Half-Brother

“I guess it wasn’t too unusual for an only child, but still it bordered on obsession.”  From the time I could talk I would ask my mother for a baby brother.  In the early 1950s in Montevideo, Uruguay one of the ways to deflect discussions about where babies come from was to tell young kids that mail-order like, babies come “from Paris.”  So, I would ask if my baby brother had come from Paris yet. I was really insistent about this point.  “What about a baby sister?” people would ask.  “No, a brother,” I would demand.  A few years after my mother was divorced from my biological father who had deserted us when I was an infant, she married Fred Kuhner who I immediately called my real father.  We moved to a house in an area called Carrasco, Uruguay, and at age 4 I started school.  Senora Gonzales was a particularly beloved teacher.  While the other kids took naps on floor mats I helped her sort materials.  If anyone awoke upset or fearful I would run to their side to talk to them and make them feel better.  Nap time was my favorite part of the day.  Sometimes during that time I would be allowed to wander down the hall to the school library.  That’s where I saw it—evidence that my parents were totally ignorant about conception and birth.
“Senora Gonzales! Look, look what I found!” I called to her in as controlled a whisper-yell as my young mouth could produce. “You need to tell me the absolute truth.  Do babies really come from Paris?”  Well, dear readers, she felt she had no choice.  The book detailed a lot and she knew I was desperate for facts.  So she explained, in what I imagine must have been rather ambiguous terms, how pregnancy happens.  Apparently I was not shocked about the process—but I was shocked at my parents’ lack of information.
“She called us from the school before you came home.  She warned us about what had happened,” my mother told me years later.  “You came in the house, threw down your sweater and demanded that your father and I sit down in the living room the instant he came home.  Then you went to your room and slammed the door shut.  Slammed it. I couldn’t imagine what was next.  I called your father to warn him and we decided what our approach would be with this situation.  But I underestimated you.”  She sighed.  She always sighed when she told this story and always emphasized how she underestimated me.   I’d heard it many, many times throughout my life, but the last time she told it was in 2001, three years before she died. Then it became different.
But now  she continued the often-told story, “When your father came home and we settled ourselves on the sofa I called to you that we were ready.   You came out of the bedroom with a book, some paper, and some pencils.  There was barely controlled anger and disappointment in your face.  You were always such a sunny child that this took us by surprise.  And then, putting the writing materials in front of us, you began your lesson.  ‘Babies do not come from Paris.  You have been doing things all wrong.  You have wasted letter after letter sending for a baby.  Let me show you what needs to happen.’ And then you began drawing and explaining.” At this point she always stopped because embarrassed laughter would overtake her and anyone else listening.  She then continued, “You asked us if we had any questions.  When we shook our heads with a ‘no’, you said you expected that this knowledge would lead to a baby brother, and you pivoted and marched resolutely back to your room.” 
When my own daughter was 3 years old, in 1981, my mother was visiting us during a particularly cold day in February, and she once again over tea and cake told the story.   I then asked a question that had not occurred to me before.  “Mom, when did I give up this quest for a brother?  I must have given up at some point.”  “Well,” she began, “it was really very strange.  For most birthdays or holidays when asked what you wished for you’d say a baby brother.  But several days before you turned 6, you asked for something else.  It was odd.  ‘You don’t want a baby brother anymore?’ I asked you.  And you answered in the strangest, most eerie way, ‘No, I don’t need to ask anymore because he’s already born.’  So strange, Sylvia.  So strange. But then, children say such strange things.”  My mother and I laughed about this as we sipped some tea and watched my daughter, her granddaughter, play with dolls.
Twenty years later, to the day, (pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-easy international communications) my half-brother who—completely unbeknownst to me—searched for me most of his life, contacted me.  He was currently living with his wife and three young children in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he was born on January 21st in 1956—one week before my 6th birthday.

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