A Broken Tree Read online

Without missing a beat, Mom said, “Oh, you can’t really trust those DNA tests. They aren’t all that accurate, and the results are just wrong a lot of the time.”

  I told her that initially, I’d thought the same thing, so just in case there could have been an issue, like the sample being bad, or the test results being incorrect, I had used a totally different sample for a second test, just to be sure. I told her the results of the second test were exactly the same.

  It was quiet for a minute. I could tell she was thinking about what to say next. I was sure she would crack and tell me who my father was. I didn’t want to overwhelm her with the news that we’d had Tim tested, too, and that his results also revealed that Mark was not his father. I’d tell her that later, after she’d gotten over the shock of learning that the jig was up, and we were on to her secrets.

  Instead of telling me the truth, Mom simply repeated that the DNA test was wrong, and that Mark Anderson was indeed my father. She then told me she didn’t want to go on with this conversation any further, and that we needed to get back to talking about her history.

  I was completely at a loss for words. She was lying to me, and she made no apologies about it. If I pushed back, I knew she would clam up, and I’d never get any information about who my real father was. I didn’t know if Mom understood the situation we had here, but I knew that if she decided not to talk about this now, then none of us would ever know anything more about who our fathers were. We would never have any idea who really belonged to Dad and who didn’t. I wasn’t ready to take that chance.

  This was a very tough position to be in. I had recently read a book titled The Stranger in My Genes, written by a man named Bill Griffeth.[1] He also discovered, through the use of a commercial DNA test, that his dad was not his real father. He was visiting his elderly mother to see if she would be willing to provide some additional information about his biological father and the circumstances of his conception. His encounter ended up very much like mine did. She simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about it. Situations like this are a delicate balance between someone who is desperate to find out who they are and how they came to be and someone who feels like they’ve made a terrible mistake and have lived with their shame for many years. Circumstances like this are never black and white, and have the potential of doing great damage to a relationship if not handled right.

  I realized that confrontation at this moment would do more harm than good. I could feel myself getting angry that she wouldn’t own up to her involvement in such a critically important matter. I told Mom that I had something I’d promised I would do for my sister Diane, and that I needed to go. I grabbed my stuff and was gone from her room in a matter of minutes. I usually give Mom a kiss and a hug when I leave, but in this case, I just couldn’t bring myself to show her any kind of affection. I had to leave right away, before I said something I would regret later.

  I got into my car and just sat there. I was furious and didn’t know what to do. I typically don’t get truly angry; I’m usually an easygoing guy. In fact, I can remember only two times in my life when I was ever filled with rage. The first time was when I was eleven years old and got into a big fight with my older brother for destroying some trees I had planted. The second time was when I got the DNA results back from Jack and discovered that Mark was not my biological father.

  Now, I was feeling those same feelings of rage again, and I didn’t like what it was doing to me. I wasn’t familiar with this level of anger, and have to admit that I was quite surprised by the enormous power it has on the soul. I knew I had to do something, and quickly, to get these feelings to stop.

  People do odd things when they get really angry. When I get mad or frustrated, I walk. I walk hard, and fast, to work out the raw feelings. I knew that I had to walk right now. Within a stone’s throw of the care center where my mom lived was a cemetery. I’ve always thought it odd to locate an end-of-life care center so close to a cemetery. It seems a bit grim to be able to look out your window and see where your body is going to be deposited when you finally leave this world. In a matter of minutes, I was in the cemetery, walking my heart out. I’m not sure why I chose to go there; maybe because it was quiet, with no one to bother me. I walked over to my grandparents’ tombstones and just stood there, wondering what in the world had happened to their daughter, that she would be messed up enough to have all of these kids out of wedlock—not just one, but five. Maybe all nine of us were conceived out of wedlock! For all I knew at this point, that could turn out to be the case.

  A strong winter wind was blowing as I walked through the rows of tombstones. I was so cold that I finally had to go back to my car and warm up my hands and my ears. Once my lips warmed up enough that I could talk again, I called my brother Tim and told him how things had gone with Mom. I guess he hadn’t expected it to go well from the beginning, because he didn’t seem at all surprised when I told him that Mom wasn’t willing to talk about the matter, or to give me any information about what really happened. I am always amazed by Tim. When things bother him, he doesn’t seem to lose his temper or go crazy. He just handles it with a calm sense of dignity. He is one of those people who makes you feel a bit silly for getting all worked up when you know it’s going to be okay in the end. He was handling this a lot better than I was.

  We talked about what had happened and what our next moves were going to be. I was hoping he had a strategy that I could use, because I had no idea what to do next. He assured me that somehow things were going to work out, and that we’d discover what we needed to know. After about an hour of talking with Tim, I was feeling much better.

  I called Carlee next. As I told her what took place, I could feel myself getting all worked up again. Carlee calmly guided me back into the real and rational world again, and helped me see things from a better perspective. After talking with her, I decided I’d walk around the cemetery again and see if I could figure out what my next move was going to be.

