Family Secrets

My mom calls me a snoop. And she's right for the most part, although it's never for a malicious reason. I was in my parents' basement last night looking for pictures from my father's side of the family. I found them, but I found something else that caught my eye. It was a garbage bag that hadn't been tied shut yet. Inside this bag were remnants of fabric. Fabric that my mother used to sew shirts for me and my sister when we were very young. I recognized them instantly, so I bent down to take a closer look. As I looked through the bag, however, I found much more than I bargained for. As I dug deeper, I found mementos... cards from my mother to my father, from my father to my mother, and from relatives from when my sister was born. And then I found letters. Love letters. Pages and pages of love letters from my mother to my father, and a few from my father to my mother (he never was much for writing letters, so it didn't surprise me that there were fewer on his end.) I didn't read them all, but one in particular caught my interest and I read it back to front. In the letter, my mother told my father that she understood why his family was having trouble accepting her. She didn't blame them, for she had made some mistakes in her past that they feared she would make again if she married him. She wrote about meeting his parents for the first time, and how she was so afraid that my grandparents' next door neighbor had to encourage her to knock on their front door. She wrote how she understood why he respected them so much, because she could tell they were loving and good people, and that she hoped she could convince them that she was good for their son. There was a lot more in the letter but the point was that my mother was madly in love with my father, and he was crazy about her too. And they did get married, and are still married today. But the controversy behind these letters is that my mother had been married before. The truth about this came out to my sister and I back in 1985, as my parents and we were cleaning out my Grandma's apartment while she was on her deathbed. My sister and I were charged with packing things up in her kitchen, and my sister found a photo album in her hutch. The photos were of a wedding. My mother's wedding. But the groom was definitely not our father. My sister-- only 11 years old at the time -- brought the pictures to my mother, who immediately started crying. She sat us down and told us that she had been married before. My sister was hurt and shocked, but I wasn't. I knew about this already-- although I didn't really know what it all meant. About five years earlier, I had found my mother's divorce papers while cleaning her writing desk in the living room. (The snoop strikes again!) I wasn't looking for anything, but while I was cleaning, something popped out and there they were. The thing is, at the time, I didn't understand fully what it was about. I was only 9 or 10 at the time. But I remember seeing my mother's name on these documents, but with a completely different last name. I also remember seeing my parents get married by my uncle when I was 5 years old. I didn't understand it at the time, but they had never been married in the church until then. They had been married at the Justice of the Peace. And the reason I was watching my parents get married in 1976 was that her previous marriage had been annulled in the church, so they were cleared to marry. As my mother told us the story, it suddenly all became clear to me what I found and what I knew. It was as if all the pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit and made sense, and I could make out the picture depicted in the pieces. So as I sat talking to my mom on Saturday night, I asked her to tell me all about her previous marriage and why it didn't work out. We knew names and general dates, but we never knew why it happened, or why it ended. So my mom told me the story.... to be continued.