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Beneath the large Black Gum Tree in our front yard, the one whose roots made occasional appearances in the dirt of our Hot Wheels racetracks, my brother David twisted a tire swing around and around until my feet were high off the ground. While he twisted, he whispered to me that the two of us may not belong in this family. He came up with this theory that our real parents had been abducted by aliens because we seemed so different from everyone else in our household. I was inclined to believe him. If it had been my story, told today, I may lean toward he and I being the aliens dropped into this unsuspecting family, because we were two of a kind in a foreign land. 

We’d never been told that Mom had been married before, prior to meeting our father. Dad had been helping her raise the two black haired/brown eyed children, whose own father was M.I.A., a few years before David and I came along with our fair-haired English/Irish complexions. By the time I was born, our oldest sister Barbara was almost 12, brother Butch had just turned ten. David had only been scoping out the planet a short while and already had made a few discoveries he couldn’t wait to share, like different rules for different children or how some kids have extra sets of grandparents which translated to extra Christmas presents. I arrived two days after his third birthday and I like to believe he considered me a gift.

Dad held him up in the nursery window where I and some of my future classmates were displayed and asked him which baby he wanted. Born a few weeks late and weighing in at 10 pounds and 21 inches, I was born tall and old. David was in bad need of a compadre and I looked like I was off to a good running start. Even the doctor claimed he’d delivered a three-month old child!

“That big one,” David pointed. Out of a half dozen babies, he picked me!

“Okay, son,” Dad said. “I’ll have them wrap her up, so we can take her home.” For years, David believed it. He liked to remind me that he was the one who sprung me from the hospital and that he could also send me back. (I have since checked the roster for kids who would have been in that window at the same time, and I can say Thank You Brother D for not sending me home with any of their families. Shoo-Weee! Even if ours were abducted by aliens!) For his part, he was happy to have me deflect Barbara’s attention away from dressing him up like a girl.

Barbara was the age most girls are when they begin to pay attention to real babies, too old for dolls, too young for her own children. With two brothers she was primed and ready for another girl. In some ways it seemed I half-belonged to her. Whenever Mom had asked her help with David, she had used him as her dress up doll, putting him in a dress and painting round red circles on his cheeks, a bow in his hair. I was real, better than make believe, however short lived it was. She was over babies and children by the time our youngest addition, Angela, was born four years after me.

With Angela’s arrival we were a family of seven in a five-room house. We tripped over each other and shared every material thing. Besides clothing, sometimes even our thoughts were handed down. When it came to sleeping arrangements, we were divvied up along gender lines in small alcoves on opposite sides of the living room. Until I was six years old, I slept with our half-sister Barbara, while David was sequestered on the other side of the house in some arrangement which included a half-bed, a couch, and our half-brother, Butch. Angela, the baby, slept in a crib next to our parents in the only room with closing doors. 

The house was a 4-square. Every room had two doorways so that you could leave one room and enter another, then another and another until you returned to where you were originally. As children, we used this unending circle within the square to chase each other. On one corner of the square, a bathroom had been added where none existed before. On the opposite corner, a porch had been closed in for extra bed space.  

It was no secret Barbara wasn’t fond of children. Most of the time, David and I had the impression we were merely “tolerated” by both our older siblings. Barbara detested having any of our friends or younger cousins around. She complained and usually left the house before they arrived. Her bonding as a mother figure was strictly limited to me, and viable only at night when everyone else was asleep. She rarely had anything to do with me during the day and nothing for Angela.

Butch was a prankster. He liked to pick on his sisters, play ball, laugh and hang out with friends. Oh, and listen to oldies music on a stereo we were forbidden to touch. He was gone a lot. I snuck in his room (the boxed in porch area) and snooped and touched all the things while he was away so what I knew about him came from my observations more than actual interactions, until I was older. 

Although I shared a bed with Barbara, you could hardly call ours a bedroom. It was more like a glorified hallway on the way to the only bathroom in the house so that everyone had to walk right past our bed day or night. This invasion into her privacy, irritated the teenager who seemed to me had already grown up. Any privacy I would find in that household came from hiding behind a toy barrel in a very small shared closet, pretending it was my own room. I hid there for hours until someone realized I was missing and came looking for me. My late-night bonding with Barbara included her angelic voice singing my favorite songs and lightly running her fingers up and down my arms to relax me into slumber, a technique learned from our mother. She sometimes shared secrets with me which made me feel special. Sleeping in the bed with Barbara created a symbiotic emotional bond which tethered us until her death in 2013.

From the beginning, I knew too much for my own good without the words to understand anything at all. I know now I was soaking in the energy from those I loved. As an empath, I was sensitive and thoughtful and easily worried. David lightened my load by being responsibly caring and funny as hell. I could pretty much count on him to say what was on his mind. My vivid imagination happened only while I was asleep. During the day, I carried the burdens of my well-meaning and good parents’ unspoken and emphatically denied emotions and because they denied the truth, I came to believe I could not trust my own intuition–or my dreams (which I now know were trying to clue me in.) I became a lifelong seeker of truth without always believing it when I saw it. This was exhausting work and tamped down any creative or imaginative endeavors.

At the time of David’s tire twisting alien explanation, the one and only living grandparent that we all shared had recently died, leaving Mom in grief. Barbara had moved to college which in itself was an adjustment in sleeping arrangements if nothing else. Especially for me, losing my night-time security blanket. Further, Barbara had become a girl gone wild, lending to Mom’s despair and our parents were beside themselves with what to do about her. Mom cried all the time. It was 1968. Barbara was diving headlong into the hippy scene, free love, drinking, pot smoking, and mixed-race dating which led to a mixed-race marriage, which led to dropping out of college, which led to racial discussions, all topics that were not allowed in our household. Barbara was blazing a trail on which we would all be singed.

