…stop letting her see me.”
I made the principal play the footage again. Then I zoomed in on the woman’s hands. There was a small tattoo of a sparrow on her wrist.
My younger sister, Kate, has that tattoo.
Kate and I look so alike that people used to mix us up at school. But for the last nine years, we had barely spoken. Kate had struggled with addiction since she was nineteen. Eight years ago, she gave birth to a baby girl while she was in a treatment program, and the court placed the baby with my husband and me. We adopted her when she was two. That baby is my daughter, Mia.
My husband, Greg, had never forgiven Kate. He made me promise she would never be part of Mia’s life. And I agreed, because Kate had relapsed so many times.
I called Kate from the principal’s office. She answered on the first ring and started crying before I said a word.
She had been sober for three years. She had a job, an apartment and a sponsor. She had written to me twice, asking to see Mia. Greg had thrown the letters away without telling me. I found out later.
Six months ago, Kate saw Mia at the park with my husband. She followed them to the school. Then she cut her hair like mine, bought glasses like mine and used my old driver’s license — the one I’d reported lost after Thanksgiving at our mother’s house.
“I just wanted to be with her for one afternoon a week,” Kate sobbed. “I took her for ice cream and to the library. I never told her who I really was. She thought I was you. She called me ‘Wednesday Mommy.'”
It was wrong. She knew it was wrong. She could have been arrested. But I also knew why she’d done it, and I knew who had thrown her letters away.
Kate turned herself in to the school and the police the next day. Because she had never harmed Mia, prosecutors agreed to drop the identity theft charge if she completed a diversion program.
Greg and I went to counseling. He admitted he had hidden the letters. He thought he was protecting Mia. I told him he’d been protecting himself.
Now Kate sees Mia every other Saturday, with me there. We told Mia the truth, gently, with the help of a family therapist. Kate is her first mother. I’m her mother forever. Mia says she’s lucky because she has two people who look exactly the same and love her exactly the same.
