REAL MOTHER

In 1985,  I continued my search for information about my mother’s biological family.  She had been adopted.

Bernice had met her mother once when she was twelve years old. Annie Lois had come secretly to visit Bernice and her sister  Clara.  She collected them from school. 

“I am your real mother,” she said to them.  They followed her, mesmerized,  as if she were the Pied Piper.

She bought them hamburgers,  an ice cream cone each and a stuffed animal. Then, she popped the question: “How would you like to run away with me and be my little girls again?”

Clara wanted to …or at least, she was tempted. Bernice said no—and that if Clara went with Annie Lois, Bernice would tell. The visit ended and Annie Lois left town again. That was in 1937.

In 1947, Bernice was the mother of her firstborn, a son.  She went looking for Annie Lois.

She talked to everyone who was willing to talk to her in Eudora,  Arkansas. Not many were willing to talk. They were wary, skeptical, she would tell  me later.

She got no useful information, no leads. She left empty handed, without seeing Annie Lois, if she was even still there.

Then she locked all those secrets away in her heart and she did not tell me anything about any of that until 1966.

That is when Lucille showed up. Lucille was a traveling evangelist who arrived at our house and was invited to   stay for a week.

Lucille said to me, “ I am your real aunt.”

I was twelve. I was puzzled. My father had three sisters. My mother had one. How could she be my aunt when she was not one of those?

She was Bernice’s mother’s sister, she said. But I knew all of  Granny Janie’s sisters—all of them: Pearl, Mattie, and Leola. Lucille was not one of those.

“No,” she said, “not Bernice’s adopted mother—her real mother!  I am her real mother’s sister.”

Those words cut through me like a knife—though I did not know why. Real mother?  My mother had a real mother?!

Then, what did that make Granny/Janie—who loved me and gave me coffee with cream in my own tiny china cup, who taught me to bake a cake and who picked blackberries with me from her garden and them made cobbler for me? What did those words make her?

Children were not allowed to question adults—we had to figure things out from what we could overhear when we eavesdropped. But this was different. I could not wait to figure it out. I needed answers.

I went to my mother. She was busy at some task-- I don’t remember what-- but I remember that she kept at it and did not look at me.

“Lucille says she is my real aunt and that you have a real mother who is her sister Annie Lois”. I waited. She said nothing.

I felt like Abraham bargaining with God for Lot’s life but I had to go forward. “ Is it true?” I asked.  “Do you have a real mother?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, as if we talked like this every day. “Everybody has a real mother.”

“But I don’t understand. What about Granny/Janie?”

“She and my Daddy adopted me, “she said. And just like that the door closed, the wall came down and she did not say another word. I knew from her manner I had learned all that she was willing to say at that time.