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"Is something a secret if everybody knows it, but nobody talks about it?" -Macky Alston, "Family Name"

My mom is coming in to town on Thursday. I think that in general, knowing that I am going to see her instills some unavoidable anxiety in me. This time, though, it's not only my mom, but also my mother's mother, my mother's mother's boyfriend, and the immediate members of both our families. Yeah. That's enough to send me into panic mode.

There are two get-togethers every year. One in September for Rose's birthday and one in April for Jesse's. Next week Jesse is turning ninety-one years old. We don't know exactly how old Rose is because she has always lied about her age, but she's somewhere in her mid-eighties I think.

My relationship with my grandmother Rose when I was little was your typical grandmother-granddaughter thing. We'd go visit her at her home in Larchmont and she'd demand way too many kisses and let me try on her perfume and try and pawn off useless tchochkes on me and make me bagels with cream cheese and lox and ask me if I wanted to put on a sweater. Sometime in high school, though, my relationship with her changed. Or, I changed it. My uncle has his own issues with his mother, of course. He told me that the relationship I had with Rose wasn't always that way. When I was born, to her unwed, Jewish, and only daughter who had been living in sin with a black man, she was reluctant to acknowledge my existence and wouldn't visit me in the hospital that week in September 1972. At some point later on, I also found out, completely by chance, another disturbing family secret.

My mother is a freelance writer. One summer, years ago, when I was visiting her in Florida, she offered to pay me if I would help her organize her files, the ones consisting of almost every story she had published for magazines and newspapers over the years. At the time, the Sun-Sentinel had a regular non-fiction feature called "Can't Live Without 'Em" and my mom often filled the slot. As I was going through her by-lines, organizing her publications, I found one "Can't Live Without 'Em" entitled "Tar Baby". It was about my mom and the birth of her only daughter and the scandal surrounding her existence, the lies that unfolded to cover up the truths that no one wanted to accept because of their own shortcomings, self doubt, and racist views.

As the story goes, when I was barely a toddler and was going to meet extended family on my mother's side for the first time, Rose revealed to my mother that she had told the aunts and uncles that I was Vietnamese, and that my mother had adopted me. That was more acceptable than knowing that there was a half-black child in the family, borne to a couple who weren't married what's more. My mother went along with her mother's wishes, until one fateful first meeting with the relatives, when someone started to try to speak to me in French, thinking that most Vietnamese children know the language.

After I read my mother's story, I crumpled up the only two existing copies and threw them out without telling her. Of course, she knew I'd read it when she checked her files and found it missing, but we didn't talk about it for a long time. I stopped all contact with my grandmother and both my mother and my uncle new why. I think Rose did too and felt, and maybe has always, guilty about the decisions she made back then.

Fast forward to my mid-twenties when Rose met Jesse and they started having these birthday parties. The first one was a big deal -- it was Rose's 80th (we think) and my mother begged me to go. I did go that year, and to each one thereafter until a year and a half ago. The last birthday I went to was Jesse's which was attended by, among several others, Rose's best friend, whom I apparently had not met since I was very little. When I first arrived, I was standing with my mother and Rose when my mom reintroduced me to this friend as her daughter. The shock on this woman's face was priceless and, silly me, I thought it was just because she couldn't believe that this woman standing before her was the same little girl she remembered. But that wasn't it. That whole moment still confuses me and I can't quite figure it out. Maybe I look "more black" then I did then, whatever that means. But this woman refused to believe that I was blood related to Rose and her daughter. She just kept looking at the three of us, saying "no" while Rose stood nervous, embarrassed, speechless.

"Oh, but you're adopted," Rose's friend tried to reason.

"No." I said adamantly, "This is my mother. Rose is my grandmother.

"...Oh," she replied with what to me looked like shock and shame and disdain.

She couldn't bring herself to make eye contact with me or speak to me for the rest of the evening. She apologized to my mother and to Rose, but never said another word to me.

I don't remember who walked away first, but that one moment brought everything back up to the surface. It was bad enough that the lies still permeated my relationship with and to this family, but to be faced to face with concrete evidence of it more than twenty-five years later was enraging and it made me feel hopeless and helpless. Each year, twice a year, I did my grandaughterly/daughterly duty, sucked it up and attended those gatherings because I knew it would make everyone happy, and maybe help relieve some of the guilt I myself have always felt for cutting off ties with Rose. But after that day I started questioning again why I would submit myself to that kind of thing. I refused to go to the last engagement.

Last week, I started to get a series of phone calls from Jesse, saying he hoped I would attend his 91st birthday. I'm going. It's this Saturday. I'm going because it's the right thing to do and because I can go and get through and leave and say I went and it will make everyone happy. But it's hard. These family dynamics are hard. This fucked up disjointed family makes me anxious. The lies and secrets affect me deeper than anyone who isn't me can imagine. I am the only biracial child in that family and I feel my skin when I'm around them. I feel like people look at me as if there's a piece of broccoli stuck in my teeth but everyone's too ashamed to tell me.

Yet, they love me, they say, because I am the granddaughter and I believe them. And who knows how much longer they will be around. I don't forget, certainly, and I can't say I forgive because, somehow, that's still the hardest thing in the world for me to do. But I'm going. I'll be anxious about it up until the very last minute. Saturday evening it will be over, and hopefully, I'll feel okay about it. And then September will roll around and it will be Rose's birthday and time to show my face again.