Page 12 of Not Since Ewe
“I don’t know, I’m sorry. You can ask him. I’m sure he’d love to tell you.”
“So he’s married?”
“Divorced, apparently.” I remembered Donal’s wife from our last reunion. She’d been dark-haired and curvy, with an easy smile and a bubbly personality. Basically the polar opposite of me. I’d avoided speaking to them, but I’d watched them from across the room. I hadn’t been able to help myself—I’d wanted to know what kind of woman he’d picked to settle down with and start a family.
Erin looked thoughtful as she sipped her tea. “I’ve never had a sibling before.”
“You’re an only child? Me too.” I hoped she’d volunteer more about her childhood and the family who’d raised her. Every atom in my body was starved for more information about her, but her guardedness made me reluctant to push too hard.
“Are your parents still alive?” she asked me instead.
I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak immediately. It wasn’t a simple question for me to answer. “My mother died about five years ago, but I hadn’t seen her for a long time before that. She left when I was a child and we didn’t have much contact.”
Erin digested this information in silence. The glaring parallel between my mother abandoning me and the way I’d abandoned Erin sat between us like a big, hairy mole no one wanted to acknowledge out loud.
Tucking my hair behind my ear, I pushed on. “My father remarried a few years after my mother left us. My stepmother and I…” Words failed me as I struggled to adequately describe our relationship. Her death was recent enough that it still hurt to talk about it. I’d been aching for Sherry’s advice and comfort ever since I’d first heard from Erin. “We were very close. She was like a mother to me…but she passed away nine months ago. My father’s still alive, but he has late-stage Alzheimer’s. He’s been living in a residential memory care facility for the last year.”
“I’m sorry,” Erin said quietly. Her expression was pensive, and I sensed disappointment in her. Perhaps she’d been hoping for more extended family.
I shared her disappointment. It seemed cruel that I’d effectively lost both my father and Sherry before Erin found me, and now they’d never be able to know each other.
I cleared my throat. “They would have loved to meet you. Sherry—my stepmother—she was in the delivery room when you were born. She would have been thrilled to see how beautiful you grew up to be.”
In a way, it had been my pregnancy that had brought Sherry and I together. Before that, I’d been wary of her and obstinately standoffish like teenagers are sometimes prone to be. But Sherry had stepped up in my time of need and supported me in a way my well-meaning father hadn’t been equipped to do.
Erin’s gaze dropped to the table, and she rubbed her fingers over her knuckles. “You said you were in high school when you got pregnant with me.”
“That’s right. It was our senior year.” In the emails we’d exchanged before today’s meeting, I’d only shared the essentials—that Erin’s birth father and I had been high school students, unprepared to be parents—without going into too much detail.
“Were your parents upset when they found out?”
“Mostly they were shocked—and pretty disappointed with me, although they tried to hide it. I was an honors student, only a few months away from heading off to college. I think they’d assumed I was too responsible to end up a pregnant teenager and blamed themselves for trusting me too much.”
Erin nodded, looking like she wanted to ask something else but was trying to work up the courage.
“You can ask me anything.” I smiled to show her how unbothered I was. “I promise to try and answer as honestly as I can.” It was the very least I could do for her. She’d reached out to me for answers, and I was here to give her whatever she wanted.
“Did they pressure you to give me up? Because they wanted you to go to college?”
She was basically offering me a “get out of jail free” card. An opportunity to shift responsibility onto my parents and their high expectations, absolving myself of at least some of the blame for my choice.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to take the out, though the momentary impulse made me ashamed. It wouldn’t be fair to my parents. It wouldn’t honor their memories to lay the blame at their feet for a decision I’d made myself.
Nor would it be fair to Erin. I’d promised her honesty, and that was what I owed her. Even if it was more painful for both of us.
“I made the decision on my own. My parents would have supported me no matter what.” I paused, trying to make my thoughts orderly. “I told myself that giving you up was the best thing for you, that you’d be better off with more mature, financially stable, married parents who wanted to have a child. But I also did it for selfish reasons. I didn’t want to be a teen mother. I wanted to go to college and have the life I’d been working so hard for.”
Erin nodded, and I wondered if she’d been hoping I’d say something else. She was staring down at her hands, rubbing her fingers over her knuckles again.
“I do that too,” I said, tipping my chin at her hands. “I rub my knuckles in the exact same way when I’m nervous.”
“Really?”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? How random little things like that are written into your DNA.”
She smiled faintly. “I wonder what else I inherited from you.”
“Hopefully not my crooked teeth. I had full headgear for most of middle school.”
