Meet My Mom

After discovering I was an NPE, I wanted to look at my mother’s life. I wanted to understand her more.

My mother hated the name Martha Lee. She lived her life avoiding it whenever she could. I remember my grandmother sometimes calling her M.L. Mom felt M.L. was much better than the grating “Maaatha Lee” she was called growing up near Boston. As an adult, she was just Lee.

Mom was born to an upper-class family on January 31, 1928, in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her father was an insurance salesman with deep New England roots. She adored her father. The feeling was mutual.

Mom was the youngest. She had one older sister, my Aunt Jean. While Jean was dainty, scholarly, demur, and classically pretty, Mom was more of an early version of Carol Burnett. She was skinny and gawky with a broad, gummy smile and hated school. I always felt that Mom never thought she was good enough compared to her sister.

My mother was very different from my friends’ mothers. I knew this from a very early age. My parents divorced when I was eight years old. In 1973, none of my other friends had divorced parents. My mother was definitely judged for being divorced, and I felt it for her. But Mom was a strong woman, and she didn’t let that judgment stop her from living her life as she thought she needed to.

She had a lot of layers to her. She worked full-time when other moms in our neighborhood didn’t. She was practical and realistic about life. She had a big, toothy smile and laughed a lot. Mom had a gregarious personality and many male and female friends her entire life. She liked a good Manhattan or Martini and believed women should never order their own drinks because it wasn’t ladylike. She enjoyed life.

She was also a very good mom who was extremely dedicated to us kids. She was loving and attentive to us all. Dinner was at 6 pm every night like clockwork, and she expected us all to be there. She was a terrible cook, by the way. But we always had a hot dinner with meat, veggies, and potatoes. Tradition and holidays were very important to her. She gave us all Christmas stockings and Easter baskets well into our adulthood when we all had families of our own. Dad was still in the picture, and I credit her for ensuring he was always there.

Mom was surprisingly very faith-driven. She went to church every single Sunday. The Episcopal Church was a big part of our lives growing up. She was involved in groups, was a coffee hour hostess, and even taught Sunday School.

Looking back at my mother’s life, she was ahead of her time and sometimes struggled with it. She grew up in a generation where gender roles were clearly declared. If you were a woman you were expected to get married and have a family while your husband worked. She worked hard to balance the roles of a “traditional” wife and mother with her yearning to be adventurous and independent. She knew she had disappointed people along the way with her choices in her life. My grandmother was embarrassed to admit to people her daughter was divorced. My mother was always chasing approval from her parents, but she also wasn’t someone who lived with regrets.

It is very confusing to continue loving someone who has lied to you for 50 years. But that is where I found myself.

Instead of dwelling on that, my immediate focus was to find out who my biological father was. I wasn’t ready to ask Mom that question because if she had denied it, I could never feel the same way about her again for denying what I already knew.

I had to do what I do best as a genealogist and prove who he was. At this point, I had an idea who it might be. I remembered him from many years while I was growing up.

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This is my NPE story of discovering in 2015 that my Dad was not my biological Dad. If you’d like to follow along, I encourage you start at my first post of the series HERE.