Until I Say Good-Bye

by Susan Spencer-Wendel

  That’s the feeling I often had growing up. Like water in the ear. An unease in the soul. Chiefly because of my relationship with Mom.

  My mother was a Greek beauty. She had high cheekbones, raven hair, and almond eyes. Her waist was so small you wondered how her organs fit inside. People often told her she looked like Sophia Loren.

  Tee’s father worshipped her, as did my father. “She was the most exotic, beautiful woman I had ever seen,” Dad has said of meeting her.

  Soon after their marriage, Mom had a life-threatening miscarriage. And my parents both carried a gene for hemophilia. So they decided to adopt children rather than bear them.

  They adopted my sister Stephanie, a beautiful brunette, in 1964.

  When they adopted again two years later, Mom requested a child of Greek heritage. One with college-educated parents, she specified on the application. With no red hair and no freckles.

  She custom-ordered her ideal child: one like herself.

  And there I came. Pudgy. Blond. Beady blue eyes.

  The unremarkable-looking daughter of a remarkable beauty.

  Most days this was not an issue. As long as I did well in school—and I did very well—Mom was happy. But when Tee was peeved about something, watch out! When her cruel side flared, she hissed things I will never forget:

  “My natural child would not do that!”

  “My natural child would not look like you!”

  “Fat slob!” she often called me. She would puff up her cheeks with air. “This is how you look, you beady-eyed cow.”

  I was perhaps ten pounds on the heavy side.

  Stephanie and I joked often about Mom’s disappointment in me, laughing about how “those adoption folks musta pulled a fast one” on her, since I clearly wasn’t Greek.

  I remember being thrilled when people said I looked like Dad, because he had blue eyes too. I so wanted to resemble somebody. And so wanted to be close to him.

  My relationship with Mom changed as I got older and pushed back. I was not scared one whit to say, “Screw you!” Or, “If you lay a hand on me again, I will tell Dad!”

  Now, this did not happen on a daily basis, nor even a weekly one. Mom and I might go months without a scene. But when there was one—especially when Tee mocked my looks—it marked me. It left me feeling like a foreign exchange student in my own home.

  Our personalities were as different as our looks. Tee shunned attention and was always artificially proper in public. Always smiled and insisted everything was wonderful, even when it wasn’t. Honesty made Tee nervous. What would people think?

  I was quasi-incorrigible. I set the clocks forward in junior high so we’d go to lunch sooner. I snipped the ends off the teacher’s pet’s ponytail. I sideswiped the garage after an illicit drive in Dad’s Camaro when I was fourteen.

  I have scads of pictures of myself with my eyes crossed, puffing out my cheeks, my favorite clown pose. Mom must have hated that.

  It wasn’t that I was a bad kid, despite the Camaro.

  I was a straight-A honor student voted Most Likely to Succeed, a drum major, a class officer, and a member of the homecoming court.

  My high school crush, David Hruda, broke my heart when he told me, “You’re too nice for a boy like me.” And he was right.

  But Mom was convinced I was trouble—and that her natural child would not have been.

  Then there was religion.

  My parents are lifelong members of an enormous Southern Baptist church. Their church is attended by some of the most caring people you’ll ever meet. I never received anything but kindness from the members there.

  About high school, though, I began to question the Baptists’ one-way-to-heaven beliefs. I cringed at the converted Jew they trotted out before the congregation, saying he had found the only way to salvation: “Accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.”

  What about the millions of people, I asked, who don’t know Jesus? Or don’t worship him? The Buddhists? The Muslims? The Taoists? The Hindus? What about the Jews, whose belief system pre-dates Christianity by more than a thousand years?

  Millions of people follow ancient belief systems of which Jesus is not a part. “What about them?” I asked.

  “They go to hell. So we must save them,” was the Baptist answer.

  My heart said no. And I left that Baptist church as soon as I was old enough, joking I would only go back there in a pine box.

  A truth that hits me more each day.

  After high school, I lit out for college far away, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I studied abroad in Switzerland. Majored in international studies and interned at the United Nations.

  My parents paid for all this, including my extensive travel, even though they never traveled then nor understood my desire to do so.

  I became spoiled. I went to Dad after college and proposed that if he financed a trip around the world, I would get a job afterward and pay him back. He said, “Susan, I think you got that backward. Travel is the reward you get after working.”

  So I spent my twenties divining ways to travel and live abroad. Paid for everything myself. Grew away from my parents in spirit, as well as physical miles.

  Even after John and I had children and settled back in south Florida, there was more distance between my parents and us than the mile that separated our homes.

  In 2007, two years before I started showing symptoms of ALS, I snuck away to Miami for a weekend with Mom’s sisters, Sue and Ramona. The trip was a secret because Tee would have a hissy fit if she knew, scared to death we might talk about her. Those Damianos sisters—who by the way look exactly alike—are forever locked in pettifogging. At times, they have gone years without speaking to one another, in a huff about something or other.

  The first thing I said when I got to Miami: “I’m not talking about Tee. And neither are you.” Sure enough, it wasn’t long before her sisters started in on Tee. And like so many times before, I thought, How the hell did I end up in this bickering clan?

