Carried

I’ve always known I was adopted.

But in 1963, at age ten, headed home from a summer vacation at my grandmother’s farm, I learned, for the first time, I had another name when I was born. Here’s the story.

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At the end of August, we’re headed home from Virginia on the new interstate, but it’s still five hundred miles in our maroon Ford station wagon with no air-conditioning. We leave the Blue Ridge Mountains, climb through Pennsylvania coal country, cross the mighty Susquehanna, and stop at a gas station in Port Jervis. I’m lounging in the way back in a nest of luggage when my dad gets out and talks to the gas station attendant who pumps our gas, checks the oil, and washes our windshield with a squeegee.

My mom gets out too, herds me and my brother to the grimy gas station office and obtains the keys to the restrooms. We walk around the side of the building and my mom unlocks the one toilet Ladies room. I go first while she hands my brother, still sleepy, his cheek imprinted with the pattern of the vinyl back seat, the key to the men’s room.

There’s only two and a half years between us, but I’ve always known I was adopted as a nine-month-old baby, he as an instant four-year-old. I envision my parents adding water to a package of sea monkeys and voila, Bruce. We look nothing alike. I’m a strawberry blonde. His hair is dark brown and curly. Because his skin never burns, he calls it fire-proof.

I carefully place toilet paper on the seat before tinkling, and a thought pops into my head. When my brother was adopted, he was already Bruce. He got to keep his name and the red tricycle he had at the foster home. I’m named after my memaw, whose real name is Annie. I must have had a different name when I was born. Surely, I wasn’t baby X for nine months.

I explode from the rest room, “Did I have a different name when I was a baby?” The question pushes itself out of my mouth before I understand all I’m asking.

My mother hands me a stick of Teaberry gum, snaps her purse shut and says, “Yes, do you want to know what it was?”

Something about her face makes me slow down. When we’re all done with the restrooms, I let Bruce beat me to the way back, so I can sit in the back seat closer to my mom.

As my dad starts the engine, I realize there’s more to a name than just the name; it’s everything behind it. What does it mean if my name is Darlene or Lulu? What kind of parent names their kid Denise or Ermintrude? What if my real mom is mean like Mrs. McGinty, the playground supervisor? What if she has a moustache or wears a hairnet like the cafeteria ladies? What if my real dad has a temper like Bill the bus driver who tells us kids to sit down and shut up or we’re going to be penalized, a word that sounds an awful lot like one I know you’re not supposed to say?

Still, “Yes, I want to know my name,” comes out of my mouth. Instinctively I want my mom to tell me I’m a long, lost princess like Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia, an old movie I watched on TV with my Dad.

But before my mind can fully prepare for a former identity, she says, “Your name was Leslie.”

“Leslie,” I voice my long-lost name, the l’s curling off my tongue like a melody.

“Do you want to know more?”

I swallow and nod.

“Your mom was petite like you, and you have your dad’s coloring. Do you want to know more?”

I nod again, mesmerized by facts only now crystalized.

“They met in college.”  She continues. “He was an engineering student. She was a music major. They weren’t married, so they couldn’t keep you. Your father’s family was Irish Catholic, and your mother was from old New England stock. That’s all I know. Oh, and your grandmother was some sort of journalist.”

Old New England stock makes no sense to me. Stock is the broth my mom makes by boiling down beef bones and chicken carcasses. My mind moves on to Irish Catholic. All I know about Ireland is that’s where leprechauns live. Linda and Laura, my best friends, are Catholic. That’s why they can’t play on Wednesdays after school because they have to go to something called catechism.

Bruce interrupts my train of thought by asking about his parents.

My mom tells him, “Your mommy was very pretty. In fact, she was a model, but your daddy already had another family, so they couldn’t get married, and keep you. Your grandfather was a full-blooded American Indian who owned a hardware store.”

This last part, the Indian part, is what grabs my attention. I look at my brother in disbelief as if I’ve been living with Tonto, from The Lone Ranger, and no one thought to tell me. And I can’t picture Geronimo behind a hardware counter.

I cycle back to Memaw’s name, Ann. I lean over the front seat to ask my mom, “What does Ann mean?”

“It means grace.”

“Like a ballerina?”

“Yes, but also like an unexpected gift from God. Your other grandmother was named Grace because she was born after her older sister died as an infant.”

I sit back. “Do you know what Leslie means?”

My mom turns to face me. “Sorry, I don’t.”  She snaps her purse open and hands me a pad of paper and a dull pencil with a smeared eraser that won’t erase. “Why don’t you and Bruce play Hang Man.”

I draw the empty gallows and six blank spaces for the letters of my secret word.

My brother looks over my shoulder and guesses the vowels one by one. I write an E in the second and final spaces and an I in the next to last space. He tries a string of consonants before he’s swinging from the hangman’s noose.

When I fill in the blanks with Leslie, he says, “That’s not fair. It’s a name.”

He’s right, but I don’t care. It’s my name, and I needed to write it down, to try it on. Am I the same person under another name? My mom said she doesn’t know the meaning of Leslie, and neither do I.

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This is an excerpt of a memoir I’m working on that portrays how God has carried me since I was conceived and adopted me into a new identity in Christ solely by his grace.

“⁴ Even to your old age and gray hairs

    I am he, I am he who will sustain you.

I have made you and I will carry you;

    I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

Isaiah 46:4 NIV

Cover photo from Boston Public Library on Unsplash