[Continued from HERE.]

Mr. H went on to tell me that he had done something he thought was very bad.

He was furious when he found out that he had suffered so much, so long with his ‘parents’ and that the whole thing had been a lie. He kept getting tripped up trying to explain how he felt to me.

What he did was to immediately sell his childhood home and use the money to search for his birth parents, giving him what appeared to be the first stroke of luck in his life: he found his birth mother, a school teacher, living half way across the country. He also found that he had five sisters … NOT half sisters. Five sisters. His biological father was dead but had always been with his mother and sisters before his death.

This wasn’t the part making him feel guilty. Again, this normally articulate man was stuttering, stop-starting, back-and-forthing, interrupting himself every time he tried to give me some tiny idea of how he was feeling at all of this news.

Then he took a deep breath, looked me in the eye once again and told me he had used his credentials as a V.P. at the pre-eminent scholastic book publishing company to approach his birth mother. He told her she had been selected to try a new series of books in her classroom. She accepted the offer. He flew out to meet with her (he did bring a set of books), never letting on who he was. They began building a relationship through their common interest in pedagogy. Because his birth mother was a down-to-earth mid-westerner, every time he was in town (he made sure it was at least once a month) she invited him to her house where he met all of his sisters with whom relationships were also built.

By the time he was telling me the story, the situation was ready to boil over and he was clearly at his wits end. He had become very close to his birth mother and sisters but felt the resentment building inside of him that he was ‘given up’ to such a horrific life while his sisters were all kept and loved and raised in a wonderful atmosphere, in complete honesty. The week before we met, he had, on the spur of the moment, confessed his real identity to the sister with whom he felt closest.

She was completely shocked as she and her sisters had never been told anything about him. She eventually convinced him to let her confide the truth in another one of their sisters as well. At that point they were trying to get the sand to stop shifting under their feet long enough to decide how to put the pieces, so many jagged pieces, together in order to form a family circle. While his sisters understood why he chose to deceive them, they were worried about how this would all impact their mother. At the same time, they were also angry and felt deceived by their mother even while understanding how hard it must have been for her to keep her ‘secret’ over the years.

[Continued…]