  I went to Dad’s grave to see if he had any ideas. Nothing. I knew he’d probably had all the answers I was looking for, plus a few more I hadn’t even considered yet. I know it wasn’t possible for Dad to send me answers from beyond the grave, but at this point, I was willing to entertain the thought that just maybe he would come back for a visit and tell me what I wanted to know. Then I wouldn’t have to try and get answers from my mom anymore. No such luck. It’s funny to see what lengths we’ll go to when we get desperate.

  After spending more than an hour in the cemetery, I went back to my brother Neil’s home where I was staying during my visit. I had to smile as I thought about how I’d chosen to stay with him during this critically important trip. It was his tractor accident that had started this whole adventure.

  When I got to Neil’s house, I told him the real reason I’d come home for a visit. I didn’t tell him all the details that had gotten me to this point—only that I had found out that Mark wasn’t my dad. He didn’t seem at all surprised. Things had happened between Neil and Mom that made a close mother–son relationship impossible for either of them. I don’t know the specifics of all the conflicts, but I knew enough about some of the events that it was plain to me she was punishing him for something that none of us knew about.

  I can remember one event in particular that stood out as being especially unfair to Neil. He has never forgiven Mom for what she did to him, and Mom knew that.

  When Neil was about sixteen, shortly before his tractor accident, Dad brought home a couple of piglets for him to raise. At that time, we lived on what used to be an old farmstead complete with a barn and a chicken house. Neil fixed up a section of the barn so that it would accommodate the two young piglets. He figured he could raise them until they got full size, and then he would sell them and make some seriously big bucks. He had his driver’s permit and knew that he would be getting his license soon. With the money Neil would earn from raising his two piglets, he could pay for his own car.

  About that time, Dad’s aunt and uncle were vi
siting from Oregon. While they were at our house, they invited Mom to come to Oregon with them and spend some time getting to know the rest of Dad’s aunts and uncles. While she was there, she could visit Grandma Anderson and have a lot of fun doing things together. The only problem was, Mom didn’t have any money to pay for the trip. Somehow, she scraped up enough money to get there, but didn’t have enough to get back home. Mom’s solution? “I’ll worry about getting back when it’s time to come home.” She was never very good at working out the finer details of anything that involved money. She just went with what was happening at the moment and figured she’d worry about tomorrow when tomorrow came. While this rarely worked out well for her, she went through most of her life living by that motto.

  After staying in Oregon for three weeks, she called and told Dad she needed money to get home. Dad told her that he didn’t have the money, but he’d ask around and see what he could come up with to buy a bus ticket back home. But Mom didn’t want to travel by bus; it would take too long, and plus, it wasn’t much fun. She wanted to fly home. Dad told her that he couldn’t come up with enough money for that; she’d have to stay there for another month before that would happen. Mom told Dad he could get all the money she needed to buy a plane ticket if he’d just sell Neil’s two pigs and take whatever he could get for them. There was no time to haggle for a good price. She wanted to get back home, now. So Dad sold Neil’s pigs and bought her the plane ticket. Mom was happy to get home, and quite enjoyed being able to fly in an airplane. She had never flown before, so it was quite the adventure for her.

  Neil was not at all happy with what had happened to his pigs. As far as he was concerned, Dad should have let Mom stay in Oregon and find a job to earn the money she needed to get back home. Over the ensuing years, Mom and Neil had many fights over her “theft of his pig money.” He has never been able to forgive her for selling his pigs. He knew that Dad wasn’t really to blame for that. In his eyes, it was Mom who was responsible for the loss of his pigs, which ultimately meant the loss of the car he planned to buy with the proceeds.

  So, when I got back from the cemetery and told Neil that I had found out Mark wasn’t my father, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, I guess that doesn’t surprise me one bit.” That wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but at least he accepted the news better than I thought he would.

  The next morning, I got a call from Mom asking me to come back and visit with her. She said we needed to talk. This came as quite a surprise to me, but I was glad to hear that maybe I had a second chance at getting the information I needed. I went over to the care center after I knew she would be done with breakfast and back in her room.

  She told me that she had spent a long, sleepless night thinking about what I had said, and how she was going to tell me what I needed to hear. She came right out and told me that the DNA test was correct: Mark was not my biological father. I asked her who my biological father was, and she told me it was a man named Ray Jacobson. I thought about it a minute and couldn’t recall anyone in town by that name. The only Jacobson I could remember was a girl in my class at school, named Diane Jacobson. Then it hit me: Was she my half-sister? I knew Diane, and recalled that I didn’t much care for her. She was one of those high-performing kids that always looked down on kids like me.

  I was never one of the gifted kids in school. I couldn’t read very well when I was in second grade, so I struggled to make good grades. I remember that our teacher had the kids in our class separated into three different reading groups. Those who read above average were in the Robin reading group; the average readers were in the Bluebird group; and those who struggled were in the Blackbird group. I spent most of my time in the latter. The teacher wasn’t very encouraging to our group, and seemed to spend considerably less time with us than she did with the other two groups. This humiliating experience was one of the lowest points of my early school years. Because of this, I wasn’t especially fond of kids like Diane Jacobson, who were in the Robin reading group. They treated me like I was stupid, which is probably the way I acted much of the time. I didn’t handle the idea of being in the Blackbird reading group very well and often acted out because I felt humiliated—at least, that’s what my teachers told my parents. Either way, Diane was a “Robin reader,” and because of that, I didn’t much care for her.

