Donor 106

Phoebe Judge (0:00)

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Eve Wiley (1:14)

I grew up in a really small town in East Texas. It's about 5,000 people, so there's not really a whole lot out there.

Phoebe Judge (1:24)

Eve Wiley grew up in the early 90s with her mother Margo, her father Doug, an older sister from her mother's previous marriage, and a sister who was 14 months younger than her. Were you close with your younger sister?

Eve Wiley (1:38)

Yes, I was really close with my sister, but we were just really different. She kind of liked more science-y stuff, and she liked math. And I wanted to have more imaginary play, and be outside, and build forts, and play princesses. And so I think we tolerated each other, but we could not have been more different on all accounts. I was this blonde hair, like bright blonde hair, blue eyes, very fair skin. We would always joke that I was part of vampire, because I would go in the sun and just immediately turn red. And my little sister had this gorgeous olive skin complexion.

She had these big dark brown eyes, and then dark dark brown hair.

Phoebe Judge (2:29)

Eve's sister looked more like their father.

Eve Wiley (2:32)

And that would come up quite often.

Really in any conversation, the joke kind of ended on that I was that way because I was the milkman's kid. But that did start things of, oh my gosh, am I adopted? Those jokes would come up as well. And it wasn't just to our family. There were people in the community that would constantly be making comments as well, because I really was the black sheep.

Phoebe Judge (3:00)

When you were little, did you ask your mother, why do I look different?

Eve Wiley (3:06)

I did.

And the response I would always get is that genetics are a funny thing over and over and over again. And so we also would talk about maybe there were some throwback genetics from our Irish roots or something like that.

Phoebe Judge (3:25)

Eve remembers that when she was five, her father started to get really sick. He had a heart condition.

He died when she was seven.

Eve Wiley (3:35)

We were very close growing up. I look back at pictures and I can see that I was always on his hip and his arms right next to him.

It was really, really difficult. I didn't know anybody else in my tiny town who had lost a parent before. So I didn't really have a good frame of reference of even what to expect. And I certainly didn't understand all of the medical reasons behind it. So there were a lot of fears, thinking and assigning meaning to things of like, oh, if I eat this, then maybe that would make my heart go out. And so I remember a lot of those conversations of just double checking is this going to hurt me?

Am I going to get hurt like him? So it was really hard.

Phoebe Judge (4:25)

Eve says that eventually things got easier. Her grandparents had a farm about 30 minutes away that they would go visit. Eve played a lot of tennis, something she and her father had liked doing together. Tennis courts in the town were named after and dedicated to him, the Doug Andrews Tennis Courts.

By the time Eve was in high school, she traveled all around Texas for tournaments. And she says one of her favorite things to do after school was to go into her mother's office, sit at her computer, and check her mother's e-mails.

Eve Wiley (5:04)

So my mom, she was a school nurse. And so school nurse in a small town means that she had all of the juicy gossip on my cohort. And it also meant that I could get in there and maybe delete some e-mails if it came from a teacher about me not doing too well on a project or a test.