An epidemic of bastards

The thing I am refusing here is to feel ashamed of my son. Or myself. What I want to know is how he and I fit into the shape of the world around us. For that, the past may be instructive.

In my own family tree, I can trace only two out-of-wedlock births: two uncles made half-uncles by the fact that they were fathered by someone other than my maternal grandfather. My grandparents, Hal and Marjorie, divorced in the early 1940s. He left for Manhattan looking for fortune as a Madison Avenue photographer. She remained in a small town raising four kids on her own in part by renting rooms out to boarders. Rumor has it that her fifth and sixth children were fathered by one, probably two, of these boarders, who also left her to do the raising alone until she died of pneumonia in 1947.

My grandmother's youngest child was only a few months old when my grandmother fell ill. Her last wish was that none of the children go to live with her in-laws. But because my grandmother's own siblings could not afford to take them, the children were orphaned, fostered out and adopted. Some spent their entire childhoods in rural New Hampshire only a few farms away from each other but never knew it, at least not until 42 years later, when a string of flukes unexpectedly brought them together again.

My grandmother was the age I am now when she died. My mother was 8 years old when she and her sister were adopted by an older, childless couple who lived frugally in a house by an enormous salt marsh on the New Hampshire coast. My oldest uncle was too old to be adopted, so at 15 he bided his time with a foster family for a year until he was old enough to join the service.

The state gave my youngest uncle to a foster family that supplemented its income by hosting more than 25 foster children in a dozen years -- not the miracle story in a made-for-TV movie, but the sad tale of children who often went to sleep hungry and spent their days working the farm as unofficial indentured servants.

Everyone from town to town kept track of the Richardson kids and their new names. They knew where they all were and how they fared. But the children themselves wouldn't find each other until they had grown children of their own.

Shame, I am sure, had much to do with this. Especially the shame over the births of the youngest sons, and the earlier shame of the divorce. When my own mother decided to divorce my father years later, her adoptive parents told her to suck up the pain and live with my father even though the marriage was a train wreck. And when she went ahead and divorced him anyway, her parents, out of shame, refused to help her support her three children.

On the other side of my son's family tree is his paternal grandmother, Maria Davilla, who was raised with her siblings in poverty in Zacatecas, Mexico. There is an echo of Marjorie's story in Maria's: She too married young and had six children. She also divorced and was left to raise her children alone. But Maria didn't die so her kids remained under one tin roof in a barrio in Chihuahua. Their father was a gold digger -- for real. He packed off into the mountains for months at a time with pickaxes and mules looking for fortune. Meanwhile, in Chihuahua, Maria put meals together out of the butcher's discards -- bones, fat, entrails.

When I met her years later, Maria was renting a stall the size of a small bathroom in a mercado where she cooked soups, tortillas and carne asadas for the lunch crowd in the business district. Her sons came most days to eat her food before going back to low-paying jobs. Their father was rumored to be in the city, but he never showed up. Angel, an uncle of Gabriel's whom I met briefly -- a tall lanky man with sandy hair and edgy demeanor -- has several children by different women, none of whom he supports. Not one bone scrap.

And of course there is Gabriel's own father. Beyond this I cannot reach back. Still, the pattern of abandonment shows its webbed circumference.

Maybe it is true. Maybe my son and I are part of an epidemic that is ruining this country. Without my knowing it, I have stepped fully into a tendency that began with forebears. I have brought a child into a difficult world untethered, with only a blurred place to hang his name.

Or maybe my son and I are seeds of a great tree, whose flowers were pollinated by winds that have carried us far. We root in the rocky ground of our inheritance. And the soil will be made good by us in our own way.

• View blog reactions