This is copied from my Facebook feed, where I posted it the day after April 5, 2016. That day will be significant forever as the day I learned I had a sister.
Wednesday is my long day, but I must take a minute here before getting up.
First, thank you for so many likes and loves and comments yesterday upon my learning (at age 65!!!) that I have a sister, and that she's as excited to learn about me as I am to learn about her.
And hugs to my "opera kids." During last night's break in rehearsal, they surrounded me with love. One wanted to know who was the mother who wanted nothing to do with me, because he wanted "at her!"
More hugs to my circle of girlfriends (whom I would never have known if I hadn't met Jas on that fateful day six years ago). I was able to join them for a quick dinner last night. When I walked into the restaurant, they immediately bombarded me with questions. Thank you Debi, Diane, Marilyn, Jeanne, Maggie, Carol, and Nancy. Yes, I'll keep you posted. Thank you for your love and support.
Sharing life facts with my sister, Debbie, yesterday in several texts put checkmarks on some of my "who I think I am" list. She began taking piano lessons when she was six years old. She's sung in many choruses in her life. She loves to knit and cross-stitch and needlepoint. She gets migraines. (And her three children and my younger son all get migraines. 😖)
Here's the most sadly ironic part of the story. People who know me well know how I adored and was adored by my daddy, and how I never felt loved by my mother. (If you're a friend or acquaintance of my mother, do not go jumping in here to tell me how much she loves me. That may be - I'm sure in her own special way she loves me. I said I never FELT her love.) In my sole written communication with my birthmother, she told me she adored her father, and lived for Sundays, when they would go for long walks on the Gloucester beach, just the two of them. To complete this sick trilogy, last night Debbie told me she deeply loved and was loved by her adoptive father, and never felt her adoptive mother loved her.
Mothers of the world, if any of your children makes a statement like this, shame on you. Shape up. Get some therapy. Make it right. It's a heavy and terrible burden for a child to bear. For me, it has meant a lifelong self-image of being unloveable. It meant marrying the wrong man because Mother said I was so obstinate I'd never get a man. In the South, a girl's life goal in the 50s and 60s was to get a man. I didn't particularly like this man, but he asked, so I had to say yes. It took stumbling my way through trying to get three husbands to love me before I found the winner, my sweet #4 John, who taught me how to be loved and then died 21 months later. And now Jas, who has taught me how to laugh at myself and my situations. (And I say all this with the utmost appreciation for my two sons and the love they shower on me daily. It was worth ten years of a miserable marriage to share life with you.)
And as everything in life circles around, I circle around having been offered the opera collaborative pianist position at YSU - now finally finding myself able to be loved - and these wonderful and talented young singers showering love on me every time they see me.
Lucky, lucky, lucky me!
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