One birth story about my mother is heavily contested. In fact, nobody in our family subscribes to it except my Great-Aunt Isabel. In Isabel’s story, she had an affair with my grandfather; gave birth to my mother, their love child; and then gave her to my grandmother and vowed never to tell. As far as I know she told no one but my mother, sending my mother monthly letters until she died in the late Nineties in either a convalescent home or a mental hospital. She had no insurance so each of her siblings, my grandmother included, had to pay for her funeral expenses. My grandmother was convinced she did this on purpose, as one final jab at her. I didn’t meet Isabel until two years before her death, when she showed up at a family reunion in Arkansas and hugged me like I hadn’t just met her. I remember she had two black children with her, whom she said she’d recently adopted. They both had runny noses. That was when my mother told me her birth story.
Just added to All You Need to Know