The room was silent.
I looked around at my seven children.
Seven.
I had entered that building believing she was a mother of six children.
At the age of eighty-nine I discovered that I had always been a mother of seven.
We finally lit my birthday candles.
No one cared that the food I had prepared at home was cold.
No one cared that the celebration was not as planned.
Someone found another chair.
Rebecca sat next to me.
And when everyone started singing, I couldn’t accompany them because I was crying too much.
For most of my life I thought one of my children had been taken from me by death.
Rebecca had spent almost all of hers believing that her mother had decided to turn her in.
We had both been crying the loss of someone still alive.
I’ll never get those seventy-two years back.
I still find it hard to accept what my mother did.
There are decisions that don’t get right simply because whoever made them believed that they were protecting you.
But that night something happened that I never thought would live long enough to experience.
I arrived at my 89th birthday waiting for six children.
When I returned home, there were seven phone numbers saved under “My Kids” on my phone.
And from that night, every time anyone says,
Maybe next month…
another responds immediately:s
