Mom

by Dave Isay

  The second lesson was how you share things, because in the orphanage you really didn’t own anything—nothing was yours; everything you had was shared. If it was cold outside, they’d bring out a table of coats and everyone threw on a coat, and every day you had a different coat when you went outside to play. You didn’t know anything about Santa Claus because they never brought Santa Claus to the orphanage. They would bring military people who would hand you gifts, and you’d take turns opening your gifts. You’d put them in the center of the room, and then everybody could play with all the toys. So I had more than just one toy; I had hundreds of them—you just shared everything that you had.

  Finally, I was adopted. I was five years old. The matron sat me on the front counter, and my dad looked at me and my mom looked at me, and I looked at them—we just kind of stared at each other. My dad shoved this blue stocking cap over my head, and my mom shoved this little toy stuffed dog in my arm. They swept me off the counter, and away we went.

  My mother said, “We never brought you home on a trial basis because they told us, ‘We think Ray is experiencing rejection. ’” So they came for several weeks just to observe me. They were enamored with me, I guess, and they said, “That’s who we want.” They picked me up and they never took me back.

  So here I was with the first two things I ever owned in my life—the stocking cap and the toy dog—and off to home I went. I didn’t have a suitcase—there was nothing else to take but the clothes on my back. They took me to my new home on Sycamore Street, and they said, “This is your home.” I looked at it and I thought, Okay, whatever that is. They took me to my bedroom and said, “This is your bedroom, this is your toy box, this is your closet, and everything is yours.” This was all kind of confusing to me. They put me in my bed, which looked like a giant bed. It was just a single bed, but back in the orphanage you slept on small cots. And then they closed the door and shut the lights out. Well, I wasn’t used to that. I was used to sleeping in a room full of kids and the matron walking down the hallway checking up on you every hour—I used to watch her come down the hallway and hear her heels clicking. I was used to all this noise and raucousness and people around, and all of a sudden it was dead silent.

  As my mother remembered, “Within the hour, you jumped out of bed, came to our room, and jumped in bed with us and slept with us for the night.” They suddenly realized, He’s not used to being alone. So they let me stay for the night with them. Then the next morning was interesting, because that’s when they tried to explain to me that we’re your mom and your dad. I just kind of looked at them like, What’s that? I didn’t understand.

  My adoptive mother died in 1994, on Easter night, and my adoptive dad died in 2000, on Father’s Day night. I loved them dearly—they live in my heart just like they’re alive today. They taught me so much and cared for me so much. When my mother passed away, I went through her cedar chest and I found my stocking cap and the toy dog that they gave me—the very first things I ever owned. Each year, I keep them under the Christmas tree as a reminder of where I came from. I never knew my mother held on to those things, and I’m very thankful to her for hanging on to me.

  In April of 2005, I filed for my records from the orphanage. Six months later I received a big package with microfiche film of all my adoption records, but they redacted everything about my biological mother’s identity, her name, and my biological father’s name.

  There was a two-page document, and at the very top edge of that second page, where it overlapped with the first page, they had forgotten to white out my biological mother’s name. So I had her name, and I thought, I’ve got a lead here, and the search was on.

  All of a sudden, bam! I had an address, and I had a phone number. I had this feeling: My gosh. I am so close, so quick. I started the search in October, and November second I was making the phone call. When I first made that call, my heart was racing. I thought, Well, she has to be elderly at this point. And I felt, I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want to turn her world upside down.

  All these things were racing through my mind. What am I going to say? Then she answered the telephone, and I said, “I’m looking for a Gloria Quintana.You may not be the right one.” I was trying to give her wiggle room in case she decided she didn’t want any part of this. I asked if she was born down in the San Luis area, and she said she was. So I started conveying the story that I was doing a genealogy search and I was trying to see if she was part of my family or not. So she was answering a few questions, and I told her that I was born in Grand Junction and relinquished to an orphanage. When I got to the point, she hung up the telephone.

