I Wear the Face of a Woman I Will Never Meet

My grandmother’s name was Opal and I look just like her. I didn’t know who she was or that I was her granddaughter until about a year ago. My mother had woven a story for me when I was growing up that I had mistaken for truth. 

She told me a man she’d dated in high school was my father and I had no reason not to believe her. For a while we lived with that man’s father, before drifting from here to there and then my mother got married and kept the man I believed to be my father, and his family, at an arm’s length. As I got older I watched that  distance grow. My mother didn’t share her part in that dynamic, and used their disappearance to reinforce the narrative that she was the only one in my life who would always be there. The only one who really loved me. 

About five years ago, my chosen grandmother, my Nannie, gave me a letter near the end of her life. It was a notarized document my mother had given her in the ‘90s before going on vacation. My mother gave it to Nannie in case something were to happen to her. So the truth would be documented somewhere.

In the letter my mother disclosed that the man she claimed was my father, was not in fact my father. She named another man. A man whose name was foreign to me, and who I had no idea how to find. 

Last year through the marvel that is the internet, more specifically 23 and me, I found a first cousin who wasn’t a maternal relative (as far as I knew). I shared the name of the man from my mother’s letter with this long lost cousin and learned that it belonged to his uncle. 

It turned out that though my paternal family was a mystery to me, I was not a mystery to them. The man shared letters my mother had sent him throughout my childhood. Updates on how I was doing in school. Her current relationship and how her jealous partners made it impossible for her to manage phone calls. She wrote about how clingy I was. How burdensome. How soft despite her best efforts to raise me otherwise. There were years of correspondence. 

I learned that my grandparents kept pictures of me on the mantel in their home. Versions of me frozen in time from toddler years and grade school. And then the man sent me photos of her

Opal T.

My cheekbones. The slope of my nose. My smile. I found all of them in my grandmother’s face.

After learning about the father I never knew to seek, the relatives I had not known I was missing, I didn’t know how I felt. There were so many emotions brushing up against each other, it was hard to feel anything sometimes. But looking at my grandmother’s picture, one rose to the surface. Grief. 

Grief for the relationships I would never have. Grief for who I might have been with this additional knowledge of myself. Grief for the love I hadn’t known was covering me.  

Especially that last one. There were a lot of things I grew up feeling an absence of. Love was first on that list. I wonder if I can apply this love retroactively. Sprinkle my younger self with the care of a grandmother she’ll never know. Will she feel it? I wonder if I can feel it. I am trying to.

When I look in the mirror now, I see Opal T. I also see my mother. Her mother. My aunt. My daughters. So many women in my face. Each one adding another layer and dimension to this woman I am becoming. 

Here are some questions I have asked myself that maybe you might like to ask yourself too:

• Who do I see when I look in the mirror?

• What am I doing to strengthen the bonds I have chosen?

• How can I embrace all the parts of myself, even the parts that are cloaked in mystery?

See you again soon.