Imagine, if you will, that you have lived a half-century without knowing that you have a sibling. Imagine that your parents remained married until the day your beloved father died. And that you and your sister were the apples of his eye, daddy’s girls with no reason to doubt the size of your family.
If you can imagine that, then you can imagine what it would be like to hear thirdhand that some of what you believed about your father wasn’t true. That is exactly what happened to my sisters.
When my aunt said that my newly discovered uncle would tell my older sister Maria Elena the news of my existence, she made a serious marketing error: she overpromised and underdelivered. The closeness of the families didn’t entirely live up to her description; their two households had at one point been estranged and, though that is no longer the case, they were not routinely sharing deep secrets.
Instead of telling my sister, my uncle called her husband and asked him to do it. My brother-in-law didn’t try to sugarcoat it. He just walked into the kitchen where Maria Elena was doing dishes and announced the facts: “You have a brother.”
Boom.
(When I heard this story later, I couldn’t help but think how I dropped a Fernando bomb on my mother while she stood washing dishes forty years before. Kitchen sinks are apparently news delivery magnets.)
Of course, my sister couldn’t believe it. And it wasn’t happy news. How could it be, if it meant her father had kept something so seismic from her?
Maria Elena called my uncle and aunt immediately, wanting to know what made them trust this story. Perhaps fearful that she was mad at them, they embellished the storyline, claiming that I had led the charge, calling the family multiple times and that my uncle had only called back because I was so persistent. In this version of the story, they had tried to spare her (as opposed to being excited and assuring me all would be well).
That didn’t change two facts: I exist and Maria Elena is no push-over. There was no chance of her not facing this scenario head-on. She called Elizabeth to tell her of their new sibling and then set to googling me to learn everything she could. 3,000 miles away, I had no idea my uncle had already spilled the beans; meanwhile, she was looking for family resemblances in online photos of me and sleuthing out my phone number.
My phone is unlisted. (You don’t have to be very famous to have creepy fans; I had a creepy fan.) What she unwittingly ended up with was my ex-husband’s number, which is why he got the first text:
What makes you think you are my brother?
When my ex forwarded it to me, my heart sank. It was clear by the tone that this news had indeed been a surprise, as I’d feared. And reading between the lines, I knew that it had been a blow.
I tried to think how to answer. Replying “1500 cMs of DNA” might have been accurate but it wouldn’t have addressed the heart of her problem: Why had her dad never told her about me? That’s a question I couldn’t answer.
Elizabeth had a different concern: What did I want from them?
Since we live in an age when a “Nigerian prince” may email you to offer up a portion of his kingdom if you’ll simply provide a bank routing number, it’s perfectly fair to question a stranger who pops out of the blue trying to insinuate himself into your life. (Side note: That first scammer did quite a disservice to all Nigerians…)
I told them what I knew of my family history — dates, names, places — and was sure to say that I hadn’t intended to hurt anyone. Maria Elena made clear that their mother couldn’t ever know because it would be too upsetting. With texts flying back and forth till late at night, I finally signed off, telling them to take all the time they needed to process their feelings and to reach out when they were ready (if ever).
I didn’t sleep well that night, berating myself for wading uninvited into their lives. Had I really needed to make this connection?
Though my legal family is small, it is rounded out by a large chosen family. The term “chosen family” was first coined by denizens of the Harlem drag ball scene of the late 19th (yes 19th!) century. In the gay community, it has come to mean the network of people who accept you as you are, the substitute for families that could not or would not embrace you. It simply means not defining kinfolk by bloodline or law, but rather by action. Chosen family are the people who know you by heart.
For me, that’s included friends I have known since youth and college, others who came to my life through parenting or theater or teaching, and my former in-laws, for whom divorce did not lead to a dimming of affection. At every point in my life, high to low, I have known I was loved and supported — so why not accept my good fortune and call it a day?
I knew logically that if my sisters never called again, little would change in my world on a practical level; I told myself that my daily experience wouldn’t be any different than it had been the week before. But I also knew that was not 100% true: the piece of my heart that had leaned toward a missing sister for so long would now lean toward two.
It wasn’t even 24 hours before they were texting again, this time talking to me as family. Considering the shock of the news (and the tears they had shed since it came), it was a remarkably fast turnaround. They made a conscious choice to embrace me despite their disappointment with their dad’s actions.