  Then Mom added something that really muddied the waters for me. She was thinking out loud and said, “Yes, I think it may have been Ray Jacobson. It was either Ray, or it was his brother, Timmy.” What? Brothers? Wow, that’s convenient. She’d been seeing both brothers? This was getting more complicated than ever. It looked like I was going to have to do further research to see if I could determine which of the two brothers was really my dad.

  Of course, there was always the possibility that Mom wasn’t remembering the details correctly. If she couldn’t remember which of the two brothers was my father, then it was only logical that this might not have been an isolated incident, and that she was probably pretty promiscuous in her younger years. At ninety, she might not even remember who my biological father was. I mean, nearly sixty years had passed since all of this took place, so I wasn’t sure if I could trust her memory.

  I decided that as long as she was spilling the beans about who my father was, now might be the perfect time to ask her about the letter my siblings and I had often talked about. None of us knew for sure if this letter really existed, but now was the time to ask.

  I told Mom that a story had circulated for decades among us kids about a letter she had supposedly written when she was in her forties. During that time, Mom had thought she was dying from ovarian cancer. The story was that before she died, she wanted to write a letter to her children revealing the truth about a lot of things that I had never heard about. I was told that Mom gave it to her sister Eva to keep, asking Eva to give the letter to our oldest sister, Holly, after Mom died. I explained to Mom that my older sisters had sworn such a letter existed, and that it contained all the secrets she had wanted to confess before she died. I came right out and asked if such a letter really did exist. I had nothing to lose and a lot to gain if she confirmed its existence, and if she’d tell me who might have the letter now.

  Mom seemed surprised that I had heard about this and denied the letter’s existence. If such a letter did exist, she said, she wouldn’t have given it to her sister Eva. Eva would have blabbed everything all over town. I pressed her a bit more to see if I could discern whether she actually knew of it and was denying its existence, or if maybe she simply didn’t remember it. After a few minutes, I concluded that if such a letter really did exist, she wasn’t going to tell me about it. I was walking up a dead-end street with this issue and could see it was time to move on to other questions.

  I decided that if I was pushing her for information and she wasn’t getting angry at me for being too nosy, I would go for the big prize and see what I came up with. I reminded her that some of the kids and grandkids were dealing with health issues; I talked about the great new advances scientists were making in medicine because of genetic engineering. Then I reminded her that if we didn’t have the right information about our genetic past, that someone could die, either by getting bad information or by missing out on some treatment opportunities that might be available to us if we knew what illnesses were showing up in our family lines.

  After that, I came right out and asked her who the fathers of each one of us kids were. I started with the three we already knew about. First was Holly. Mom told me that she was Sam’s daughter. Then I asked about Neil. Oh, he was Dennis’s son. Carlee was Peter’s daughter. Great! I was batting 100 percent so far, so I was ready to go all the way and ask about the rest of us.

  With the name of each man she gave me, she provided a bit of a biographical sketch, which I thought was interesting; it was certainly more than I’d expected at this point. With some of the men, her memories were sharp and very detailed. With a few of them, I could hear in the inflections of her voice
and the moments of silence that she was feeling a sense of longing—like she sorely missed being back in those times, once again enjoying the company of the man she was talking about. It was very clear that with some of these men, she’d had longtime relationships that meant a great deal to her. I would have given anything to have her put aside all of her inhibitions and tell me more about these relationships. I’m not talking about the seedy, intimate physical details; I’m talking about how the relationships developed, the ebb and flow of their experiences together, and how serious each romance was to her at the time. I am always fascinated by people’s love stories. With my mom’s multiple experiences, I was especially interested in learning why things turned out the way they did, and why she’d felt the need to look outside her own marriage relationship to fulfill her romantic needs.

  She had already told me that Ray Jacobson was my biological father—well, either Ray or his brother, Timmy. I would ask for more details about this man later on, but for now, while she didn’t seem tired and I was on a roll, I wanted to learn more about my siblings’ fathers.

  When I asked her who Tim’s father was, Mom piped up right away and told me it was Timmy Jacobson. Wait a minute! She had just told me that Tim Jacobson could possibly be my father. While she wasn’t sure which of the two Jacobson brothers was my dad, she was positive that Timmy was Tim’s dad. Almost immediately, she went back into her reflective mode and started talking about how handsome Timmy Jacobson was. She said that every girl in town wanted to be with Timmy. In fact, she’d named my brother Tim after Timmy Jacobson. Hmm, I thought; that was a bit cheeky, to name a son after the man who had fathered him, when the guy wasn’t her lawfully wedded husband—but at this point, I could expect almost anything. I could understand if this guy had been having an affair with a single woman, but in this case, where Mom was married and had a family with seven kids already—well, that’s just not right.