  When I returned home, there was a letter in my mailbox. It was from a social worker at the Children’s Home Society of Florida. It read: “If you are Susan Spencer born on 12/28/66, please contact me. I have some important information for you.”

  I knew exactly what it was.

  I called the next day. “Yes. That’s me. I was adopted through your agency.”

  “Your birth mother would like to have contact with you,” the social worker said.

  Now, I’ve always known I was adopted. Once, as a teenager, when things were tense with Tee, I paid to be part of a state registry to unite parents and children if both entered matching information.

  Tee was appalled when she found that out.

  But after my teenage years, finding my birth parents was never a priority to me. Indeed, on the day I received the letter, I had not thought about being adopted in a decade.

  I was forty years old with three children of my own. I was happy.

  The moment hit me hard.

  So hard, I backed away. I put on my journalist’s hat, divested myself of emotion, and simply copied down the information about my birth mother. She’s a retired nurse. Okay. A gardener. Fine. A racquetball player. Loves to travel. (So that’s where I got it!) She had just participated in a three-day walk for breast cancer research. She had a daughter who urged her to find me.

  Sounds like a respectable human being, I thought, relieved.

  “And why did she give the baby up for adoption?” I asked, avoiding the word me.

  “She would explain it best. Would you like to receive a letter from her?”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up and stared at my notes. I did not cry. I did not cheer. I did not immediately call anyone to tell them. I just thought: Holy shit!

  In the weeks that followed, I panned my life, wonderin
g how I would have reacted at other times. If my birth mother came for me when I was fifteen, I would have said, “Get me outta here!”

  At twenty-five: “Why did you do that to me? Why didn’t you like me?”

  But at forty, after children of my own, the angst was long gone. I knew it wasn’t personal, that when she gave me away she did not know me.

  I imagined handing my newborns off to a stranger, forever wondering what had happened to them. I realized the emotional toll of adoption was harder on the mother than the child.

  I wanted to meet her. I wanted to tell this woman thank you, to assure her that everything had turned out all right.

  I wanted to see my face in the face of another adult for the first time in my life.

  The letter came inside a manila envelope from the Children’s Home Society. I felt the outline of it inside. I smelled it. I put the manila envelope in my car, tucked right by the driver’s seat, and drove around for weeks with it there.

  I was nervous. Would I like her? Would she like me?

  I felt badly for my parents, as if I were betraying them. I thought a better daughter would have said, “No, thank you. I have parents. I want nothing to do with you.”

  I felt worse for my sister, Stephanie, also adopted. I thought this might wound her, make her wonder why her own birth mother had not looked for her.

  I decided that my mother, Tee Spencer, was the only person on the planet I would ever call “Mom.” Then, alone one Sunday afternoon, I opened the letter.

  In neatly flowing cursive, I read her name: Ellen Swenson. In 1966, she had been a nurse at the Mayo Clinic. He was a doctor. They had a brief fling, and she got pregnant. She moved away and never told him, putting the baby up for adoption as soon as it was born.

  There were pictures. One a close head-and-shoulders shot. Ellen was blond, with small blue eyes, a wide white smile. I ran to the bathroom mirror and held the photo beside my face. My breath caught in my throat. I looked like her!

  I looked away. The moment was like staring at the sun. So intense, I had to turn away. I had to slow down and let my eyes adjust.

  Months later, I wrote Ellen a letter, confirming that I believed she was my birth mother.

  “For long tracts of my life I longed to meet you. And just when things settled, when I was overwhelmed with my own children and the longing slipped away, there you came. Life is funny like that. Perfect like that,” I wrote.

  Initially, I had written back to her as a journalist. As a journalist, if someone tells you an incredible story, by Jove, you investigate. If someone says they’re your birth mother, you damn well check the facts. So I did. I wrote and asked Ellen to reveal details of my birth, like the hospital name, that only she and I would know.

  She wrote back with all the right answers.

  This is the real deal, I thought as I walked around for a week in a daze. This is the real deal. This is the real deal.

  Now, I have never been in an earthquake. But I imagine it similar.

  A sudden shock rattles your soul. The ground shifts. In minutes it is over, but it takes a long time to find your center of balance again.

  So I waited and waited, until I could write her back with my heart.

  No hurry, I told myself. The woman waited forty years. She can wait a little longer.

  I flung myself into busy. I had three kids, a fifty-hours-a-week job, friends who needed me. Gawd, I have to put the past behind me, I thought. Do I really need this intrusion?

  Somewhere in this fog, as I was hurtling through lunch one day, my mother called. My “real” mother, the woman who raised me, Tee Spencer.

  I will never forget sitting in the parking lot of the Middle East Bakery, mentioning oh-so-casually that I would like to come by and talk to her and Dad.

  “What’s wrong!?” Mom said.

  “We’ll talk in person,” I said, wanting to just wolf down my falafel and get off the phone.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “No. Later, Mom, we’ll talk.”

  “TELL ME!”

  “My birth mother contacted me. It’s really her.”

  Silence.

  Silence.

