When Six Becomes Seven and Third Becomes Fourth

this is a photo of my mother when she was 18, and my father at the state fair in 1950

i was born the third child of six. there was two boys and four girls. now, i am the 4th child of seven.

you will never figure it out, so i will have to tell you the answer to the question that you are thinking. i can hear you.
"how did that happen? she cannot be the 4th child of seven. she just said she was the third child. you do not move to the 4th when another child comes into the family."

well, this time, you do.

many, many moons ago, my parents were not married. my father had been married, and already had five children. my mother had been married and had one son, who was adopted by her parents, so she didn't have a son anymore, she had a brother instead. you may have figured this one out on your own, they were married, but not to each other.

ahhhhhhhhhhh, you see, i am from a strange world.

when my parents met, i do not really know. i do not know if my father was already divorced from his first wife, but my mother was divorced from her first husband. my father was 26 years older than my mother. he had one daughter that was also older than my mother, by one year. there were four girls and one boy in his first family.

are you with me?

now the story goes, as told to me by one of daddies first daughters, (lenora, she was his third daughter) mother and daddy had an illegitimate child somewhere back in the late 40's. that's the 1940's. it might have been 1950, but i am not really sure of the exact date. lenora said she went to the hospital to visit the baby. she was a teenager at the time. the nurse told her that the baby was born dead. the baby was three months premature and did not survive. lenora was not allowed to see the baby.

lenora told me that she did not believe this. that she believed that mom and daddy had given the baby away.

the summer of 1994, i became the 4th child of seven children. i received a phone call from a woman who told me she was my sister. we talked for hours. i do not remember the conversation, or if i believed her at that time. her name was louise.

the story louise told me was something like this:

"when i was born, they took me immediately from the hospital to the catholic orphanage. my adoptive mother was the nurse who helped to deliver me. i was very tiny because i was 3 months premature. i remained in the catholic orphange until i was 6 months old, then my mother adopted me. they also adopted a boy later. he was mean, but they loved him more. i could never do right by them because of my brother."

i had called my older sister, who now was not the oldest, and she said, "don't you remember mom talking about the baby that she had lost?"

um, no ramona, i don't remember that. if i had, do you think i would be asking you about this? there is another story on my feelings about ramona. someday i may write that one too.

louise led a life of abuse from her brother and her mother. she did say her father loved her and sometime before he died, he gave her the names of her real parents. she then did research and made calls to all the durbins in the area, where someone gave her my name and she called me.

by the time louise found us, both my mother and my father had already passed on. mom less than two years before. so i could not question either of them.

later the package with photos arrived at my home. any doubt i had that louise was not my sister was lifted. i was looking at photos in front of me which could have been of ramona, or my mother, or someone else in the family. photos of her daughter looked like photos of my daughter. this woman had to be my sister.

arrangements were made for me to meet her face to face. the week of easter in 1995, my at that time almost husband, myself, and my four children, drove from illinois to the farthest point of texas, almost mexico, to meet my sister.

when we arrived, it appeared no one was home. this was before we had cell phones, so no calls could be made to check. we knocked on the door with no answer. we walked around the house, finding no one, so we hung out in the yard, watching the cows in the pasture, waiting.

soon, i heard someone calling my name, and i turned from the fence. in the bright texas sun, i thought i was hallucinating. i had started to walk towards this woman who was calling my name, but i was dumfounded when i saw her face. my feet became frozen to the ground, and i could not even speak. i could only choke out a sob as this woman reached me and we grabbed each other in a hug.

who i saw coming towards me was my mother. the identical likness of her, except for my mothers long black hair. louise had thin, short black hair, but everything else was my mother. the stature of her body, her walk. the shape of her hands and the length of her fingers. the way she sat in a chair with her legs twisted up in a pretzel beneath her. when she held a cigarette, it was the same as mom.

finally i got over the shock of the first meeting. we were able to get past a past that we didn't have together. my family remained in texas for two weeks before we returned home, but i knew when i left, i was no longer the third born in the family. i was now the exact center.