Labor Day

Twenty-one years ago Labor Day weekend I met my big brother and his family for the first time. The brother I learned of at my mother’s death bed at an in-patient hospice facility in Houston. Lung cancer is not pretty. Her suffering was too prolonged, she wouldn’t let go. All that Lifetime-Movie-Channel-give-the-dying-permission-to-leave is bullshit. It didn’t work. A weary nurse told us she’d seen patients hang on because of “an unresolved life conflict.” Again I thought bullshit. But, it was true. A baby, a boy, born in 1953, before she met my father, was given up for adoption. “We will find him,” my sister and I promised our comatose mother. Did she hear us? She passed a few days later.

We found him, rather, my husband, Frank, found him. I think he felt a bond to him when he learned their birthdays were back to back. The only information we had was the date of birth, the hospital where he was born, and that my mother had named him John Anthony. We also learned that my mother and my Aunt Mary, upon learning my husband's date of birth and convoluted family history, grilled him mercilessly when I first brought him home to meet the family. Their worst nightmare: Was I engaged to marry my brother? Their furtive interrogation proved not.

Two years after my mother’s death my husband handed me a yellow legal pad with the information that led to my brother. I was ecstatic. I was also scared and nervous. Is this really him? Does he want to be found? Will he like us? Will we like him? I locked myself in the bathroom and dialed the number.  On the third try, in a voice not my own, I said to the woman who answered, “I have reason to believe your husband is my half-brother.” Then screams, all I heard on the other end of the telephone line were screams followed by “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, he’s going to be so happy.”

That’s how it began. Days later, on Labor Day weekend, John Anthony and family flew from California to Texas. My Daddy, who hadn’t even known we were searching for my mother’s son, was so happy he picked up the tab on everyone’s flights for this first reunion. What a time we had. I met them at the airport with a bouquet of blue balloons, one proclaiming “It’s a Boy.” Everyone at the gate assumed we had adopted a baby arriving on that flight. Word of the real story circulated and when John appeared he was met with applause. I couldn’t stop hugging him or touching him. I had to make sure he was real.

The first stop we made was at the home of our grandmother, our mother’s mother. John knocked on her door and when she opened she said, “I always knew this day would come, that one day you would knock on my door.”

I still find it heartbreaking that John never met our mother or that our mother never met her firstborn son. We inundated him with family over the next few days. My father, my younger siblings and their families arrived the next day, followed by an assortment of aunts, uncles and cousins all eager to meet and welcome our new family member.

Labor Day will always be a special holiday for me, unique in my interpretation of it. My mother labored to bring a child into the world at a time when “un-wed mothers” were a pariah, especially in the Irish Catholic culture in which she was raised. Knowing my mother, I am certain she labored everyday of the rest of her life thinking of him, wondering how and where he was. Hoping, yet also fearing, that he might one day knock at her door. And laboring to keep it all a secret from the children she raised with my father. My father, bless him, knew about John since before he married my mother. To him it was something in the past, once confessed never mentioned.

Twenty-one years after our first meeting my brother is as much a part of our lives as if we’d been raised together from birth. He’s simply my brother. I love him, he loves me. We have a history now, a bond that siblings share. It’s hard to imagine a time that he wasn’t a part of my world.

To me Labor Day is more like Christmas. I got the gift that truly never stops giving, this unforeseen gift bestowed as my mother left us. A gift I never got to thank her for, but I like to think she knows.