When Virginia got pregnant, her family moved without telling a soul. After an irate phone call between the fathers of both reckless teens, Virginia’s family loaded their suitcases and shame in a car, and disappeared to Oklahoma City.
Her boyfriend suffered a scolding and went back to his life: a degree from OU, a job at his father’s newspaper, and then a publicity firm in DC.
But Virginia’s education ended there. She waited in a strange city for her body to do its work, and then surrendered her purple newborn to a nurse. Documents were signed by consenting parties, and the record of Virginia’s sin was sealed by a judge and locked in a county file cabinet. Her daughter was carried out of the front door by a couple that Virginia had never met.
That’s how, in 1954, my mother came to live with an upscale southern family and upended their manicured lives like an electric guitar in a string quartet.
Her adoptive mother, Gene, was a tiny-waisted Jackie O., who once met the queen of England. Her father, Orin, was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, who carried out surprise inspections on nuclear bases for the Pentagon. He once observed the boiling head of a mushroom cloud from an airplane.
Orin moved his wife and daughters to Albuquerque when my mother was two, because it was a known nuclear target. He wanted to make sure they died in the blast instead of wandering an apocalypse with radiation atoms ricocheting through their cells.
Orin and Gene were a genuine Oklahoma mix of manners and grit. When my grandfather was a base commander in Louisiana, they hosted white-glove parties in a showcase mid-century home with a bottomless bar. Orin could charm his way through a room but wasn’t above leaving rubber vomit in a corner for his own entertainment. He’d offhandedly say to fresh recruits, “see you boys in church tomorrow,” and then smile when they were seated in a shiny row at service the next morning.
On the rare occasion when he was saddled with me and my little brother, he’d say, “Behave. Or I’ll rip your leg off and beat you with the bloody end of it.”
Gene and Orin wanted and cherished Virginia’s baby. Ten years before the adoption, Gene had survived a difficult pregnancy and given birth to a daughter they called Mac, even though she wasn’t the boy Orin had hoped for.
Gene conceived again and the second pregnancy wrecked her fragile body. After months in a hospital bed, their little son came too early and Gene had to carry home grief in place of a newborn.
So it was that when Virginia went into labor in Oklahoma City, Gene and Orin came to fetch the baby. They named her Vicki Lyn and considered her a marvel. As well as a mess.
Vicki was fiery, musical, melodramatic, and willful. She ate too much, talked too loud, and her parents said often that she never met a stranger. Gene and Orin paid for organ lessons, toe shoes, and a high school trip to Spain. Two decades of trying to make her cross her ankles and use the right fork left them out of breath and perturbed. I don’t think they realized until she was gone just how much they needed the beautiful disruption that was Virginia’s daughter.
Gene, in particular, came from a line of southern stoics with an iron code of silence. The McCoys—of the Hatfield-McCoy feud—locked down family secrets better than any mafia clan. Emotions weren’t part of Gene’s family vocabulary, any more than sex or money.
But Vicki was born without those rules in her DNA, so she cannonballed into Gene’s quiet world with color and fire. Eighteen years later, Vicki would run off to follow the Jesus Movement and leave Gene crying on the front lawn.
Gene and Orin never thought of Vicki as anything but flesh and blood, and she never doubted they were her true parents. Yet, she was haunted by the belief that Virginia had rejected her. The toxic suspicion that she was unwanted ate at her self esteem and leaked into everything.
It didn’t help that Vicki didn’t look related to her mother or sister. Both Gene and her natural-born daughter, Mac, were lean by nature, as if their bodies were just avatars for their dainty personalities. Gene hated onions and would send an order back to the kitchen if it was plated with the same spatula used for an onion dish. Mac was so slender that the sisters joked she couldn’t keep her underwear up.
In contrast, Vicki was a voluptuous teen and later became an adult whose scale rose and plunged in ever-widening cycles. The stocky soldier that she married just after high school was amused by Gene’s collection of mice figurines. It was funny that such a delicate woman collected such delicate creatures—like the dog owners who choose doppelgänger canines. One evening when Vicki and her husband came for dinner, Gene asked her grown daughter if she had started a collection of her own.
