Andrew Solomon (28:34)
So it's fall 1995 and I'm a junior at Carolina Chapel Hill, and it's towards the end of the fall semester and I haven't talked to my mom since the summer. Now, now, it's important that you understand that my mom is a holy terror. Holy in the sense that she never dated, she went to church a lot and she believed that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child. Terror in the sense that she never spared the rod or the belt or her fists or even her tongue. In fact, I call my mom the verbal assassin. She could find your emotional weaknesses and hit it with laser like precision. It's not an exaggeration to say that my mom found a reason to lash out almost every day and my heart would pound whenever I'd hear a key in the door. I was afraid of my mother and I thought about the time where I would be able to escape and be free of all of that. So it's a few days before the start of my junior year and my mom's temper has flared up again. And this time she decided not to spear the cortlets up against my head. So I remember her telling me that I'm going to beat some sense into you. And this time it worked. Something changed. I have to say that when you don't feel loved, it's easy to leave. Plus, I had money in my pocket. I was a paid intern. Yes, those used to exist. I Was a paid intern, and I had just gotten my final paycheck, plus a surprise bonus, plus money that all my colleagues gathered to send me back to school. And I had enough money to stay in a hotel for the next couple of nights, which is what I did. And then the third day, I woke up. I rented a U haul, and I waited for my mom to go to church and crept like a thief in the night back into her place to gather all of my things, pack up my truck, and hit the road. I felt so free, Like I had escaped, you know? And so I'm riding to Chapel Hill, and I get there, and it's my junior year. And so towards the end of that semester, I started thinking about my mom more, you know, not giving her my phone number or my address. And whenever I talk to my friends and tell them about what I've been through with my mom, they either get angry or they cry with me. But inevitably, they'd all say, you only have one mother. You only have one mother. So one random weekend, I caught a ride with a friend, and I went home to spend time with mine. And that evening, I was there. The phone rang, and I picked it up, which I almost never did. And there was a young guy on the other end of the line who asked to speak to my mom. And when I asked him who he was, he said, I. I'm an old friend of your mother. Now, I told you, my mom never dated. And I was pretty sure I knew all of her friends, so I was a little suspicious of this guy. And then I handed my mom the phone, and she took the cordless into the bathroom, where she stayed for over three hours. When she came out, I was curious. I had to know what was going on. So I said, who's that? Why is he calling? And. And she told me that that young man was my brother. I was shocked. And I listened to my mom confess. You know, she'd been this vibrant woman, this outgoing belle of the ball. She had friends, she liked to hang out. She. She was thoughtful and compassionate. And she was pregnant. An unwed mother. Now, I come from a family of teachers, and they were well respected and well known in the community. And my mom didn't want to bring shame to the family name. So she decided to go two and a half hours up the road to UNC hospitals and have my brother before handing him over to a nurse, never to see him again. And this was the first time my brother chose to reach out to my mom. And I'm sitting there, and I'm Listening to my mom confess and talk to me for the first time in a way she's never talked to me before, she's confiding in me. And I couldn't help but think that if I hadn't chosen this weekend to go home, if I hadn't intercepted the call, I never would have known this. Well, my mom and I united because we wanted to know so much about my brother. You know, he'd done all of this research, and he knew so much about us, but we knew nothing about him. All we knew was that his first name was John, and he wouldn't tell us his last name, which kind of confused me, because I thought, if you go through all of this trouble to find your family, wouldn't you want to tell them about your life, too? And so, as it turns out, my brother issued what I can only imagine was a test of our commitment. A scavenger hunt. He was a med school student and had recently written an article for this medical publication, New England Medical Journal, and said, if you find this, then you'll know who I am. So my mom and I were working together. We went to the public library, and after a little due diligence, we found the article, and we found my brother. So we were so excited, we called him, eager to let him know that we passed the test. And so, eventually, we met face to face, Christmas 1995. He looked just like my mother. There was no denying him. And the more we talked, the more I realized that, oh, my gosh, we have so much in common. It was like there was never a point where I didn't know him. You know, we're both curious. We ask a lot of questions. We're both kind of goofy. We have a similar laugh, a warped sense of humor. We both graduated from unc. We're both into the arts. We had so much in common. And as my brother continued talking, I realized that we were also living parallel lives. My brother grew up in Charlotte, miles away from where I grew up. His parents knew my grandparents. My brother was a student in my grandfather, his biological grandfather's class. There was so much that we had in common, and all I could think about was the fact that he was trying so hard to find us. And then he goes on to tell us about how he always felt adopted, like there was something that was missing, you know? And when he confided in his mother his suspicions, she confirmed that, yes, he had been adopted. And she told him why they chose him and that she would always be his mother and she would always love him. And I have to say, I felt a little ashamed because I'm listening to this story, and I cannot help that jealousy and a little bit of sorrow is seeping in. You know, I'm listening to my brother tell me about how much his parents loved him, and yet I never felt that way with my biological mom. He worked so hard to find us because he felt like there was something missing. And yet I would have given anything to be in his shoes. I would have given anything to have been the one who was adopted. And then I started to feel empathy for my mom. You know, my brother was in his late 20s. He was a med school student. He had loving parents. My mother could no longer be his mother, but I could always be his sister. And I started wondering about how life would have been different if she kept him. You know, I was thinking that maybe he could have protected me from her rage. Or better yet, maybe my mom wouldn't have been so unhappy if she didn't have the weight of this horrible secret bearing down on her soul. My brother and I continue to talk, and I also make an effort to continue reaching out to my mother. It's hard. It can be tense. But I love her and I know she loves me. She's not the one I turn to, however, when I'm facing challenging situations. Back in 2010, I was going through a divorce, and it was difficult. I was trying to determine where I was going to spend my first Christmas alone. You know, I wanted to be with family. I wanted to feel safe and loved. And so I hopped in my car and I drove down to Florida to be with my brother, because that's what he is. Family. Thank you.
