Happy Birthday Nancy

Christmas Eve 1988, I was staying with my mom in NH, when she called my sister, Martha and I together. She had something to share. I don’t remember how she started or even if she was crying, but I will never forget her story. It was and continues to be one of the most important moments in my life.

The summer my mother turned 21, she discovered she was pregnant. She was a student at Keene State Teachers College in Keene, NH. After telling her parents, she was placed in a home for unwed mothers in Boston, Massachusetts. The twins were born on January 4, 1954 and they were put up for adoption. She named them Deborah and David. The next time she saw either of them was in 1988.

The night she told us, I laid awake for long time thinking about the twins and all that my mother had gone through. The panic, isolation, shame and heartbreak were still present and palatable as she talked about her pregnancy and their birth. I tried to put myself in her shoes. It must have been a hard time for her. The 1950’s was not a good era to be an unwed mother and it was an enormous secret she had been keeping. My father didn’t even know about them. To this day I have never been angry or upset with my Mother about the twins, confusion maybe, but not anger.

I met my sister for the first time in the early spring of 1989. They had been renamed by the couple who adopted them and her name was now Nancy. Nancy was a young mother at the time, so it was just her and her husband, Don that came. It was the start of something great. Over the years I have come to know her better. She is an awesome person. Nancy is also a mother, wife, writer, hiker, marathoner, and a pumpkin queen, but my favorite, a sister. She is more than I can write.

Twenty two years later I consider that Christmas Eve story to be the best Christmas present ever. Sam, my oldest, hiked with Nancy in the White Mountains two summers ago and when he came home he said he saw something in her that was me. That’s exactly it; there is something in her, which is me. We share genetics and a Mother and even though we didn’t grow up together, we are sisters; Nancy, Martha, and Anne. Happy Birthday Nancy. I love you. Thank you for finding us.