Dedicated to my Mema
So this is my valentine’s story, and it’s a good one… It’s the ultimate love story. And it’s totally true.
Mema is Southern for Grandmother. My Mema was Birmingham genteel. She was raised on the Bible and Southern Charm. She never uttered a curse word in her entire life. She never raised her voice at my dad… ever. Was it prayer, or was it Valium that inspired her undying patience? Perhaps it was both. It was the fifties, and the distinction had yet to be made between pharmacy and the divine. Mema was, oh so fittingly, born on Valentines Day; kissed by cupid on the day of her birth. She was a beautiful woman with fair skin and dark hair in pin-curled waves and pleated skirts like June Cleaver. Her inner beauty radiated, as she shone grace and wisdom and strength.
The beginning of the story for me is really the end of the story, so try to follow along as I skip decades… For my sixteenth birthday, Mema gave me a ring that was made from the diamonds of her original wedding ring. My sister received the same, from Mema’s twentieth anniversary set. “One day you’ll know just how special you are to me.” I can still hear her honey-sweet voice as she made this promise to my sister and I. We were touched, and so grateful.
Six months after my sixteenth birthday, we were faced with the tragic news that Mema was dying of cancer. She came home with hospice, and spent her last days in the house that she and my Gan (Southern variant for Grandpa) had built in Saint Petersburg, Florida after he came home from the war in 1948. We went through the family relics and jewelry and pictures that the house held like a buried treasure, bringing closure to a life of faith and love. And then one day, my mother came across a little document box sitting alone on a closet shelf. It contained the birth certificate for a boy named William Geoffrey who had been born on the same day as my dad. I’ll never forget this moment of truth that we stumbled upon in my grandmother’s room. All the while she lay in a hospital bed in the next room praying that we’d find her out and bring this secret to light.
Let’s flash back to December 22nd, 1954, the day my dad was born. He was the illegitimate son of a daughter of a deacon in the Episcopal Church. Like many girls of her time, when she fell pregnant she went away to a group home to deliver and surrender the child for adoption. My dad was born with water on the brain. The doctors assessed him and concluded that he would not be long on this earth.
On December 26, one day after Christmas, social services brought my dad to a foster home, with the instructions to ‘keep him comfortable’ because he wasn’t going to live for very long. Well, we already know Mema was kind and compassionate and beautiful. Let’s add ‘foster parent’ to the bill just in case you doubted all the accolades I’ve been throwing her. Mema kept foster children intermittently for several years, until the day my dad was brought to her doorstep. Mema recounted, “I took one look in his eyes, and I fell in love with him.” She named him Timmy, after Tiny Tim, given he was sick and it was Christmas. Then she secretly took him to the pediatrician, against the directions of social services. Together, they saved my dad’s life.
**Tangent interesting point: this same pediatrician cared for my sister and I our entire childhood as well.**
Social services took notice that my dad survived, and promptly came to collect him for permanent placement. Mema and my dad were already quite attached, and she couldn’t give him up. So she told the authorities that she was pretty sure he was developmentally delayed and thereby un-adoptable (by 1950’s standards in Florida, mind you). And so it went with Mema and my dad for the next five years. Social services would come to pick him up every three months, and Mema would tell them he was mentally slow. After five years of this (that would be approximately 20 visits from Social Services), someone at the agency finally caught on. They picked up my dad and took him in for IQ testing, and my dad was pretty intelligent – even at 5.
Mema was faced with losing her son, Timmy, as foster parents by legal agreement were not permitted to adopt. She and Gan went to court and appealed for custody. When the judge asked my Mema why they should let her adopt, she explained, with tears in her eyes, “He’s my son.” And so Dad was adopted when he was six years old. Mema and Gan asked Timmy what he’d like his middle name to be, to which he replied, “Elvis.” They in turn suggested Jeffrey, the name his birth mother had given him. And so they raised Timmy Jeffrey as their own, in Saint Petersburg, FL, in 1960’s suburbia. They saved his life and gave him a family and a home.
Of course, it was the South of yesteryear, and don’t ask - don’t tell was the modus operandi for dealing with all uncomfortable situations, and as my dad never asked ‘am I adopted?’ no one ever told him. Mema was looking for the right time to tell him, and never really found the right time, until we found his adoption papers in a little box on a shelf in her closet in 1994.
It was pretty dramatic when we told my dad he was adopted. These are the stories the Oprah Winfrey Show is built upon. My dad, then forty years old, stood crying, lamenting to me, “I have no idea what to even say to her…”
“Well, you could probably say ‘thank you’.” I thought it was a good start.
And so we went to Mema’s house and sat by her hospital bed while she told us the story of my Dad as a baby, and our pediatrician, and adoption and true love. She told my sister and me that this was the reason she had given us her wedding diamonds. She wanted us to always know just how special we are to her.
I remember feeling sad when I realized she wasn’t my biological grandmother, because I felt as though I’d never be as beautiful as she was. But she’s still alive in my heart and soul, and even though I’ve grown into a naughty nurse with a mouth like a sailor and a feisty sense of resolve and a penchant for trouble, she’s still inside me. I’m forever grateful.
And so my valentine’s tradition doesn’t involved chocolate or roses. I tell this story to someone new every year, and spread a little bit of love and grace in celebration of Mema’s Birthday.
