abandonment

By Mary O’Reilly

When my older brother was born—my parents’ firstborn—my mother was given a firm warning. “If you leave this child, I’ll kill you.” Knowing my father’s gentle nature and that leaving would never occur to her anyway, she simply replied, “Okay.” She understood. His fear subsided as my brother grew, musing aloud to our mother, “You really love him, don’t you?”

My father had no memory of a mother’s love. When he was a toddler, his own mother left to visit her family in Boston. As days, then weeks, then months passed without her returning to Indiana, they had to accept that she wasn’t coming back. He never saw her again. Maybe she decided that the whirlwind romance with her dashing and decorated World War II sailor had gone too far. He had disembarked in Boston right after the war. They promptly fell in love, and he whisked her from her city-dwelling family to a land of cornfields and small-town life. Nine months and three days after their wedding, my father was born.

When she didn’t come back, my grandfather was eventually granted a divorce on the grounds of abandonment. About nine years after his wife’s abrupt departure, they received word—presumably from a letter or phone call from her mother—that she had died of tuberculosis. Though it’s not clear what my father had been told, it was then that it dawned on him that the mother he had been yearning for had been alive the entire time.

My grandfather, the consummate gentleman, would only ever say of his late ex-wife that she was a wonderful woman. Perhaps he meant to comfort his son with warm feelings toward her, but the unintended consequence was my father’s default assumption that it must have been his own fault. I found out only recently that at least into his young adulthood, he wondered what he could have done that was bad enough to drive her away. I’d always thought in the back of my mind that because she died so young, she must have been sick for a very long time, maybe even in the hospital. Maybe she couldn’t come back, and if she could, she didn’t want to be a burden or have her child grow up with a sick mother. I’d wondered if my father thought this too. I’d hoped he did.

But the rest of my grandmother’s story remained a mystery—a 9-year gap—until almost 60 years later, when my mother found a hint on Ancestry.com. It had been sitting unopened in her inbox while she busily cared for my rapidly declining father. The hint led to a cousin, and then to a cemetery. I had just moved back to Boston from California. So when my mother visited from Indiana over a Thanksgiving weekend five months after my father died, we found ourselves scouring a cemetery in Mattapan. We found her, my grandmother, alone with her new last name that had made it so hard for my mother to track her down. She had remarried in 1950. This macabre scavenger hunt was enabled by my mother’s genealogical sleuthing and an equally savvy first cousin of my father’s named Karen. When she and my mother found each other, pieces began falling into place.

Throughout his entire post-toddler life, the closest my father ever came to seeing his own mother’s face was in a blurry overexposed photograph of her in a bulging coat taken in 1946, shortly before he was born. In February 2022, over lunch on the outskirts of Boston, his newly discovered cousin Karen handed my mother and me envelopes bursting with photos of extended family that my father never knew existed. Among them was a pixel-perfect black and white portrait of my grandmother’s beautiful young, smiling face. My father’s inquisitive eyes looked uncannily back at us. “Were they blue?” I asked, without looking up. “The most beautiful blue,” his cousin Joanie answered. Karen was the one who first enabled the genealogical connection to this family, but she was born after my grandmother died. Joanie on the other hand has a clear memory of my grandmother, whom she called by her nickname, Aunt Mimi. She remembers her Aunt Mimi coming back to Boston from Indiana, wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, cigarette in hand. Joannie was about six years old and thought she was devastatingly glamorous.

In the summer of 1999, my father drove me, along with my 20-lb cat, in a moving van from Indiana to Boston, where I was to start graduate school. Did he think about the fact that he was retracing the path of his mother’s own departure from him more than 50 years earlier? Did he wonder where she might have lived, which streets she’d walked?

A few years later, my mother visited me by herself. We had a couple of beers in Doyle’s Café, a bar in the neighborhood where we believed my grandmother had grown up. Doyle was her maiden name, and we wondered if there could be a connection. We tried to make sense of our complicated feelings about it, using a characteristically minimal number of words while our eyes were on the Notre Dame football game that connected us umbilically to my father watching it from his armchair in Indiana.

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Being the child of an addict might be the most confusing experience in existence. You’re loved, but not tolerated. Wanted, but not pursued. You may be the subject of stories, tattoos, and drawings, but you’re basically strangers.

I’ve struggled an entire lifetime with the unanswered questions. Not just why my dad left, but who he was— beyond the trauma, the mess he made.

One of the reasons I became a writer was because my dad was a writer, before addiction took his life. I wanted to be like him, desperate for the identity he denied me through interaction. Otherwise, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was, who I was meant to be, or how I was supposed to enter adulthood with this haze of uncertainty consuming my life like a fog. I worked hard to get my act together. Working hard was the only way I knew to rectify the mess I felt had been made. I’d show him — I’d show everyone —I don’t need them.

That’s when I learned I had a brother.

In the wilder years of my dad’s existence, he found a girlfriend, impregnated her, and walked away. Twenty-six years later, I met Jonathon.

Neither of us knew our dad. He died when I was 18 and Jon was 12, and closure became impossible. I was still clamoring for something concrete that would tell me who I was, and although Jon couldn’t do that for me 100%, coming face to face with a portion of my DNA in another human being was more restorative than I ever thought possible.

My dad, is my dad.

I said what I said. You can’t change my mind.

My therapist has tried to—or at least to change the words I use to describe my father.

Over my lifetime, I’ve called my father daddy. I’ve referred to him as my father or Steve.

But he was my dad.

My dad was an NPE. He grew up with a drunk mother and without ever knowing his own biological father. He bore his stepfather’s surname and wasn’t welcome at the stepfather’s family homestead over the holidays, unlike his two half brothers—his stepfather’s sons.

I find it interesting that my dad referred to his own missing biological parent as his “sire.” He seemed to be a stickler for labels and calling things by their proper names, although I suspect, in his case, his choice of label was heavily peppered with anger and resentment.

He never knew his father. Or why he left. Or why none of his father’s family sought him out.

But my dad—he was my dad until I was almost four years old.

But then he abandoned me.

My therapist thinks that because he left me, and because he never resurfaced, his title should be nothing more than sperm donor. She thinks by calling him dad I give him too much power and influence over me.

There is language in NPE, adoption, and donor conceived circles to describe family members and relationship roles, but it’s complicated. Words and roles—like dad, father, donor—just aren’t simply defined anymore, and I’ve had trouble unpacking the roles and titles in my life.