The Other Mom
Editors Note- The public names and locales are for atmospheric purposes only (links provided as necessary), but the events and people are not. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products are intended or should be inferred. The story is based on the life experiences of Amy Bexley.
Mom had just died from a heart attack, and Dad had progressed to stage seven of Alzheimer's. His mind had deteriorated. He wasn't talking, needed a diaper, and was wheelchair-bound. My brother, the mechanic in the family, made my parents’ place handicap accessible as Dad declined. For a long while, my brother Deon tried to convince Mom to have Dad put into ManorCare on Northampton Street, but she would have none of it. She felt duty-bound to care for him. But this was now all over, and the task fell to us kids.
Mom had made Deon in charge of her estate. Afterwards, Deon continued to act like he oversaw things. He liked being in charge and giving orders about how things would be done. Deon was my younger brother by about a year and a half. I was the older sister. We still had Dad and the house to deal with.
That's when the arguments broke out between us. We discovered how expensive ManorCare was, and I thought maybe we could do some live-in care at our parents' place for a time. I argued that Dad's pension could cover that kind of care. Deon was firm on ManorCare.
I was always Dad's favorite. Deon knew this. Locking Dad away in some cold institution just made me so angry. It was so inhumane, and he deserved better than that. He was a caring and loving father to us both. Dad loved Mom. I was determined to find another long-term solution for Dad's care.
While at my parents’ place, we had a big shouting match in front of Dad about his care. It was like we were ten years old again. "You Mother-Fricken-Fracker", I shouted at him. His foul mouth was much older. He called me a "Bitch." Just like in our early teens, we got into a physical fight. I pulled on his ponytail. What the hell was a forty-something man doing with a ponytail, anyway? I thought to myself. He pulled on my bob of a haircut. Then Dad fell out of the wheelchair. It was as if Dad was trying to break up the fight between us, but instead he fell flat onto his face. That's when we both stopped.
Seeing Dad on the floor made me realize he needed 24-hour care. We both agreed that ManorCare was the only option. Neither of us could provide the constant care Dad needed at this point. Deon had a small family of three teen girls, and a wife, and worked in a local garage. I never got married, but I worked as a full-time billing clerk for Lehigh Valley Health Network. Even though Dad got a decent pension, we had to put Dad and Mom's place up for sale to help pay for Dad's care.
We settled the tasks ahead of us like we did with chores as kids, with Rock-Paper-Scissors. I lost, and I got emptying our parents’ place. Deon got the chore of moving Dad to ManorCare.
Deon took what few items he wanted from the house. We ordered one of those moving pods for me to fill with boxes for me to move to my place on the other side of Easton. Anything else left in the house, Deon and I agreed we would sell to pickers or in a yard sale. Then we would split the proceeds between us.
As I filled years of mementos into boxes, I came across the old family albums. That day I sat there for two hours flipping through pages of pictures of me and Deon as kids. Then pictures of relatives I never saw before or recalled. Mom had dutifully labeled each picture with names, places, and dates. I had a complete record of our family going back at least to my great-grandparents on both sides.
This is when I came across the cut picture. I recognized it was Dad from his clothing. He was wearing the same jeans and shirt in another photo from the family albums. Dad was with some strange woman. The picture was in a small tin that Dad had kept filled with memories of his life. It was the only picture in the tin.
Dad was an engineer and his work required him to travel to plants up and down the valley. Sometimes he would be away for a whole month or two on an assignment. Growing up, both my brother and I got used to Dad being gone for long stretches of time. Then he would return bringing us toys and Mom flowers or a piece of jewelry.
But then there was this picture. This odd picture. It looked like someone snapped it during the summer at a park. Could it be from a company picnic? Was this woman some female co-worker? But why would they be holding hands? On the back was the name Doris. Was Doris some person Dad dated before Mom?
Dad never talked about dating other women, or an affair. He said he married Mom right after high school, just before he trained to be an engineer for the plant. Mom never talked about some other woman. I looked through all the family pictures I had, and I found nothing that came close to this other woman.
The whole week while I was packing up stuff, I kept looking at this cut-off picture trying to figure out what it was about. I would look at every little shadow and detail, like the shoes Dad was wearing, to see if some clue would just fall into place. The way someone cut it bothered me. The heads just chopped off. Why would Dad keep a cut-up picture of himself and some woman? Did Mom cut it because of an argument about the woman in it? One evening I talked to Deon about the photo, but he had no clue. Dad and Mom never mentioned to him about some other woman, or some unknown relative.
I had finished packing up what I thought we should keep from our parents’ place and had the pod moved to my place where I could put everything in my attic. On weekends I would move boxes into the attic while Deon organized both a yard sale and pickers to come to our parents’ place. We got $2,450 for everything, and there was still furniture left in the house that no one wanted.
We ended up having to rent a dumpster and just throwing it all out. It would take half a year for us to sell the house. ManorCare had placed a lien against the house to ensure they got paid from the sale. We weren't a rich family, but Dad's care would ensure neither I nor Deon saw anything from his estate. Deon, in some forethought, managed to pre-pay both Mom's and Dad's funerals and grave sites from Mom's estate.
