For 48-years, I was the youngest member of one family until I recently discovered that they are half of the real story. For my entire life, another family lived right here in northern California that I never knew until recent events pulled together the various missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that has been circling around in my heart and mind providing a backdrop to my struggle with the idea of family and what that means.
I was never close with my brothers’ father and he made little attempt to connect. Though I wondered why throughout my early life, it didn’t really bother me because I had always heard about him through my mother and she had nothing good to say about him except that he was a good provider. Now I know why he hated her with such vehemence – something that as a young child was strange to me as they tackled a rough divorce. Mom created a web of so many lies about him and her past that it was difficult for me to know what was real. Was he dead? She had told me so. Was he mean and uncaring? She had told me so. It was easy to give up his last name when I was in my 20’s. I took a part of it, removing the c, the o, the b, the s, and the n, trimming “Jacobsen” to Jae. My eldest brother married upon returning from the Vietnam War and he took his wife’s last name, so there was a trend in the bookends of the siblings. I later became Labrecque taking my former wife’s name in a ceremonious connection of feeling like I belonged with someone in a family.
So, it turns out that I was never really a Jacobsen after all. My Mother was having an on-and-off affair with a man she fell deeply in love with, enough to leave her husband several times throughout the years to be with Paul and always taking the boys in tow. I can’t imagine how they felt growing up with a cheating Mom. The eldest was 16-years-old during the many months of her final cheat. The final one that gave her a child with the man she loved that was not her husband. My Father’s name is Paul Conolley. Strange coincidence that he passed the same year she did in 2010. They kept it a secret all their lives or so they thought.
My eldest brother and sister are the same age, born in 1946. My brother had more than an inkling that Mom was cheating and it deeply troubled him. He was pulled from his high school in Bellevue, Washington along with his younger brothers (one in Jr. High, one in elementary school) in 1961 to fly off to Sacramento where they spent the better part of a year living on the same cul-de-sac as Paul and his daughter Beth. In early 1962, a life-changing hitch altered their affair forever–my Mother became pregnant with me.
What ensued thereafter is only conjecture at this point. My brother remembers that all of a sudden his Dad came to Sacramento to visit for the weekend and Mom and Dad had a bedroom reunion while Paul took Beth out on a weekend trip that didn’t include Michele and her boys. He believes that Mom tried to fool his Dad into thinking that I was his and the fourth Jacobsen. Once I came along in the latter half of November, the answer seemed clear to some, but Mom kept her secret and stuck to her story. She was good at that.