  Then, in a quivering voice, my mother said: “I knew this day would come. I always knew it would come.”

  Now, if there is a person to be thrown headlong into an emotional identity crisis with, it is not Tee Spencer. Why? Because she is insecure. Look at her the wrong way, and her feelings get hurt.

  “Do you still love us?” she asked.

  Oh Gawd, I thought. This is going to be a nightmare.

  A few days later, I put copies of the letters between Ellen and me in a manila folder and took them to my parents’ house. To be frank, I don’t remember what was said. Kinda like when I interviewed famous people. I turned on the recorder and talked on autopilot, listening from a cloud. But that day, I had no recorder.

  I do remember the first of Dad’s very few questions: “Where does she live?”

  “California.”

  “Good. Far away,” he said. “You don’t want her just droppin’ in.”

  I remember my mother bringing out the little pink baby dress she brought me home in. And the little yellow one she brought Stephanie home in.

  No, I don’t remember the words. But I remember the feeling. Isn’t that what really matters? How we are left feeling?

  I felt sorry for them. Mom’s little pink dress. Dad’s paralyzed emotion.

  I felt guilty. Because I knew in my heart I was going to do what I wanted, and they knew it too. It had always been that way. No guilt nor risk nor fear had ever dissuaded me from doing what I wanted.

  It had always been Me, the child they could not control. And Them, the oft-appalled parents.

  That meeting slowed me down, though, made me idle a while. I did not act. I went weeks and weeks without writing Ellen back.

  Mom asked now and then if I had had further contact with Ellen.

  “No.”

  Then Mom said something that impressed me, and I am one tough cookie to impress. Mom—the woman I was convinced would cower and focus on herself—said: “Don’t leave her hanging like that, Susan. She is hurting. She is a mom.”

  Still, I waited.

  I have often in my life been guided by invisible signs. I say, “The gods are divining this,” when circumstances allow for something otherwise unlikely.

  Like the fact that, after years of trying, I was accepted into a program for journalists at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles that summer. An all-expense-paid trip to California landed in my lap.

  The gods had served up the perfect cover story.

  “Well, Mom,” I told Tee, “if I am already in California, I may as well meet her.”

  “You do what you want,” she said. “We will support you. Just please don’t tell your children.”

  “Okay, Mom, I won’t.”

  So I wrote Ellen the letter. I told her that, yes, she was my birth mother, and that I was coming to California.

  Because life, when you least expect it, is perfect like that.

  I went to California in June 2008. I am tempted to say this was a year before my ALS, but I don’t know if that’s true. The ALS could have been with me already, but unnoticeable. It could have been with me always, since the moment of my birth.

  Suffice to say, I suspected nothing. I spent a week at the Loyola Law workshop, where the keynote speaker was the lawyer who had just won the court battle overturning the ban there on same-sex marriage. “The world is changing,” I kept hearing. “The world is changing.”

  And the future so unknown.

  Afterward, I visited a dear college friend in Los Angeles, Cathy, whom I had roomed with and traveled with while studying in Switzerland. We talked about old times, broke out photos of the Alps and the Hofbrauhaus and Carne
vale in Venice.

  I thought of all my parents had given me. They had sacrificed so much to launch Stephanie and me to college. I thought of Ellen. My thoughts pinged uncontrollably back and forth.

  I have had such a good life. Why am I doing this?

  This is part of you.

  What will she be like? What if I don’t like her?

  What if you do like her?

  God, I hope she doesn’t lock me in a bear hug and start gushing.

  If she’s anything like you, she won’t.

  Ellen lived five hours north of Los Angeles, in Sonoma County. My wine-loving self marveled at my geographic fortune. I was raised by teetotalers, but I have always loved to drink.

  A friend hired a driver to take me to Sonoma. Nancy offered to fly out and meet me for the drive. Nancy and I went everywhere together, talked about everything, supported each other through every major life event. This time, I declined. Not wanting any distraction. Wanting to be absolutely alone.

  Just me, my thoughts, and Ellen. A onetime meeting. To hear details. Thank her. And leave her behind. That was my plan.

  In the end, I opted to ride a crowded bus. Now that I was here, I didn’t want to be alone. I put in my iPod earbuds and played one song over and over, Kate Voegele’s “Lift Me Up.” Her sparrow voice rose and fell in tandem with my heart.

  This road

  is anything but simple.

  Twisted like a riddle.

  I’ve seen life and seen love.

  So loud

  The voices of our mad doubts.

  Telling me to pack up and leave town.

  I arrived in Sebastopol and holed up in a hotel a few miles from Ellen’s place. I had requested that we not talk beforehand. I’d simply appear at her door at the appointed time the next morning.

  I walked halfway to her house, judging the distance, working off nervous energy. Then I hung around the Sebastopol town square, watching barefoot women with long hair and tie-dye shirts nurse their children while long-haired men smoked pot.

  I bought dinner at the Whole Foods Market. The store had an odor of overripe people or overripe food. I ordered a tofu Reuben (tofu!?) and returned to the square. As I bit into the rubbery Reuben, the thought dawned on me: Ellen’s a hippie!