She Called Her Joy : A Sister Lost and Found
Tamela Georgi
“ I hope the old guy doesn ’ t have a shotgun .”
I ’ m sitting in the car with my sister in a strange driveway . I ’ m about to confront a stranger about his love affair with my mother that resulted in a child , a girl my mother gave up for adoption over seventy years ago .
The journey began when I got my DNA tested . Like a lot of people , I wanted to know my ethnic mix . That done , I soon got a close-relative match , a woman I ’ ll call Lane . But she didn ’ t appear on any branch of my family tree . Who are you ? I emailed . She couldn ’ t tell me . She was adopted .
“ This is truly as close as I have got to actual family ,” she wrote .
What would it be like not knowing who your people were ? This connection to me was the first contact in her life to a blood relative . I had to help her .
My mother , the family historian , couldn ’ t help . She had dementia .
At this moment she lay in a hospital bed as we scrambled to find long-term care for her . We ’ d lost our dad a few years before and I ’ d just uprooted myself , my semi-retired husband , and two reluctant cats to move across the country to help . I ’ d only been home for occasional visits over the past several decades .
My mother might have forgotten a lot of things , but she remembered that she was furious with me for some reason I would never know . It made our time together challenging , to say the least . And now this . A mystery relative . Who was she ? All I had to go on was a vague family rumour . But one clue led to another , and then another .
It was the Second World War . My mother left home at 14 to help support a large family of brothers and sisters . Then , at 17 , she fell in love with a boy with eyes as blue as the sapphires in an Indiana Jones statue .
And now as I waited in his driveway , I realized he might not even know he had a baby girl seventy years ago — my sister , who was hidden from all of us .
It was time to uncover the rest of the story . My story . Lane ’ s story . No more secrets .
I got out of the car and made my way to the house of the boy with the blue , blue eyes .
Tamela Georgi and her retired teacher husband moved across the country to care for her mother but have returned to Alberta . Tamela doesn ’ t think she ’ ll ever retire from writing .
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