Micro-Memoir: Every December

By Deborah CollardIn 1991, my dad and I were sitting at the table talking about my uncle and his daughter, whom no one knew about until she was in her teens. I commented that my uncle never should have hidden her from family. Dad seemed a bit glum and said his brother made the best choice he could at the time. He looked at me and said, “Your Daddy isn’t perfect either.” He then told me this: “Before I met your Momma, there was a gal I was very much in love with and we got pregnant. Her father never approved of me and we didn’t think her parents would let us marry. We had a baby girl.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. “Where the hell is she?”

He didn’t know, but he thought she could be in North Carolina or Texas. The last time he saw her was at the hospital after she was born in Rome, Georgia. He carried a picture of her in his wallet until it fell apart.

I was so excited I felt as if I had ants crawling all over me. I was my mom’s only child, so the thought of having a sister out there . . . oh mercy! I piled on the questions, and he looked me dead in the eye and said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I insisted. “It’s my sister!”

He said her mother married someone else and probably didn’t even know about us. She had gone to school in Rome and her dad, who was in the military, probably wanted her to marry a military man. Before he met her, Dad had married his childhood sweetheart and had a son, with whom I’ve never been close. The son was raised by his grandparents after his mother, my dad’s wife, died at 19 after complications from surgery. Dad married my mother in January 1955 after only having met the Thanksgiving before. They were married 38 years when he died in 1993.

Dad never wanted to talk about my sister, but he told me I looked exactly like her when I was born. He died without giving me a name. He felt that she didn’t need to be bothered. I was raised an only child and this didn’t sit well with me. I wanted to find her. Each year since I found out she existed, I’ve devoted every December to searching for her — doing research, following up on leads, and looking for new clues. I check all my DNA sites daily for the match. It’s her month. But it’s not a success story and it may never be. I haven’t been able to find out a thing about her.

I’ve craved her existence in my life. I’ve grown to love her even though I’ve never looked into her eyes.Deborah Collard is the author of the “Haunted Southern Nights” book series and lives in Orange Beach, Alabama, where she and her husband, Greg, run a historic B&B.