“Elephants,” my father joked about his full-bodied wife.
Gene didn’t hear the sarcasm and started gifting elephants to Vicki for birthdays and Christmases. By the time Gene passed away, my mother owned a herd of lumbering figurines in porcelain and jade and onyx, linked trunk in tail.
The bitter roots that would crack the foundation of Vicki’s adoptive family came from a seed that blew into her yard when she was sixteen. Youth for Christ came to Albuquerque and their message of rebirth hit home.
Moved by the story of a father-type God who threw himself on a sin grenade for his children, Vicki gave her life to Jesus and never looked back.
Her devotion scared Gene and Orin. It was the age of LSD and bra burning and hippie communes. They worried that their passionate girl had been wooed by a cult and they drew a line. In the summer after Vicki graduated, Gene tried to ban the meetings. Vicki stormed out the door for good.
Vicki stayed with friends for the summer and found her way to a charismatic church in Albuquerque called the Oasis. It was a young, free-form church, focused on the gifts of the Holy Spirit rather than tired liturgy and hymnals. Members spoke in spiritual tongues. Others were empowered to interpret their messages in English. They laid hands on sick members to heal them, just as Jesus had done for lepers. They channeled the Spirit’s intuitive wisdom and spoke prophecies from God during services and prayer meetings.
Vicki met my father at the Oasis. He had returned from a deployment in Germany and was thumbing his way across the country. Andy had found Jesus while heartbroken, addicted, and aimless on a base in Berlin. He already believed that the beauty of nature was no accident, but in Berlin, he foresaw in a vision that a passenger plane would crash. And it did. He felt the presence of Jesus in a tangible way that night and he was born again.
Andy landed in Albuquerque because the only passing car at a remote interchange was bound for New Mexico, and he believed it was a sign. He and Vicki—two beautiful, self-declared Jesus freaks—met and married each other in three weeks. One of the leaders at the Oasis had prophesied that God was calling them to it, but they would have dashed to the altar anyway.
Gene and Orin were shell-shocked by Vicki’s engagement and boycotted the wedding. Mac went to support her sister and contributed a headpiece from her own ceremony. It resembled a white donut with a snippet of tule. There was nothing Gene and Orin could do to stop their impulsive daughter, and the whole affair could have been karmic retribution for their own elopement half of a century earlier.
In 1971 when my parents married, young people felt the world was ending. Their imaginations were wallpapered with Russian missile silos and napalm-colored skies. The chipper post-war veneer that coated family, church, and country in the 1950’s, had largely peeled off. They were disillusioned. Some of them hoped for the Age of Aquarius, while others dropped acid and dropped out.
My parents looked to the second coming of Jesus. In the first months of their marriage, my father’s house painting gig wasn’t enough to cover rent, so they lived in a car and waited for the rapture. Just four weeks after saying vows, Vicki was already pregnant. She had wanted children for as long as she could remember and now that she was wed, saw no reason to wait.
Andy sincerely believed that the skies would part any day. But he also came from a practical midwestern family and knew that a pregnant bride needed a real bed. During the last months of Vicki’s pregnancy, they moved into a Christian commune with twelve other couples.
Babies wield a special power over estranged families and when Vicki went into labor, Orin met her at the hospital. My mother has a photo of me—only hours old—in my grandfather’s arms.
Gene and Orin continued to grieve Vicki’s marriage and never forgave the man who stole their daughter. But they loved Vicki and embraced their new grandchild.
Vicki’s delivery was dramatic. Not only because the baby was breech and her preeclampsia blood pressure scared the doctors, but also because she didn’t expect her newborn to have a feral mop of red hair. My father said I looked like a troll doll.
The red locks were a surprise because every aunt, uncle and cousin in Vicki’s adoptive family had blonde or chestnut hair. Vicki’s own hair was approaching brown, as was Andy’s. So the flaming tangles on my crown were a tangible reminder that she came from somewhere else.