  Persistent as I am, I called right back, and she hung up the telephone again. So I thought, Well, she’s persistent like me: she must be my mother. I ended up calling again that evening. She answered the phone, and I said, “Gloria, this is Ray. Don’t hang up. I just wanted to share a couple of things with you.” I said, “I want to thank you for giving me life.” She listened, and I kind of reviewed what my life was like: being adopted from the orphanage by my parents and becoming a shoeshine boy and always having the dream of being mayor someday. I used to shine the mayor’s shoes, and I used to tell myself, One of these days I’m going to wear those shoes.

  She listened intently, and then she told me, “Well, I have your numbers, and if I want to pursue this I’ll let you know.” I told her I wouldn’t bother her; I’d wait for her to call me—she had my promise. I got to thinking after I hung up, My gosh, it could be years from now.

  Well, the next morning, my cell phone rings, and it’s her. She said, “This is your mother.” I thought, Wow. She said, “Look, son, I want to tell you everything that happened. I think you have a right to know, because you’re my son.”

  She explained that she had given birth to me when she was about twenty years old. She was violated against her will, and they didn’t know what to do with me. She knew she couldn’t afford to raise me. During that phone conversation, she broke down and cried several times. You could tell this really hurt. But I think she felt good about being able to say it.

  After we talked for about thirty minutes on the telephone, she said, “I want to meet you.” We agreed to meet on a Monday, at IHOP, at nine-thirty in the morning. I thought, I’m going to get there at nine o’clock and watch her walk in. I wanted to see it all. Well, when I walked into the restaurant at nine o’clock in the morning, she was already there—we both were thinking the same thing. I looked at her sitting across the restaurant, and I thought, Boy, she does kind of look like me, if that’s her. I looked at her and she looked at me, and I kind of pantomimed with my mouth, “Are you . . . ?” And she shook her head yes, and so we knew that was it. We hugged each other, and she looked at me, and she said, “Well, thank goodness, you don’t look like your father!” I had been worried that I might have the same appearance as her attacker, and I was hoping that I didn’t. So we had the same thoughts of getting there early and what was the first worry on our mind.

  We had a marathon breakfast, and she proceeded to tell me even more details of the story. I found why she was so frightened when I called and why she hung up. She told me, “You know, it was a hard birth, and when I signed the relinquishment papers, I had told the doctor, ‘I just want to hold him one more time.’” She said he looked at her kind of strange, and he told her, “You know, he died.”

  So she was left to believe that I was no longer alive all these years. But she said, “For some reason or another, I knew you were alive, and I don’t know why. There was no evidence of that—I’d been told everything to the contrary. Sometimes, over the years, we’d go to different orphanages just to look and see: What if we saw him? What if we found him by chance?”

  When we left the restaurant that day, we held each other, and I said, “Just think—you waited fifty-four years to hold me one more time.”

  Recorded in Fort Collins, Colorado, on April 23, 2008.

  ANNETTE ZUMBA, 54 talks to her sister, JENEVIEVE ZUM
BA, 46

  Annette Zumba: Mom had seven children before she was twenty-eight; I’m the oldest and you’re sixth. Now that you have two very active children in your home, how do you look at the job Mom did?

  Jenevieve Zumba: I get stunned daily at how she ever was able to do the laundry. [laughs] Seriously, I’m just completely stunned at how she gave us each our own time. On our birthdays, we had the choice to have dinner alone with Mom and Dad or with the six brothers and sisters. I always chose to be alone with Mom and Dad—and I remember that quiet time between us.

  I think that she raised us really kindly and also filled with joy. I remember, even when we were poor—we got very poor after Mom and Dad split—we went to the movies once a month. No matter what, Mom would pay for all of us to go to the movies for a double show and any food we wanted: hot dogs, popcorn, sodas, whatever. It didn’t matter how poor we were—on food stamps or whatever, it didn’t matter—that was our treat once a month, and we could rely on that.

