I watch him sometimes, from a distance, when the family gathers. He’s usually in a corner, quiet, tracing patterns on a dusty tabletop or staring out the window. Just a little boy, maybe eight or nine, with hair that catches the light just like mine, and eyes that hold too much sadness for someone so young. My family, they want to cut him out. They always have.It started subtly, years ago. Whispers in the kitchen. Cold looks across the dining room table. He was a constant thorn, an unwelcome shadow. “Such a burden,” I’d hear someone sigh. “A difficult child,” another would murmur, shaking their head.
He never did anything particularly difficult. He was just… there. A reminder of something everyone wanted to forget. I saw the way he shrunk into himself, how his small shoulders would hunch at the sound of an approaching adult. My heart ached for him, a pain so sharp it would sometimes make me gasp for air when no one was looking.
Barry Manilow performs onstage at The Forum on August 4, 2017, in Inglewood, California | Source: Getty Images
Family dinners were the worst. He’d be placed at the farthest end of the table, rarely spoken to directly, his plate often the last to be filled. His presence felt like an inconvenient truth, a ghost haunting our polished home. I’d try to offer a kind word, a gentle touch on his arm, but it was always met with a swift, disapproving glance from someone across the table. A silent warning. Don’t encourage it. So I’d retreat, my guilt a hot coal in my gut, leaving him isolated, watching the laughter and conversation unfold around him like a foreign movie.
The pressure mounted as he grew older. He wasn’t getting any “easier,” they’d say. He was too withdrawn, too quiet. “He needs a different environment.” “A place where he can truly thrive.” Code words, all of them. What they really meant was: “Get him out. Get him away.” My stomach would clench every time I heard it. My hands would start to shake. They were talking about shipping him off. To a boarding school, a distant relative, some facility. Anything to erase him from our daily lives.
Garry Kief and Barry Manilow attend the Pre-GRAMMY Gala at The Beverly Hilton in California, on February 14, 2016 | Source: Getty Images
I tried to argue, once. Just a quiet suggestion that maybe he needed more love, more attention. My words were met with a wall of stares, cold and unwavering. “You don’t understand the complexities here,” one of them said, their voice laced with a warning. “Some things are just… rotten at the core.” Their eyes flicked to me then, a knowing look that made my blood run cold. They weren’t just talking about him. They were talking about me.
Every night, I’d lie awake, the image of his sad eyes burned into my memory. The desperate urge to protect him, to pull him into my arms and tell him he was loved, warred with the crushing weight of everything I stood to lose. My perfect life. My reputation. My carefully constructed reality. I told myself it was for the best. That he would be better off. A lie I repeated until it tasted like ash in my mouth.
Garry Kief and Barry Manilow attend the Pre-GRAMMY Gala at The Beverly Hilton in California, on February 14, 2016 | Source: Getty Images
Then came the final decision. A family meeting, hushed tones, averted gazes. He was to go. Next month. To a distant, prestigious school, they announced, where he could “flourish.” They presented it as a gift, a blessing. I just sat there, my heart pounding, my throat tight, unable to speak. Unable to move.
Later, I walked past his room. The door was ajar. He was packing a small backpack, slowly, deliberately folding a worn t-shirt. He didn’t look up when I hesitated in the doorway. He just kept folding, his little hands moving with a resigned grace that tore me apart.
And in that moment, seeing the silent despair in his small frame, the decades of carefully buried truth exploded inside me. The truth that explained every cold glance, every whispered word, every effort to erase him. The truth that made me complicit, a coward, a monster.
Barry Manilow performs on stage during his last Sugar Land concert on August 28, 2024, in Sugar Land, Texas | Source: Getty Images
He wasn’t just the little boy my family wanted to cut out. He wasn’t a burden, or an inconvenience, or a sad reminder of someone else’s mistake.
He was my son.
My son. Born in shame, hidden in plain sight, passed off as an orphan from a distant branch of the family tree. The result of a secret affair, an unforgivable betrayal that would have shattered my carefully curated world if it had ever been revealed. And I, his own mother, had stood by, silent and complicit, watching my family – my family – slowly, methodically, try to cut him out of our lives. Try to cut my own child out of my life, as if he were nothing more than a dangerous secret.
The secret didn’t change everything then. It changed everything now. Because now, the truth was out in the open, even if only in the shattered fragments of my own mind. And I knew, with a horrifying, gut-wrenching certainty, that I had failed him. I had let them cut him out. And in doing so, I had cut out a piece of my own soul. I had lost him the moment I gave him away, and I had lost myself the moment I allowed myself to watch him suffer in silence. I had chosen my life over his, my comfort over his belonging.
Kate Kosowicz, James ‘PJ’ Ransone Jamie McCarthy’s Birthday Party Veruca, NYC January 31, 2002
And as he zipped up that little backpack, still unaware of the profound confession brewing in my shattered heart, I understood. The secret that changed everything wasn’t that he was my son. It was that I had let him be an orphan in his own home.
