and they made us see that movie twice.  They abandoned us.  I remember how miserable I felt.” 

            Clearly, even when it comes to magical MGM movie musicals, no two children hear the same songs.

            Our different reactions to the visit with Mom can be explained.  Dana’s “Awful” came because she hadn’t seen Mom since the worst of her dementia.  She hadn’t been there when Mom was stabbing her Mother’s Day cake and shoving ice cream into her mouth to protect us from the poison she’d take upon herself.   Dana hadn’t talked to the Aegis care-givers the day after Mom paced frantically through the halls all night, breaking the glass in fire extinguisher boxes to call for help.  Dana’s “Awful” was in comparison to how she knew our mother in her pre-dementia days.  My “Good” was relative to all the visits over a couple of years including our mother’s months at Aegis.

            But probably no two children experience the same moment the same way, so I’m pretty certain that that no two children within a family have the same two parents. 

            So that’s the background.

            Then just as I was mentioning Dana’s call to get contact info for Aunt Virginia, my iPhone rang and “Dana” appeared on screen.  Her son Wes had an unexpected stay-over in SF from Aspen to Houston.  He’d be in the area until midnight.

            Wes prompted a rare phone call from Dana—one I still have on my phone—when she left the message, “The baby I gave up for adoption walked into the adoption agency and said he wanted to meet his mother.”