  Mom taught us always to watch out for each other, that love comes first, that you don’t ever say, “I hate you.” You say, “I hate it when you do such and such.” She always told us to remember the good things that we loved about each other. Even though we were so scattered during the day, we all came home and had meals together. If you were not home by six o’clock, someone was looking for you.

  Annette: I remember Mother’s Day: We were very young, and she took us to a park. Everybody’s pushing each other, and we’re all laughing, and it’s very, very fun. She asked us to please call her Mrs. Zumba on Mother’s Day. So we would be swinging in the swings and say, “Mrs. Zumba, can you push me?” “Mrs. Zumba, look what Rick is doing to me.” Mrs. Zumba! Mrs. Zumba! Mrs. Zumba! And a person came by and said, “Oh my God, it’s Mother’s Day. Are you doing this for a friend of yours, taking care of the kids?” And she goes, “No, no, these are my children.” I remember the woman was just looking at her. With a deadpan look, Mom said to her, “Well, what do your children call you?” Joann and I, because we were the oldest, we got it, and we knew that Mom was just tired of seven kids saying “Mom!” 140 times apiece over the course of eighteen hours: she had had enough. For one day, she just wanted to be called by something else. I recognized at that moment that Mom really was her own person—despite the fact that we lived in an eight-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom and with all the girls in one room and the boys in another room.

  Then after twenty-five years of raising us pretty much on her own, her life changed. I was in my early twenties when I learned about it, and Joe, the youngest, was sixteen. How did you find out?

  Jenevieve: Mom came to my apartment. I was seventeen years old and living on my own already. She called up and said, “I’d like to come over; I need to tell you something.” I actually thought that maybe she was telling me she was getting married. She asked that we spend time alone, so my boyfriend left and I went out to Sizzler’s with her. She proceeded to tell me that she’d had a calling and that she’d been feeling it for about two years, that she’d been accepted into this order, and that she was going to become a Catholic nun.

  Annette: I think Mom was very, very troubled when she knew she was going to be leaving the family and not be the mother anymore.

  Jenevieve: Oh, I absolutely think that—because although she felt all the love and all the connection to the church, she also felt the trouble and the grief of leaving her seven children.

  The roughest part for me about Mom going into the convent was that suddenly I didn’t have parents. That was absolutely frightening; I felt almost orphaned by the situation. I felt like, What do I do for holidays? At the time, I was applying to college. Everybody else went home to their parents in the summers. What was I going to do? Go stay in the convent? It sounds silly, but I couldn’t do that.

  My best friend at the time was a gal named Leslie. She was Catholic, and I remember Leslie telling me that Mom was just getting the best of both worlds: she got to get pregnant, be married and have a husband, and then go be a nun. It was a very interesting situation, because I really did see Mom’s calling; I really saw the grace in it, the love and the commitment and everything else. But at the same time I was feeling completely abandoned.

  There were a number of nuns who were not happy when Mom went in the convent. Just as my friend Leslie had expressed some issues about her getting the best of both worlds, some of the older nuns felt that too. It was exceedingly rare to get to become a Catholic nun after being married, having children, and being divorced. They gave her the papal dispensations—the pope actually signed a paper.

  I called the convent almost every day to talk to her. When I’d call and I’d ask, “Can I talk to my mom?” the sisters would not be too happy about that.

  Annette: Someone found Mom collapsed on the ground at the convent—she’d had an allergic reaction to a medicine—and they rushed her to the hospital in Santa Monica. The only reason we found out about it was that our brother Tony called up Mom, and a nun answered. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry. Your mom’s not here.” “Well, where is she?” “Well, she’ll be in in a couple days.” “Well, where is she?” “Well, there was an incident and she’s in the hospital in the ICU.”

