Shame

 

I have family I don’t talk to. And they’re not just distant relatives. They’re not the distant relatives everyone has; the kind you’re really not supposed to talk to but once maybe twice a year. I have family I don’t talk to, family that I should probably live with. Family I should love like the family I do live with and love unreasonably. My mom, the one who raised me, did not give birth to me. A detail we’ve all easily forgotten. I’m the oldest, the siblings I live with have always had me in their lives. And what child thinks about what came before them, before they came into existence? So questions are not asked about why I look nothing like mommy.

I have family I don’t talk to. Two sisters and a brother that I put out of my head right after third grade and didn’t think about until the summer of 8th grade. I went to visit. In their living room was a picture of us all together. Jane had driven up with the kids from Ohio to visit a friend in New York. I was in sixth grade maybe, we met at the mall, ate Chinese and and took a group picture-- a family picture. I had more or less forgotten about that day but there was the picture, framed in the living room. There was a couple of pictures of me in the third grade. I spent that year with them.

Jane let me know that Sherrie, my sister, went around showing people pictures of me. She wanted everyone to know she had an older sister. There were years where I didn’t even think about her. But I was young, I was eight, eight. Tensions between Jane, the woman who had given birth to me, and my dad made it so she never called the house. There were siblings in the Bronx to watch and play with. There was homework to do and shows to watch, and I was young.

We didn’t grow up together. The closest Sherrie, Sunshine, William and I got to love was familiarity. After the summer in eighth grade Jane reached out to me my sophomore year of college via Facebook. I guess she lost my number. I wasn't mad. I actually felt guilty and thought she was justified. In the summer of 8th grade she let me know it was either my dad or her. I went back to the Bronx. I'm very much an absentee father when it comes to my other siblings. I'm working on it.