Going Back Home (published 10/05/20)

 Going Back Home

Until two years ago I had a certain story of my life.  An only child from middle to an upper-middle-class family.  Born and raised in Los Angeles.  Older parents than many of my friends. A Jewish mom from Romania that came to the United States in the mid-1920s and had minor acting roles in movies of the early 1930’s including Frankenstein in 1931. And,  a Baptist dad raised in Kansas City who came to California at about the time of the 1929 stock market crash and was briefly a professional golfer on tour in the very earliest days of the professional pro tour.  One grandmother (the rest were dead) who I spent much time with as a child and lots of uncles, aunts, and cousins from my dad’s side of the family and a lone aunt (actually the ex-wife on my mom’s brother) and a cousin, much older than I, from my mom’s side of the family.   Bar Mitzvah at thirteen after going to a secular Hebrew School.  Many moves as a child for no apparent reason to me but all in the same general part of the San Fernando Valley.  Four different grammar schools, but the same junior high and high schools.  I left the roost at 22 years old, moving to Sacramento.  My mom died a few years later, and my dad remarried to someone much more similar to him than was my mom.  They visited and were wonderful grandparents.  My dad died at age 89 and after that I too little contact with my dad’s second wife who I never really thought of as a step-mother given they did not get married until I was in my thirties and she and my dad were seventy.  I viewed myself as having “good genes” in terms of longevity, particularly with my dad’s family that I knew much more about.   Lots of details to each element of this basic story has been written and talked about.  I loved to write and tell stories about my family.  I’m registered at a Jewish Genologicial site to discover more about my mom and know almost everything about by dad’s family from an aunt that wrote books on every side of the grandparents and great-grandparents’ linage.  

But all that totally changed two years ago when I discovered that I was adopted at birth and that my adoption was kept a family secret.  That my mom and dad are not by biological parents but rather my adopted parents.  So the story of my life suddenly changed to a giant lie.  

The other day our daughter Rose asked why I had stopped writing on “Story Worth”, a website where stories of your life can be written for posterity.  Rose pointed out that I was really into the writing of my life on that website and that once I discovered my adoption story, that I just stopped.  This week’s writing cue really got me thinking about this

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”

Can I go back “home”?   Will my vision of my parents ever be what they were just two years ago?  They were my parents, my mom and dad.  But somehow I’ve lost interest in that part of my story.  The childhood family I had is somehow not real as the story I conjured up of my ancestry is not real.  Will I ever be able to go back to describing my parents and the stories as I had?  Just yesterday someone contacted me about my mom’s linage, “Solomon from Romania.”  I hardly paid any attention to the incoming email whereas several years ago I would have received it with glee.   It is my family, but it isn’t.  But I’m still closer to my childhood family than I will ever feel with my newly discovered family.  I learn about my new family without the same personal emotion I have with my mom and dad and my childhood but at the same time I can’t seem to “go back home”

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