My wife,
Kathy was noodling around on Ancestry.com in 2015 and discovered that my birth
mother, Margaret High, died the
previous June in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She was 91 years old. I never
had any contact with her and only discovered
her identity through the diligent research by my late brother’s ex-wife Arlene Brennan a few years ago.
Margaret High came from a pioneering Montana ranching family in aptly named Twin
Bridges in the remote high country of the Missouri Brakes. She served
in the Marine Corps during World War II. Four years after coming
home she got pregnant and was disowned by her parents—or so we were told in the myth-tale of our adoption—and
reportedly gave birth to my brother
and I all alone and unattended. By prior arrangement W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin got us within hour of the birth and soon adopted us.
It turned out that while we were growing up in Cheyenne, she had taken a
job at Frances E. Warren Air Force Base
as a telephone operator. There is no
indication that it was anything more than coincidence.
She never married.
My brother once tried to contact her but she
wanted no relationship with us. She
had what seems to me—I could be wrong—a hard,
lonely life and we represented the worst moments of it. I respected
that decision.
Ruby Murfin lost her baby William “Butch” Murfin at birth in 1940 and was unable to have
another. It was a deeply traumatizing experience for her and
contributed to profound depression
that stalked her for years. After separation for long years during the
War, and the unsettling post-war years
she and husband Murf finally turned
to adoption in 1949. A local doctor who knew both Margaret and the
Murfins quietly arranged a discrete adoption-at-birth.
After moving from town to town in Montana and Colorado while my father worked as a
local Chamber of Commerce manager,
the Murfins came to Cheyenne in 1953 and stayed until moving to Illinois in 1965.
Margaret High oddly ended up in Cheyenne by complete coincidence seemingly unaware
that the family raising her sons had also moved there. She took a job as a switchboard operator at Francis
E. Warren Air Force Base in the mid-‘50s and worked there until she retired a chief operator not long before her death. She never married, but a woman who I
connected with in a Cheyenne Facebook
group, knew her and said that she was attractive,
intelligent, and sometimes dated senior officers on the base, or
at least was their companion at officer’s club functions and the
like. She never married or had any other
children. When she died, she was in contact with one brother in Montana but it is not clear if she reconciled with any other members of her family.
I couldn’t help but imagine what would have
happened if my two mothers met.
Two Mothers
I wonder if they
would have liked each other
or had anything
to say
if they had met for coffee and pie
on a Saturday afternoon
at the Plaines Hotel Coffee Shop
each maybe in a summer dress,
faux pearls and clip-on earrings,
white gloves for sincerity and probity.
After the pleasantries
and forced smiles
would they have fallen into awkward
silence,
each eying the other for signs of pity
or remorse,
blowing clouds of cigarette smoke
and wishing the black coffee with
sugar
was a vodka highball?
Could they fall
to chatting like old school girls
having just two boys between them,
boys given by one and ransomed by
the other,
babes that shattered one family
and filled the void of an aching
heart in other,
children that crushed one dream,
and raised impossible expectations
in another?
—Patrick
Murfin
Powerful, thank you for sharing.
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