Filling text threads with pictures of ourselves and our families, we began the work of learning each other. Maria Elena has always addressed Elizabeth as “sister” in texts and she started applying the same rule to me. When a text would come in that started “hello brother,” it felt like the squeeze of a little heart muscle made of pure joy.
Two weeks after the first text, we did a Zoom call. Zoom can be dislocating — you can’t make actual eye contact and body language cues are limited to what appears in the tiny head-and-shoulders frame. And yet it was enough: we talked and laughed and talked and sighed and talked — for almost three hours. The whole time, it was a marvel to witness their relationship with each other.
My brother and I love each other in the way that a lot of dissimilar siblings do: from a distance, making space for what we share (our corny humor, for one thing, and rooting for the Red Sox, just like our dad), and maintaining near-total avoidance of what we do not share. In the Trump era, this got harder, as I spend my time uplifting the stories of gay and trans people, and people of color, while he posts about Biden “socialism” and the New World Order.
In contrast, despite having very different personalities — Elizabeth is a talker and hugger, Maria Elena has limits on both — they are best friends; their rapport with each other is of the finish-each-other’s-sentences, push-each-other’s-buttons, Statler-and-Waldorf variety. They’re like the aspirational ideal of siblings, the photo illustration for sisters in the encyclopedia.
They certainly didn’t need a third kid on the family tree. There wasn’t some gaping void for me to fill. They could happily grow old as just the duo they have always been. And yet they made space for me anyway. By the end of our zoom call, I was sure I had sisters for the rest of my life.
This realization had a funny effect on me: It made me want to call my brother. I was excited about this blossoming relationship, but I still had my own garden to tend. I had not spoken to my brother or looked at his social media in months, but it felt wrong to exclude the person who has known me longest from this major development.
I dialed his number; considering the blind rage that had seeped into my last text to him, I wasn’t sure how eager he would be to pick up. But I was glad I called: I reached him just after he accidentally shot himself in the face. During target practice, a crazy ricochet bullet had split his brow just above his eye socket, a near miss that could have ended his life. I was grateful it had not, that I still had a brother as well as sisters.
My mind turned to my dad, who was approaching the two-year mark with a cancer that should have claimed his life months before. As far as I knew, he has never had any inkling that I was anything but his own flesh and blood. I told my cousin Alex, who was seeing my dad through the cancer journey, about my sisters, and he was pretty sure dad didn’t know. It seemed to me that there would be no value to changing that narrative now, in the last gloaming of a life.
In the time since dad’s diagnosis, I had not gone to see him. This was not just because of the pandemic. Our previous visit in Florida had been so healing, that I really just wanted to leave things there. I have so few easy, uncomplicated memories of my dad (and those I have are from so long ago) that I didn’t want to risk tarnishing the luster of that good day in my mind.
Instead, I had settled into a pattern of calling him to maintain our connection. But if I was going to see my sisters in Miami, which I was now sure I would, I began to wonder whether I should bundle a visit to my dad into the same trip.
In the end, I decided the first visit should be separate, that I needed to have this experience fully by itself. I told myself that I would decide whether or not to blend worlds the next time.
After I pulled the trigger on buying tickets for a late summer trip, I kept it to myself. When I next called my dad, I didn’t tell him; we talked about the Red Sox and my brother and I left it at that.
Flash forward: A JetBlue flight to Miami. Winging my way to meet my sisters, my emotions were patterned like radio waves: peaks (Oh my god this is so exciting!) alternating with valleys (What if they don’t like me?). Though we already had formed a bond over text, I had to be primed for any scenario.
For one thing, I already knew that not all relatives get along in any family. But there was also my post-divorce experience with online dating: I had learned quickly that people who text well don’t always mesh in real life. Either way, on that plane, I was preparing myself for the possibility that the visit might not be everything I dreamed.
And then the universe zigged when I was expecting a zag. In the miracle of 21st-century life, a man on the ground can send a message to a plane 35,000 feet up, words appearing on a screen smaller than a slice of toast. I got a message from Alex that dad’s doctors had done everything they could. What he had to say was stark: We have to put your dad in hospice.
My eyes filled with tears and I turned my head toward the window, uselessly staring at clouds as the dislocating news sank in. How was I supposed to feel? What was I supposed to do?
My sisters were on the way to the airport. I was landing in thirty minutes.
The journey was already in motion, one timeline ending, the next about to begin.
Read Part One: The Man Who Wasn’t There
Read Part Two: You Have Sisters
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Previously Published on Medium
all images courtesy of author
