I remember walking into the kitchen, and wondering why it had suddenly gotten so quiet.

Our dinette was covered in family photographs, snapshots of family and friends, fond memories, and favorite past times spanning several decades. Over the course of the evening, my mother, grandmother, and aunt had sorted through piles of pictures, talking about family history and sharing memories.

When I looked up from the pictures, I saw that their eyes were filled with tears.

I asked what was wrong, and everyone looked at each other, but said nothing. So there I remained, staring at my aunt who was sitting across from me, and watching my mom and my grandmother avoid each others’ eyes.

Whatever it was, whatever secret had been kept from me, I was sure I could handle it. However, nothing could have fully prepared me for the weight that this secret would carry.

I was 15 years old. It was the end of my freshman year of high school. My aunt had come to visit us from Florida, and my grandmother was staying at our home for the weekend, in honor of an early surprise sweet 16 party which took place the following day.

“You’re not ready to hear this,” my mom whispered to herself. I’m convinced that she really meant to say, “I’m not ready to tell you this.”

I looked down at the pictures scattered across the table. One photograph had been turned over so all that showed were diagonal grey streams of the word Kodak. I picked it up, carefully studying every detail of the photograph.

The picture, taken when my mom was 19, showed her in a way I had never seen. Her skin looked like pure ivory, and her auburn hair like silk. Her eyes were innocent and sad, her gaze distant. She was sitting, with a book open, laid over her stomach.

I flipped the picture around, and slid it over to her after I had looked at it. I analyzed every detail in the background and foreground, searching for some clue to what was causing everyone so much pain.

“You all know something that I don’t,” I said, more of a statement than a question. The women shamefully nodded their heads and looked at each other. “What is it?” I demanded.

“You have to understand, I was young...” my mother started, tears streaming down her face.

She told me about how when she was 19, she met a man who told her that he loved her. He got her pregnant and said that he’d marry her and make it right.

He was 26, and had already fathered other children well before he ever met my mom. When she told her mother what had happened, that she was going to have a baby, my grandmother told her that if she had the child and kept it, she couldn’t live with her.

So my mom then went to live with her father in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Shamed by having found out that his daughter was pregnant, he insisted that she have an abortion.

She was already in her third trimester, and besides being illegal, an abortion probably would have killed her.

Hopeless, my mom sought help and guidance through the Catholic Family Center, which provides services to pregnant women who cannot keep the children that they bear. My mom found a family for the child to whom she would soon be giving birth.

In October 1980, my mom gave birth to a healthy baby boy. She was sedated while giving birth and never saw her firstborn. After she gave birth, the pregnancy was never really discussed any further, she said. I think everyone just wanted to forget that it had ever even happened.

“You don’t know how much it broke my heart every time you said that you wished you had an older brother,” my mom sobbed.

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend the concept of siblings, every chance I got, I vocalized my desire for an older brother. I had often fantasized about what it would be like to have an older brother: He would be tall and handsome, and all of my friends would have crushes on him.

He would play baseball and football with me in our backyard, and when the boys in our neighborhood picked on me, he would rough them up. When my parents got divorced, I locked myself in my bedroom for hours, wishing that I had an older brother to tuck me into bed and tell me that everything would be all right.

So at that moment I sat completely still. No tears would come to me until weeks later, when I realized the magnitude of the news. Even then it still hadn’t sunk in that an older brother had a place in my life.

Since then not a day goes by where I don’t think about him. Everywhere I go, I internalize and consciously pick apart every 20-something male that I encounter. Could this be my brother, I wonder?

Year after year the holiday season is difficult for me, especially when I’m buying gifts for loved ones. Every year for the past four years, I’ve picked out a gift for a brother that I know nothing about, and this year I did the same.

Every gift is wrapped in the holiday wrapping paper, each one adorned with ribbons and bows. I keep them hidden in a box in the back of my closet; I don’t know if he’ll ever get a chance to unwrap them.

I’ve called the Catholic Family Center a few times in the last four years, except the records were sealed and New York State laws are tricky regarding adoption information. Parents can find out non-identifying information about the children that they gave up for adoption, but siblings can only send away for information based on the small chance that the adoptee has used the state wide registry as well.

That’s providing that the adoptee even knows that he was adopted in the first place, and lives in the same state as those seeking information.

Recently, I asked my mom if she would ever consider attempting to contact her son; she looked at me although she hadn’t thought of it in some time. “I guess I’m just not ready for all of that. In my life, I’m just not ready,” my mom quietly said as she looked away.

Sometimes, however, I wish that my mom had told me the truth about my older brother and about her past from the beginning. Perhaps then I would not have felt so betrayed when I actually found out the truth about my mom’s experiences as a young woman.

I remember wondering what else I had been lied to about during the course of my 15 years. What other part of my identity had been completely false as I had believed it to be? For years, as I’ve looked around at my family members who knew the truth the entire time I was growing up; I’ve felt so angry at them for allowing a huge part of my life to be a lie.

“That was really the only thing that we kept from you,” my mom told me recently. “I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure of how old you should be, or when you would be ready. I didn’t really have a choice of when to tell you, though, so I just told you when I did; there was no way around it.”

I’ll never know the absolute desperation that my mother must have felt as a pregnant 19-year-old girl with no alternatives, or support. I can never take the pain of her past experiences and turn it into joy, and I will never be able to erase the shame and guilt of my mother’s mistakes as a young woman.

My mom says that she feels like she “made the right decisions,” and that she really had no other choice at that point in her life; mostly my mom just hopes that “my son never went without. If I ever knew that he has suffered in any way, I don’t know how I would ever be able to forgive myself,” she said, tears streaming down her face again. “A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about him,” she whispered to me as she looked down.

This past holiday season, just like last year and the two years before that, I wrapped a gift for my brother, and set it aside, just in case I ever do meet him. At least that way, if I ever do find out an address where he can be reached, I’ll be able to mail him all the gifts he’s missed these past years.

Hopefully, that way, he’ll be able to recognize the fact that he’s been thought of, with love, every year for as long as I’ve known about him.