I cannot even begin to tell you how incredibly numb I felt. All of a sudden people were giving me information that I didn’t know how to process. Tim telling me I was the “missing piece” to the puzzle made me feel that I should have won some kind of prize. He had been the whole family tree together from the civil war and beyond and I was the “missing piece”. What I ‘won’ was passage to the family Facebook page where the cover photo (pictured below) is of the family of about seventy-five, maybe more family members. It is a big family. And I was the “missing piece”. And yet, here I was alone still. My sister needed her time to process this as well so we went weeks without speaking. I felt betrayed. The betrayal that comes from my mother who had the responsibility to tell me. She knew very well my dad and I did not ever get along. She knew very well the way he treated me made me sad. She knew very well that he wrote in a journal “joyce is a complete and total failure”. She knew very well how much that broke me. She knew very well she could have taken that pain away at any given time, especially when she survived my father 19 years. I felt naked. Thinking back that everytime my father looked at me, he saw my mother’s infidelity. Same thing with everytime my Aunt and my Grandmother saw me. All of a sudden I felt very exposed and ashamed. I felt broken. There was no one on this earth I was wholly connected to…bloodline wise. No one. Seeing that my sister and I were 100% half-sisters broke me. She’s my sister and I love the same but we have different dads. Growing up people would comment that we didn’t look alike. When I was bullied, she was my bodyguard. She protected me. She’s my sister and to be legally, bloodline-ly, “half related” broke me. So while I made one family whole as they found the “missing piece”, another family became half with the same piece. I wasn’t sure where I belonged. I felt sad for my daughter. Her lineage changed as well. That wasn’t fair to her or to Dominic or to his kids and so on. I felt a level of anger I hadn’t felt since my abuse. I was angry that once again MY world was turned upside down. I was the one who had to regroup, process and find a game plan. I was the one who had to deal with this major development in my life while doing school, work, babysitting, and pretending life is normal. I was getting irritated easily, snapping responses at my husband, seeing red while driving. When I wasn’t being angry, I was being sad. It was a heavy sadness. I cried a lot. Hard. Loud. There was an occasional scream now and then in the pillow. And I also felt some relief that my dad wasn’t my dad. I understood why he treated me the way he did. I know why when I was nineteen and my mother was in surgery and he and I were in the waiting room and he said, “if something happens to your mother, you and I will not have a relationship”. At the time I thought it was a horrible thing to say to your kid, but now I understood. It’s no excuse, but I understood. His anger at my mother somehow also transferred unto me. It took some of the pain away.
I was confused and still am. I’ve been part of this large family now for three years. No one has reached out to me, sent me messages to see how I’m doing or even welcome me to the family. Tim has not called or invited me over. He has messaged me about more ancestry stuff. He was instrumental in finding where my bio dad was and more on that next time.I learned I have a (much) younger brother. So I went from being the youngest child in one family, to the oldest child in another family to being the middle child in the combined families. That is a weird sensation all on its own.
Next week: Finding Ray
Until Next Time…
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