Wake Up, Maggie, I Think I Got Something to Say to You

Wake Up, Maggie, I Think I Got Something to Say to You

          It was late September, 1978 and Steve really thought he should be back at school. He could collect his books and get on back to school. Or steal his daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool. Or find himself a rock ‘n’ roll band that needed a helping hand.  If that reminds you of Rod Stewart, it’s not coincidental.  I want to tell a story here about a life-changing experience that my friend Steve has just experienced, and I think you’ll see why I have this song stuck in my head like it was in 1971 when it came out and I was a freshman in college myself, trying to sort out girls and life and all the priorities of a young post-adolescent.

          Before I start, a tangential story took place for me in early 1994.  I got a call late one night from a man with a thick Hispanic accent.  He told me he was my brother, but I had no brother that I knew of.  I had heard tales that my father had married a woman in Mexico City in 1970 and that there had been a child, but that was all. Now I was being told that he had had a son and he was calling to connect with me.  Our father had died several months prior and this young man was on a roots expedition and was heading to New York soon on business.  He wanted to meet me and needed to understand how a man could have a son and never want or bother to see or meet him.  I took the time to meet him and given that I was almost twenty years his senior and thus his much older brother, I reassured him that it was not about him, but rather about the father that had little room in his heart for all the children he had sired.  I have two sisters and three groupings of half-siblings from our father’s prolific ways and they all have some size and shape hole in their hearts over his absence from their lives.

          In early 2019, Steve got a call from his cousin Roger.  He and Roger were close, so Roger went right at the issue head-on. He had received an email from a young woman in Minnesota (their family home state) that had developed a relationship with Roger’s daughter over several weeks.  This young woman had taken a DNA test with one of the genetic ancestry services and had found that she and Roger’s daughter showed up as cousins.  After establishing a rapport with the daughter, she went on to ask if Roger was cousins with Steve.  Based on an affirmative reply to that, she emailed Roger to explain that she had discovered through the DNA testing that her birth father was Steve and that she wanted to reach out to him to meet him, but had some trepidation in doing so.  Could Roger help?  Roger ended the call by saying he would forward the email to Steve and that he hoped Steve would seize the opportunity to reach out to the woman.

          This is where I imagine Steve’s wife of thirty-eight years, Maggie, napping next to him on the sofa and Steve saying, “Wake-up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you.”

          Steve had spent the summer of 1978 working at an electronics store at the regional Apache Mall in Minnesota. It had been a good summer, as summers go, with a gang of young people working at the mall, taking the opportunity to party together throughout the summer. At one such party, Steve had hooked-up (as young people did all the time in those halcyon days) with LuAnn, a fun redhead, who he had seen around the mall somewhere.  There had been no drama or pathos, it was just a chance encounter that ended as quickly as it began.  Except now he was learning that it had resulted in a baby who, as a grown woman named Christie, was seeking to connect to him as her birth father.

          The email from Christie told her story. When Christie was nine years old, her mother LuAnn became sick with cancer and her step-father had adopted her.  This was the first she became aware that the man she’d assumed was her father was not her birth father. She inherently understood the goodness of the man in embracing her as his own.  When her mother died, she never felt comfortable asking her father more about what it all meant.  When she was a teen, she found a birth certificate listing her father as “unknown.”  LuAnn had apparently never told anyone Steve’s name – not her parents, other family members or friends.  When Christie became a teen she began looking for her birth father, but there were few clues. 

In 2016, Steve had to prepare for heart surgery, and did a DNA work-up. There had been no surprises medically and certainly no long lost daughters. It had never occurred to him to revisit the site after that.  In 2018, Christie did her DNA test for ancestry reasons with the same provider that Steve had used.  She was hoping to find a distant cousin somewhere that might shed some light on her birth father.  Maybe she would find a clue to help with her search. Then, on Christmas morning, 2018, Christie got the results and there it was, a solid, unambiguous father in the person of Steve from Arizona.  Christie spent the better part of a month researching Steve and finally got up the courage to contact Roger’s daughter and then Roger. She was triangulating her way to Steve.  She had spent her life longing for her birth father, and now was the moment of truth.

          Christie wanted to meet Steve, if he was willing, so now the ball was in his court.  Steve talked to Maggie right there on the sofa and there was no doubt that they felt the same way as he did about all of this.  They then called their daughter Ginger, who had had her own hole in her heart over the loss many years prior of a young brother who died at the age of two.  She was genuinely excited to know she had a sister and two nieces and was anxious to meet them. Steve emailed Christie that same day and explained what he could in writing about his life and the situation with LuAnn as best he knew it (forty years is a long time). 

          Christie was back in Minneapolis holding her breath.  She had Googled her newly found father every way possible.  She Google Earthed his house and zoomed in on his swimming pool.  She felt like she knew everything about her father and yet she knew in her heart of hearts that she would know everything only when they met.  She checked her email and there it was, an email from him.  Would he say thanks, but no thanks?  Would he deny the connection?  She just barreled forward and opened the email and proceeded to read the most beautiful thing she had ever read.  It was a sweet and sorrowful letter of a father who wished he had known his daughter and now relished the opportunity to finally meet her.  He also mentioned the excitement that his wife Maggie and daughter Ginger had about meeting her.  She had never felt so much special warmth and love in her life.  Parental love owns a special place in the heart and that spot immediately blossomed like an orchid in Christie’s heart.

          The families have now met several times and the path forward is filled with gatherings planned and anticipated across the country. There is much joy on all sides.  Sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing until you find it and both families have found something very dear and special to them. Even Rod Stewart would be happy with this outcome.