All this time, I hadn't packed away that odd cut-up picture of Dad and this unknown woman. I had kept it on my kitchen table. The picture ate at me. From time to time I would just stare at it thinking it would tell me something.
While my odds were slim, I took the picture with me one day to Dad at ManorCare. The staff had him propped up in a wheelchair when I showed him the picture. All he did was this twitchy half-smile. What did that mean? Did he know who was in the picture? Was he trying to tell me that? But then Dad did the same twitchy half-smile when the medical technician came over to give him his medicines. She was in her early twenties and busty. So, all this twitchy smile thing was Dad still liked women, and he was now a creep. Well, that part of his male mind hadn't rotted away. After that day I stuck the photo on my bookshelf on top of a pile of important papers I was keeping and walked away from it.
It was after all this estate stuff and putting Dad in ManorCare, that Emily, my co-worker, got me into building my family tree on Ancestry. I dug out all the family albums. Got a cheap scanner for my laptop and scanned the old family photos. Starting with me, I began our family tree by adding photos of each person.
It was fun with all those leaves shaking at me with hints, but then around Thanksgiving Ancestry was running this special for their DNA program. I bought the kit and sent in my spit. Six weeks later I discovered I was like most white Americans, a mix of various European ethnicities. German, but also Scots, Irish, Italian, Slavic, and traces of Finnish. With the DNA, Ancestry was emailing about new matches almost every day. It was showing me new third and fourth cousin possibilities. I was meeting people online I had never known. We shared family stories and debated how related we were. After a time, I stopped building my tree, and talked online. It was a good distraction from all that had taken place with Mom's death and Dad going into a nursing home, but I had to get back to my life.
AncestryDNA kept sending me promotional emails saying it had a "new discovery." They always showed a shared ancestor on my tree linking to some fifth cousin. I had been ignoring all these supposed hints for a long while now, and the unopened emails were piling up in my Inbox tab. It was time to clean up these emails and lower the number of unopened emails.
I opened one up so I could click on unsubscribe. As I was scrolling down, the graphic showed that they had found a DNA grandparent match connecting with my father. That was insane to me, because Dad's parents were long dead, and I had already put them into my tree. How could this system say I had a DNA grandparent match? Ancestry was telling me I had a fifth grandparent which was just silly. This DNA-matching stuff wasn’t that accurate, I decided.
As I continued to clean up the emails, one I opened said I had an aunt connected to Dad. I knew this was wrong, but out of curiosity, I clicked on the link to the family tree. The email took me to a public tree by username Ross4874. As I scrolled around on the tree, I saw Dad's name connected to some woman by the name of Doris Ross. Was this the same Doris as in the photo I had? She had just passed away in the last year. This woman lived in Bethlehem, on the other end of the valley. She had two kids, Dylan and Erica. Dylan, the oldest, was only five years younger than me. I went back to the grandparent email and clicked on the tree link. The email took me to the same tree. Now nothing was making sense.
AncestryDNA was saying this one tree contained both a grandparent link and an aunt link. I didn't see how that could be. No one in the tree matched up to my tree, except my father. This must have been a mistake. It must have been that someone linked my father to this woman who happened to have the name Doris when they were building their tree by accident. Then I looked at the attachments in the tree. It had my dad's draft card taken from my tree, and a marriage license between my dad and Doris Ross. That's when I came across the picture again. The picture I left on the pile of papers to collect dust. But there it was, in all its fullness with their heads attached. That was my dad holding hands with this woman named Doris Ross. The same Doris name on the back of the photo I had.
Then it hit me. This woman and Dad had married at the same time Dad was married to Mom. Holy crap! Dad had two wives. That means Dylan and Erica are my half-siblings. All this time I thought Dad was away on a work assignment when he was just with his other family. Did he bring them gifts as well? Was this how he kept us from knowing what was going on? Bribing us with gifts? And should I contact Ross4874 to tell them Dad has Alzheimer's and was now in ManorCare?
Later that week I told my brother everything. I could hear the gasp over the phone when I told him. After an hour of back and forth on how this all could have happened, we both felt Dylan and Erica should know our dad was now in ManorCare. So, I reached out to them through Ancestry. I sent three requests. Each time I tried to tell them about Dad, where he was, and his condition. But I got nothing back. Then the tree went private. I talked to Deon about it, and he said we should drop it. Something must have happened to Dad's other family. Something to cause the children and wife to use her last name and not take Dad's, based on the tree I saw. Maybe it was because there was just a marriage license and not the marriage certificate. I left my tree public in case the Ross side ever wanted to reach out to us. I realized Dad’s Alzheimer’s made him a letch, but having a second family years prior was another thing. This I didn't think was even possible.
My entire childhood with my dad was a lie. Had Mom known and decided never to say anything? It would be like Mom to not say anything and keep going on as if it never existed. For the next week I couldn't sleep. I felt this complete loss of my childhood. This realization that Dad could have been faking his love for us this whole time. Here I thought he was a good father, but the truth may be something else. I was angry with him, and part of me thought he deserved to be put into ManorCare. But then I felt sadder for the other family. We had Dad after he retired, and they didn't. I wondered; can a dad love two families?
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