Seventeen months later, Vicki delivered another child with copper hair, and the song of rejection that played on a loop in her subconscious grew even louder.
By then, my parents had moved to Oregon so Andy could finish his degree in agricultural engineering. For almost ten years, school and work kept them in the Pacific Northwest. Then they returned to Albuquerque in an F100 with two children, a cat, and a pet rat.
Everywhere they moved, their faith continued to deepen and they practiced the gifts of the Spirit: wisdom, tongues, healing, and prophecy. They also believed in spiritual warfare. The world was a battleground of good and evil, angels and demons, the Creator and the fallen creature who staged a coup.
Vicki didn’t know that for all those years, she had siblings in Oklahoma who were journeying through life with the same love for Jesus, and the same call to spiritual arms. She was forty-three when she finally crossed a line she had promised to never cross, and found her biological family.
Gene was always terrified that Vicki would open a door to the past and jeopardize their connection. Operating from the McCoy code of silence, she made Vicki swear to never search for Virginia. Vicki honored Gene’s wishes, despite the seismic rumbling of rejection under every interaction and relationship. Then a series of health problems in her early forties gave her a reason to follow the longing she had ignored for so long.
Her adoption records were still locked in a file cabinet in Oklahoma, and the only way to unseal them was through a private investigator. It was during a phone call with the PI that Vicki learned Virginia’s name for the first time. Her PI didn’t know Virginia’s whereabouts, but he dug up a phone number for her brother, Virgil, and her boyfriend, John—Vicki’s biological father.
Many family reunions of that sort go badly. But Vicki’s phone calls to unexpecting relatives initiated a magnetic reconnection of broken pieces. Her uncle Virgil hadn’t heard from Virginia in years, but he was in touch with her four daughters and her son. Vicki spent hours on the phone with new half-siblings comparing personality traits and childhood stories. They had not only their biological past, but their spiritual present in common.
Christmas arrived a few months after the first phone call, and our four drove from Iowa to Oklahoma to celebrate with an extended family we had never seen. My mother approached the trip with the same worry-free enthusiasm as she did every other major decision, and she wasn’t disappointed.
Her oldest half-sister lived on an oil-money ranch with a great stone fireplace and a sundae bar, surrounded by smooth green hills. A festive tree with giantism towered over a ski run of Christmas gifts. Warm southern accents bounced from room to room and my brother and I felt strangely at home.
We had always sensed the same out-of-placeness that Vicki felt in her genteel family. Our two cousins, like their mother Mac and grandmother Gene, were wispy and well-behaved.
My brother and I, on the other hand, shattered the blown-glass buoys in Gene’s Tiki room. We ransacked her cabinets for candy and tried to mix jello on her velour couch. Even as kids, we knew we were sweaty peasants in a courtly world.
Now, for the first time in our twenties, we had found cousins like us: a whole tribe of sturdy, gluttonous, uncivilized redheads. We discovered that Vicki’s mother, Virginia, came from Irish blood and her father, John, came from Scottish blood. So it all made perfect sense.
Vicki bonded immediately with her sisters. They were as candid as the McCoys were secretive.
Our families grilled and sang and opened gifts. We also prayed together. We weren’t just blood relatives but spiritual ones, who shared an abiding love for Jesus and an active role on the front lines of a spiritual war.
Vicki’s half-sisters had started a ministry of exorcism. They were survivors of sexual abuse and wanted to care for other victims plagued by demonic activity. It was with this expertise that they recommended a three day fast from food to deliver my younger brother, Caleb.
Caleb was a sensitive, musical kid who had been pushed to study engineering at university and failed. Though in truth, his problems started long before college. My father, who carried a world of hurt from his own childhood, was drawn to the evangelical guarantee of a tight family nucleus with traditional roles. Our subsect of fundamentalism pictured fathers (with an actual graphic) as an umbrella of spiritual protection from the rains of Satanic attack, and he took his rank seriously.
