Am I really an only child?

I grew up an only child. Good thing, considering that I was constantly sick as a child, never went to school more than two weeks at a stretch and had to drop out of high school in my second year due to health. I was the only child my parents ever had together. But was I the only child my mother ever had?

One day I got into a discussion with my mother (who was in her eighties) on family history, going thru some documents at the same time. One of’em happened to be my birth certificate. On it were two questions, the answers to which were normally provided by the father.

The first one said “Number of other children by this mother who are living”. To which my father accurately indicated 0. It was the second question that got my attention. That one asked “Number of other children by this mother who are not living”. Just as plain as day, my father had entered the number 1. 1?! I asked my mother about it and her response was that my father was just confused. Well, my father might have been a lot of things, but confused over a simple question like that wasn’t one of them. Anyway, no further information was forthcoming, so I had to let it lie.

Ten years or so later, after my mother had entered a nursing home, I was going thru boxes of papers and discovered her employment record for the time she worked at AT&T. She started in 1922 and ...as far as I knew... worked for them continually until she retired from them in 1955. Come to find out, she didn’t.

There was a period in the late ‘20s when she resigned from AT&T ... and then returned to the company eight months later. That, in itself, doesn’t mean anything you say. And you’re right. But there’s more to the story that creates a very interesting pattern.

You see, she was the sole support of her mother and younger sister. Her mother never worked and her sister was still going to school. They were living in Memphis, Tennessee and renting an apartment. Without my mother working, there was no way to pay the bills, buy groceries, school books for her sister or anything else. All of which immediately raises two very interesting questions. Where did the money come from to pay the bills and what was my mother doing for eight months?

Another reason for reaching the conclusion I have is the societal attitudes of the time. Women who were “in a family way”, (in other words, pregnant) especially unmarried women, simply did not work at AT&T. They basically stayed out of sight til the child was born and the situation taken care of (meaning the child was informally adopted, placed in an orphanage or sent to live with a distant relative).

The next piece of this puzzle is the relationship she had with a man for six years. Not only was the man’s family crazy about my mother, she was over at their house for dinner constantly and they were also planning on getting married. That never happened, of course, but I have reason to believe that each one of them carried a torch for the other for the rest of their lives. But that’s another story.

What I suspect, but can’t prove, is that my mother became pregnant by her boyfriend (or lover, if you prefer) and had a child who was either stillborn, or was taken by her boyfriend’s family. Her boyfriend also provided all the financial support for the eight months my mother was away from work. The child was either raised to adulthood without ever knowing who his (or her) real mother was or died at an early age from some illness. I’ll never know for sure, but the pattern described above certainly supports the theory.

These kinds of secrets are the ones that are buried so deep that it takes a bulldozer to find them. And when they do surface, usually accidentally, you never know the whole truth. Instead, we seem to be ashamed that our ancestors, particularly our parents, could do something like that.

Well, hey, I hate to bring this up but our parents were just as capable of making mistakes and messing up their lives as we are. It doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them, anymore than it means there’s anything wrong with us. Just human.

Finding out that your mother may have had a child out of wedlock doesn’t tell you anything other than the cold facts. What’s important is why. Learn this and you gain a deeper understanding of the kind of person your mother really was. In my case, it tells me how deeply she loved and cared for another person. The only thing that bothers me is that, assuming my analysis is correct, she felt she had to keep it a secret from me.