Welcome to the Money or Love Share Your Love Story Contest!
From August 12th through September 4th I will be posting entrees to the contest on this blog, in both video and written formats.
On September 5th, I will select three stories from all submissions as winners of signed copies of Money or Love .
Those three will then be posted across social media where people can vote for their favorite.
On September 12th the votes will be tallied and the #1 vote getter will will win a $100 gift certificate to Ristorante Lombardo, a Buffalo, NY landmark Italian Restaurant that plays a significant role in Money or Love.
(If the winner is from outside the Buffalo, NY area, a gift certificate from the restaurtant of their choice will be awarded.)
Thanks to every person who takes the time to share their love story in this contest. You are an inspiration to all of us looking for love ….at any age.
Money or Love Tell Me Your Story Contest Entree #5
Author: Joyce Kryszak
Familiar as a summer sky, draped over a gentle wave, her sea-blue eyes mirrored mine, and I knew instantly. This woman was the long-lost love of my life. My sister, after 58 years, was finally “home.”
Christina, or Tracy as my other siblings and I knew her, was never a secret. As soon as each of us was conscious of knowing, Mom confessed her greatest regret: Christina was given up for adoption at birth. My two brothers, two other sisters and I all knew the tortured story well.
Our mother, a woman of immense love, but of little restraint or discretion, gave birth to seven children, by four different men. Somewhere in the middle was the union with Christina’s and my father, the quintessential charming Irishman with fantastic stories you desperately wanted to believe and those sea-blue eyes that made you not care if they weren’t.
There was another family Dad neglected to mention in his stories as he wooed our mother. On her own, already with one child born out of wedlock, our mother was easy prey, but their love story was real. Until it wasn’t. After I was born, came a baby boy, our brother, Tommy. The love story began to die when Tommy did, from SIDs when he was barely three-weeks old.
Totally bereft, Mom was now left to care for two children born out of wedlock – my older brother, Mark, and I – with few resources other than my father’s support. Then, even that ended, thanks to an understandably scorned, estranged wife and a legal system in her favor.
Story Author, Joyce Kryzsak (r) and her sister Christina
Mom discovered she was pregnant again, this time with Christina. Now with no resources and no options, baby “Tracy Bryan,” as it read on her birth certificate, would be carried away from the delivery room without Mom ever seeing her daughter’s face. “I can still remember,” Mom would recount through tears every year on “Tracy’s” birthday. “All I saw was the shock of black hair on the back of her head as the nurse carried her down the hall.”
Knowing what it cost her, and how deeply she believed “Tracy” was better off not having her life interrupted by Mom’s chaos (which, indeed, continued), my siblings and I honored Mom’s wish not to look for our sister. But when Mom died in 2014, we knew we had to find our sister, our long-lost love, the missing piece of all of our hearts.
Thanks to genealogy sites and to kismet (thank you common Facebook friend, Christina Abt!), last year, 58 years after she was born, I met my sister on her doorstep in Boston, New York. It turns out, Christina was with us all along.