He believed fathers were armed with a direct channel of insight from God, which meant his authority was absolute and ordained. He determined what length of skirt his wife could wear and who she could spend time with. He shielded his kids by banning secular music, makeup, and dating. And he decided what my brother would study at university.
Almost from birth, Caleb fought the rigid hierarchy in our home. The roar of passion inside him was louder than the whisper of consequences, and no amount of spanking seemed to correct the problem.
He was like a bag of marbles spilling in twelve directions at once and my father couldn’t contain him. One afternoon, Caleb drank himself into the hospital. Another, he ran off for three days. My brother openly questioned the disparity between our fundamentalist bubble and the rest of the world.
A few months after the Oklahoma trip, Caleb would abandon his studies to live in a VW van and follow a cynical 90’s resurrection of the hippie movement. But while we were there opening gifts with Irish cousins, my parents hoped his problem was as simple as a spiritual door that had been left ajar and could be closed again.
In Oklahoma, we also realized that the battle between God and Satan had ripped a chasm between Vicki’s five siblings. The older three and the younger two weren’t speaking to each other.
At the heart of the feud was Virginia. Vicki’s three sisters, who were hosting us, told us that their mother was living in a car and was an addict. She had run a series of car scams and then fled to Vancouver, to evade arrest. Above all, she was a psychic and a witch—a powerful Wiccan who was known to heal people.
I was scared of a woman I had never met.
Virginia’s two youngest children refused to cut their mother off, and the older three broke contact to protect themselves from Virginia's influence.
After the holidays we returned home. We fasted for my brother, and wondered at the way our Oklahoma counterparts had followed a parallel path to our own.
But the relationship between Vicki and her sisters burned out as quickly as it started. I don’t know the details, but I know that the phone calls stopped after a year. My mother, it seemed, had inherited the McCoy code of silence after all.
Vicki's relationship with Virginia’s other children was over, but one connection from the sealed adoption file endured. Vicki’s investigator had warned that Virginia’s boyfriend, John, might not welcome the exhumation of a long-buried secret. His wife and adult daughters didn’t know about his high school transgression.
But Vicki’s biological father was not one to hide from the past. John not only took Vicki’s call and confessed to his family, he also booked a flight for Iowa.
The phone calls between DC—where John lived—and our house, were just as long as the first calls to her sisters. An initial curiosity between father and daughter became so consuming that John’s wife compared their burgeoning relationship to an affair. Vicki’s husband felt the same.
John came to our part of the world for two tense days. It would have been hard enough for my father to watch a stranger command my mother’s full attention, but there were other layers: a blue collar distrust for the bourgeois, a Limbaugh suspicion of Clinton Democrats, and an evangelical hatred for atheism.
I have three acute memories of that visit. I remember thinking John had my brother’s face: Scottish cheekbones, graying red hair, and defiant eyes. I remember John’s expression when my father explained how overcrowded lab rats will turn gay over time. But the most poignant memory of my new grandfather, is from a tour I gave in the pottery room at my university. I was studying art and had sculpted a pile of empty clay heads. My father was appalled. My grandfather was intrigued.
It was inevitable that Vicki’s husband would see a spiritual threat in John. After the visit, he convinced her to shut the whole thing down. Our family cut off contact with DC, because you can’t win a war without sacrifice.
I rebelled much later than Caleb did. I spoke in tongues and battled demons in prayer all the way through college. Even after four years of exposure to history and philosophy and the arts, I still believed that a woman’s only calling was to marriage and motherhood. My exasperated professors didn’t realize—and neither did I—that my tidy worldview had developed fissures in the classroom.
At twenty-three, I graduated and intrepidly rented a house sixteen miles from my parents. My father insisted that I had stepped outside his protection and was spiritually vulnerable. For the first time, I disagreed out loud, and the relationship exploded.
I remember sitting on my kitchen linoleum numbly holding a phone while he predicted I would end up pregnant and on the street. The numbness was followed by an odd sensation of freedom, and my first thought was to buy tickets for DC.