Butch, for me, was the stereotypical older brother who picked at me and chased me into the bathroom with his friend’s boa constrictor wrapped around his neck. But he was Barbara’s younger brother—Irish twins—only eighteen months between them yet they had never been close. Unlike the easy camaraderie between David and me, they were separate satellites orbiting our familial habitat, with occasional thunderous clashes. During our alien invasion period, words were spoken between them that would never be taken back. Yet, none of this was spoken out loud where children were supposed to hear it. What we overheard by accident must be surmised on our own and through our own lens, then added to the palpable tension in the room. Of course these people were abducted by aliens!

Mom was trying to wean me to sleep alone but I was having none of it. I was prone to nightmares and when I woke, I yelled for what seemed like hours for Mom to come to my bedside. In reality it might have taken a whole 3-5 minutes for her to make her soothing appearance and shush me from waking the whole house. She had to cover my windows with sheets and load my bed with stuffed animals for protection. I had also taken to sleep-walking, and went straight for the door, apparently trying to escape while the rest of the house slept. If I coaxed Mom to lie down beside me, I held her tight so I’d know if she tried to move. Poor Mom. With a two year old in tow, I doubt she ever got much sleep. Soon, she placed the backs of chairs against my bed so she would hear if I got out of bed. Instead of lying beside me when I called, she sat in one of the chairs so she wouldn’t get pinned down, still tracing her fingers across my back and arms until I drifted off.  A couple of times, David was dispatched to sleep in my room, probably to give Mom a break and before long my little sister Angela became my roommate and protege, thus shifting my role from little sister lost to big sister mentor. Angela was born into changing times. She and I shared quarters for the rest of our years in that house together but unfortunately, I would never be as good to her as David was to me.  

Those early nights with David made for good black op planning sessions. We utilized our best spy techniques, learned from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and pledged to watch, listen, learn and report back any alien activity. David was a keen observer and where I took everything to heart, he saw absurdity and was able to turn any situation into a great story or cartoon drawing, getting to the heart of the matter in a much healthier way than my rumination. We made a good team. I was his greatest fan and best (aka captive) audience. He made the jokes and I laughed.

I was the Robin to his Batman, the Tonto to his Lone Ranger. We were shoulder companions, forging through our world like superheroes with towels pinned to our shoulders, searching for clues. We fought invisible foes, pretending to be tied down on a conveyor belt, inching toward the doom of a sawblade. We’d borrowed this scenario from a real episode of Batman and Robin. To save ourselves, we used what we had on us, shoes. We took turns throwing a shoe toward the pre-designated shut off lever that would stop the saw and the conveyor belt. Our mark was one particular knob on a dresser drawer. If we missed the mark, we inched further toward the saw!

We founded a neighborhood club called The Eagle Eye Investigators. When the neighbors got involved, we sometimes chose sides, boys against girls and became each other’s temporary enemies but if things got too rough, I knew David always had my back. By the end it was always us against them. As big brothers go, he was the best, always including me in the fun and never outgrowing my presence or trying to get away from me when his friends were around. Except for when the aliens landed, we had an idealic childhood.

Somewhere along the line, I changed the narrative of the alien invasion to my being adopted. I felt things that I could never explain or put into words and had nobody to tell if I did. Sometimes I thought I must be crazy. Like a good investigator, I gathered my clues. They are as follows:

1. I was in the kitchen looking through the junk drawer and found a box of wooden matches and a candle. I loved the rough scratchy vibration of striking a match and the blue/yellow flame that followed with the sound of gasping breath. I lit the candle. Then, I took other matches and held them to the flame to watch the spontaneous burst. Mom came in and frantically took them away from me saying, “My children never play with matches!” Emphasis on MY!  ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘I must not be your child because clearly, I’m playing with matches.’
2. I questioned everything. I needed to know the why of things. Against the unspoken family rules, I wanted to know why Barbara and Butch had different last names. I wanted to know why there were different rules for different children. Why Barbara’s black husband wasn’t allowed to come to our house and why couldn’t we go visit them? I must have struck a nerve. Mom said, “You say things to me none of my other children would ever say,” then she cried, which was all it took to make me feel ashamed for ever having spoken my thoughts. I internalized a gasp of separation between us and it was all the proof I needed that I must not belong here!

With all my questioning, I did get some answers, stories about Mom’s earlier life that nobody else got. Even after we were grown David did not know the name of Mom’s other husband. I learned what a step-father was and heard words like alcoholic, abuse. While I was gathering fodder for future memoirs, David was busy making up stories of his own.

I eventually found proof enough of my birth to this family in the form of a baby spoon with my name etched on it. It was wrapped in a letter from IBM where Dad worked, congratulating him on the baby girl. I had been snooping through a portable file box left unlocked in the bottom of Dad’s closet. There I was, Donna Marie, though the baby spoon didn’t look like it had ever been used…hmmm. Even if David did pick the wrong baby, I decided to be glad he chose me and that we were in this adventure together.

About a year before both our parents died, Dad found a newspaper clipping with the names of all the babies born in the local hospital during my birth week listed with who their parents were. He gave it to me, “If you’re still looking for proof,” he said.

These days all I need for proof who my parents were is to look in the mirror.