Today is the 25th anniversary of a special phone call I received that forever changed the course of my life. Thinking about that singular moment reminded me of this piece, about the importance of family in whatever forms it appears, from the 2014 archives of Running the Campus:
T’s Family Tree
I love stories.
I love hearing them, and I love telling them. These weekly emails, as I explained when I started them a few years ago, owe a lot to one of my favorite storytellers, Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion stories.
More recently, like a lot of you, I’ve enjoyed listening to the Moth Radio Hour podcasts, and even trekked down to Somerville not long ago to catch a live Moth “Story Slam.”
So, I was very happy a few months back to discover that the Actors Studio in the Newburyport Tannery had begun hosting our very own local “Full Moon Story Slam.”
A story slam is a competition for storytellers. You get five minutes to come up with the best story you can tell on the theme for the evening—topics like “Overdue”, “Fear”, and “Lies Our Parents Told Us.”
Last Sunday, I joined a bunch of other local storytellers on stage at the Firehouse Theatre in Newburyport to spin yarns about “Why We Came, Why We Stay,” and this is the tale I told:
Big Sis T is 14 years old now, and a freshman in high school. Sensibly enough, she recently decided it was time to remodel her bedroom. The beaded curtain across the door, “Pop Princess” stickers on the wall, and piles of stuffed animals on the toy box were all pieces of her childhood that she still adores—but was ready to see packed away in memory boxes in the attic in favor of something that better suits the style of the young lady she is becoming.
What she came up with is amazing and may end up on the pages of some home fashion magazine one day: carpeted platforms and stairs with a recessed bed; remote control, LED-lighted, custom-built shelves; and linens and light fixtures inspired by flower petals, all in fourteen shades of blue.
But the centerpiece is the most amazing thing of all: One entire wall is covered by a stylized “family tree,” painted on the wall, with framed pictures of generations of family members hanging from the branches.
Now, if you’ve ever tried to create a family tree, you probably started with a trunk representing a pair of great-great-great-grandparents decades ago, with some kind of orderly branches forking off in each direction, representing generations of marriages and children, all the way out to the farthest leaves on the top, which were probably you (or your kids).
Well, when Big Sis sat down to figure out her family tree, she quickly discovered that just wasn’t going to work for her. The story of Big Sis T’s family tree is a big part of the story of why I came here, and why I have stayed.
And it began 14 years ago tonight.
I was born about an hour and a half from here, in Worcester, Massachusetts. My parents were young—teenagers—and not ready to raise me, so they made a difficult but responsible choice, and put me up for adoption.
I lived with a foster family in Worcester for a while. Records of adoptions and foster families from those days were more private or sealed, so growing up I never knew their names. My foster mother kept a short journal about me, so I have some idea of the kinds of baby food I enjoyed, and when I took my first steps. I know I had five foster brothers and sisters, and I have a card from all of them for my first birthday—but the names are actually cut out.
When I turned two, I was adopted by the parents who raised me: Raymond and Judy Glenn.
Their story is one that may sound familiar to some of you: They wanted to have children, and had been trying for a while. But after a series of heartbreaking miscarriages, they decided to adopt. Then, less than a year later, they had a healthy baby girl, my sister, Nikky.
Dad was in the Marines, and we traveled around a lot, living on both coasts and up and down the middle, moving every couple of years. For most of my young life, family to me was Mom, Dad, and Nikky.
I always knew I was adopted. They told me when I was very young—but I loved my small family, and although I was curious from time to time about who my birth parents may have been, and what my foster family may have been like, growing up, I never felt the need to go looking for them.
And then, in my twenties, my parents moved down south to Houston, Texas, and I moved up north to Michigan for graduate school and got married.
My wife was Armenian, and she had a large family and “extended family” near Detroit, where we lived, who welcomed me in with open arms. If you’ve seen the movie “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding,” it was a lot like that: Quiet young man from the Midwest marries into quirky, raucous Middle Eastern clan.
The only difference was that instead of running a restaurant and spraying Windex everywhere, my new father-in-law was a loud, fun-loving attorney who wore colorful ultra-suede sport jackets and reminded everyone of Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinnie.”
All was going along as it should, and then, a few years later, Big Sis T was born.
Just before her arrival, my wife turned to me and said, “Just think, any day now, you’re going to meet your first relative.”
I had never thought about it that way. My relatives, as far as I was concerned, were Mom, Dad, and Nikky.
But that idea struck me—my first actual relative—and for the first time in my life, I really wanted to know more about my birth family.
So, a few months after Thomasina was born in June of 2000, I contacted the adoption agency and asked for their help finding my birth mother and father.
Just before Christmas—in fact it was exactly 14 years ago tonight—I received a call from Children’s Friend, telling me they had found my birth father through his alumni office at Worcester Polytechnic University. He lived in Maine, and knew how to reach my birth mother, who lived in New Hampshire.
And oh, by the way, I also had a full brother I never knew about.
As it turned out, my young parents stayed together, married, had another son four years after I was born, then later divorced and each remarried.
So, you can see how this family tree of Big Sis T’s got complicated very quickly.
Thanks to adoptions, divorces, and remarriages, by the time Little Sis Z was born in 2004, my children had eight living grandparents (the doorbell never stopped ringing at Christmastime with presents arriving for the kids).
After spending the first half of my life knowing only a very small family, then joining someone else’s family for a while, suddenly I had my own sprawling tribe—and it was great fun getting to know them.
My brother, Adam, builds timber frame houses and is an adventure skier out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
My birth father, Doug, had remarried a woman younger than him, and had two more children, my sister, Avanelle, and my brother, Mitchell, both twenty years younger than me.
My birth mother, Lisa, had remarried my brother’s Little League Baseball coach. He had two sons from two previous marriages, my stepbrothers, Ian and Gabriel.
Ian is a photographer and world traveler who met a South African woman named Mmatjatji at a Peace Conference in Johannesburg, where they live now.
Gabriel is engaged to a woman from Uruguay, and together they have run a popular restaurant in Cambridge.
And the list goes on with more aunts, uncles, in-laws, cousins, second cousins twice removed, and dozens of relatives we never knew we had.
By 2005 when the time came for me to change jobs, we were living in Michigan. Several members of the Detroit Armenian crew had moved or passed away, and my wife’s parents had settled on Cape Cod. And, not too far away from them here in New England, were my new relatives—the Carlsons, Rileys, Edelsteins, Bremers, Rogers, and Eilenbergers—so this is where we set our sights.
For the last eight years, I have lived in Amesbury, worked in Haverhill and Lawrence, and played in Newburyport, Boston, and all across Maine and New Hampshire.
I’ve learned to ski—and am almost as good at it as my daughters.
I am engaged to be married again—to a wonderful Haverhill girl.
We see this new family of ours—grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, and cousins—all the time. Although it’s been 14 years tonight, it feels like we’ve been together our whole lives.
My mother, the one who raised me, passed away earlier this year, but she had visited me in New England several times, and was happy for me, because I found a place that felt so much like home to me.
And Mom was right: My life has come full circle, and this has been a homecoming for me. I came back, and I stayed, for family.
My daughter, T, like all of us, has faced her share of family ups and downs. Marriages, births, adoptions, and new job opportunities have brought parts of her family together; while divorces, deaths, and departures have split other pieces apart.
There has been great happiness, and considerable sadness. And I marvel at the curious and graceful way she takes it all in and paints it on her wall: This family tree with roots in Massachusetts, and branches all over the world.