I abandoned my own atmosphere yet again, for a planet of unmet relatives and new experiences. I thirstily wandered the capital’s monolithic galleries and absorbed every historic portrait and modern installation. I ate steamed crab from Chesapeake Bay, drank too much wine and swapped folk songs on guitar with John’s daughters. They were my aunts, but they were also my age. We talked about Vicki and Virginia and the Scottish branches of my family tree.
We compared faith and humanism. We compared right and left. It shouldn’t have been comfortable and easy but it was. It should have mattered that we were from different political and religious continents, but it didn’t. I had found my people.
The fissures in my worldview grew.
After DC, I moved to San Francisco to work with a missionary organization. It was a safe first step away from Iowa. Even though I was living in a modern city, and even though quiet doubts were evolving, I continued to live the way I had been raised. I never dated.
My sect of fundamentalism had founded its own schools and colleges. The elementary curriculum included a cartoon of a clean-cut husband complimenting his wife on her submissiveness. A multiple choice question taught that a good citizen doesn’t support candidates who want to punish big business and give away money to the poor.
I traveled to a national school conference with speakers from an anti-dating movement that would come to be called “purity culture.” I learned that God had predestined a husband for me and I should save my first kiss until my wedding veil was raised. I believed it into adulthood.
In San Francisco, at the age of twenty-eight, I kissed a man for the first time. Then I married him. When my parents came for the wedding, they were disappointed to catch me kissing my fiancé in the street.
Since university, I had been carrying around doubt in one hand and faith in the other. I clutched the contradictory pieces and hoped one day I’d know what to let go of. My wedding was an intersection of the two worlds: my parents, my brother, my Christian colleagues and John.
I invited him to the ceremony over my father’s dire objections and I wore John’s mother’s cameo down the aisle. It was at the reception that John finally met my little brother and saw what I had seen on his visit to Iowa. They had the same face.
John was moved. Caleb was nervous. It was the only time the two ever spoke.
My brother’s mental health was tenuous. His nomadic journey had left him penniless, strung out, and nearly dead in an Arizona desert. He had moved back home and was earning a bible degree. After my parents’ desperate battle to rescue him from the demonic activity invited by drug use and rebellion, they were opposed to any contact with a spiritual threat like John.
Their caution didn’t help. Caleb later returned to the streets for years at a time. He wound up in rehab and jail. After one arrest, the state of Iowa finally diagnosed him as bipolar. His struggle could have been spotted in high school, but such secular ideas were at odds with the work of the Spirit and personal responsibility.
Caleb’s diagnosis gave me more than just a name for his wild nature. It also gave a name to the extremes that my mother experienced. She would never be officially diagnosed, of course, but the artistry, the passion, the weeks of creativity followed by weeks in bed made sense. My brother inherited his brain chemistry from her. And she inherited it from her mother.
Suddenly, Virginia’s nomadic life and addictions had a new meaning. I’ll never know if she was a witch, but I do know she suffered. I know it could have been different for her. And her children.
My story eventually led away from the church. I stopped battling dark forces in my prayers and crediting them for the tragic choices that people made. I was lucky in that way.
Lies ripple outward, like the mushroom cloud my grandfather watched from a plane. They breed fear and break up families.
Sometimes the ripples can be stopped. I left a purity culture marriage and I held on to my grandfather, despite the fear that his politics and atheism were demonic influences.
Some ripples can’t be stopped. Virginia called our house once after our Christmas trip to Oklahoma. She had heard about my mother’s search and wanted to meet her daughter. I nearly dropped the phone because it had a witch on the other end. My mother wasn’t home, so I told Virginia to call back. That was the last time anyone heard from her.
I sometimes imagine Virginia falling asleep in her car for the last time. She has my face. And a raging chemical imbalance. And enough whiskey and opium in her blood to silence it.
It turns out I do still believe in demons. The kind that haunt an adopted girl with feelings of rejection. The kind that lurk in DNA and have to be silenced with whiskey and pills. The kind that steal grandmothers.