  Tony called me. I went to the ICU desk at the hospital, and I said, “I’m here to see my mother, Sister Jane Kelly.” They said, “I’m sorry, nuns don’t have children.” I stood there, and I thought I was going to be one of these screaming women. Instead I said, “My mom has bigger goals in life than just to be Sister Jane Kelly—she’s also a mom of seven kids. Where is she?” It seemed I was very disrespectful, but I was so determined to see her. When I saw her across the room, her head was the size of a basketball. She turned around, and she goes, “Oh, dear, you didn’t have to come. I could fare on my own.” I thought, But why should you have to? That was her grace.

  I remember growing up as a Catholic girl and going to Catholic boarding school, I was never disrespectful to the sisters, but this was my mother. So I went to the head of the sisters and said, “The truth of the matter is, whether you like it or not, Sister Jane is the mother of seven children, and she is not going to die without one of us being there.” Mom said that the relationship between her and the nuns changed after that night. It became apparent to them that they were being a bit selfish about her situation.

  Jenevieve: I think all seven of us really adore Mom, and we all supported Mom going to the convent. The day she took her vows all seven of us were there, and it was like watching a wedding: it was this stunning thing. I think we all really believed that she should have the right to make that choice. We became disconnected to her so she could become connected to them.

  Recorded in Sacramento, California, on April 26, 2008.

  JENEVIEVE ZUMBA (left) AND ANNETTE ZUMBA (right)

  DOT CAMPI, 79 talks with her daughter, KIM CAMPI, 51

  Dot Campi: I always hoped for three or four children and a good life. It was never my thought that I would get married and be divorced in ten years—people didn’t get divorced back then. So I was really very offended that my first husband wanted a divorce. I thought I was this great person—who is he to tell me he didn’t want me? However, that’s what happened. And I said, “I’m never gonna get married again.” I was thirty-two.

  I met Ronnie through a friend of mine. He was widowed—his first wife died at a very young age. We got talking, and he said he was looking for a mother for his five kids. So I said, “Well don’t look at me!” You know what happened there.

  People used to say to me, “You’re marrying this guy with five kids—are you nuts?” I’d say, “Well, I love him, and I’ll learn to love the kids.” In the end, I used to tell Ronnie quite often, “You know, you’re lucky you had these kids, because I never would’ve stayed here without them!”

  Ronnie had five children: Pat was eighteen; Georgia was sixteen; Bobbie was thirteen; you, Kimmy, were around four, and David was two. My daughter Mona was ten, and then we had three together. Th
ose are the three families that we blended together and blended very well, I think.

  Kim Campi: What were your fears going into it?

  Dot: At that particular time it was, How am I gonna be a mother to all these kids? One of the biggest fears was that your mom was dead. You could’ve put her on a pedestal, and she could’ve been this saint of saints. Here I am, this lowly person, coming into this family—how could I measure up? Not so much as a wife but as a mother. That was a really big concern.

  I was tough. And I was as strict with the Campi kids as I was with the Romano kid or the Campi kids that Ronnie and I had together. I was an equal opportunity mother for strictness. And most of it was because Daddy worked so much of the time that the disciplining was left up to me. But never once, in all the time, did Daddy ever say, “Don’t talk to my child like that!”—never never never never never. He always backed me up, and he told other people the same thing. He said, “Anything as far as discipline and behavior, that’s Dot’s job.” And that’s how we did it.

  At one point I remember getting into a discussion with your older sister, Bobbie, and I said to her, “If you don’t want me here, I’ll leave!” She ran off and slammed the door, and I said, “Nobody slams doors in this house! You come down and we’ll talk it over.” She stayed upstairs for a little while. Then she came back down and she said, “I don’t want you to leave.”

  Kim: You had rules: no elbows at the table; fifteen-minute limits on phone calls—and the phone would go in the bread drawer at dinner. You were involved in our lives but not to the point where you controlled us. I had a friend in third grade who came over the house, and you didn’t tell me not to play with her, you just said, “I’m not crazy about her.” That always stuck with me—that you never said, “You can’t do this or be with that person.” But you let us know how you felt and we respected you so we would fo llow that.