by Ann Fessler
Close to a year later, my friend who had been prompting me to do this all along said, “You know, so many times kids will change their minds. Why don’t you just call Catholic Welfare and ask that social worker to contact her again and ask her if she’s considered changing her mind?”
So I called Catholic Welfare one morning and the gal came back on the phone and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t find a file with your name on it.” I was angry. I thought, “What do you mean you can’t find a file?” Good grief, you know, it was only a year ago. She said she would leave a message for the gal I had worked with. Well, she called me at my office about three hours later and she said, “I have to tell you. I am shaken up by this whole situation.” She said, “The reason we couldn’t find your file, it was because your daughter called here about an hour before you did this morning and someone put your file on my desk and that’s why the other person couldn’t find it.”
Yeah. We just kind of both knew that it was meant to be at that point in time. We exchanged a few more letters and finally decided that it was safe to give each other a phone number.
Her family was given so many misconceptions when she was adopted. Her husband is just a super, super guy, quite a character, very Irish. Her family is all Irish, so the agency told them that they had an Irish baby for them. I mean, my dad wore a shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day, but that’s about it. My mother is a full-blooded Swede and my daughter’s father’s parents are both full Swedes. So she’s 75 percent Swedish and the rest is kind of a mixture. The weekend that we finally met, her husband said, “You know, first of all I was told I had an Irish wife. Now I find out she’s a Swede. Secondly, I get two mothers-in-law.”
—Mary I
Whether a search is initiated by the mother or the adult adoptee, the person who searches generally spends quite a bit of time contemplating the process and possible outcomes. They have had time to prepare emotionally for the reunion. The person who is found most likely receives a call or a letter out of the blue. The emotional intensity of that first, unexpected letter or phone call can be powerful indeed.
It was the day Dale Earnhardt died; it was that Sunday. We were watching the race and I remember seeing it happen. About nine-thirty that night, the phone rang and I said, “Hello?” And a man’s voice said, “Um, yes, I’m trying to reach a Cathy that used to live in…” Now, my high-school reunion is coming up next year, thirty-five years, and I figured that’s what it was. I’ve been married for twenty-six years and no one knows me by my maiden name. Then he said, “Does the date April 29, 1970, mean anything to you?”
I literally fell on my knees. I was standing right there. My knees gave right out on me, ’cause I knew right away who it was. Then he started saying, “I weighed…” and I would say, “Yeah, you weighed…” And he said, “I was born at…” and I would say, “Yeah, you were born at…” And then he said, “You remember all that?” I said, “You don’t forget that. Don’t you know I thought about you every single solitary day of my life?”
When I got married and I was walking down the aisle, I talked to him. When his sisters were born, I talked to him. I would say, “You have a sister now. You have another sister now.” I can honestly say that when my parents died I stood at the coffin and I said some really nasty things to each of them. I’m sad that they died, but my relationship with my parents was never the same after that. Never the same. I hated them for what they made me do.
None of my family knew. I never, ever, ever talked about it until he found me. My children didn’t know about him. I had to tell my husband; he didn’t know, either.
My husband was sitting right here, and I said, “I gotta tell you something that’s going on in my life that you need to know about.” Well, he thought I was sick. I could see the look on his face—he had that scared-to-death look. I said, “I had a baby in 1970 and I had to give it away for adoption.” He just looked at me and he went, “I hope it’s not another girl.” That’s exactly what he said. My husband is the only guy in this house. We have two daughters and the hormones fly. I said, “No, it’s a son.” Next question: “Does he play baseball?” That’s all he wanted to know. He’s a baseball coach, so he wanted to know, “Is he an athlete?” “No, he’s not. He’s an electrician, he’s not an athlete.”
He said, “I need to deal with this in my own way.” We kinda kept away from each other for a couple of days. I gave him his space and he was fine with it.
—Cathy II
I’m looking through the mail and I saw a little card that looked like my girlfriend Lorraine’s handwriting. I opened it up and it began, “Dear Kathleen, it was twenty-one years this past December since we last saw each other. I hope you will remember me…” The letter went on and she gave me her address, her phone number. I had to read it a second time. I couldn’t believe it.
I immediately tried calling her. She came out to see me that night, that very night. I think we stayed up most of the night talking. She had so many questions. I can’t tell you what it felt like to be looking at her. I was waiting for it not to be real. She wanted to hear the story and I told her the story the best that I could.
She was graduating from college that May and she asked me to go to her college graduation. She was going to tell her adopted parents and I have adopted children, so I was sitting on both sides of this. I asked her if she would just please not tell them until after graduation, because they had brought her to this point in her life, in their life, and it was very important that they had that day. But I said I would go.
I sat at her graduation all by myself over in a corner, sobbing. The people around me were probably thinking, “Oh, that poor woman, she must have been scrubbing floors to put her child through college.” If they only knew. I just sat there thinking, “My God, when I left that infant in a nursery I never thought I would be sitting here at her college graduation.”
—Kathi
Many mothers describe their reunion as an emotional roller-coaster ride. When talking about their relationship with their adult child, they often sound like someone recounting their first experience of falling in love. These newly formed relationships are filled with intense emotion that, as in many romantic relationships, is not always equally or simultaneously felt. The emotions described by mothers I interviewed included extreme highs, being obsessed with their adult children, wanting to know everything about them, wanting to be with them every minute, wanting to hold and touch them. It’s not uncommon for women who reunite with a son who looks exactly like their boyfriend of so many years earlier to find themselves momentarily attracted to him. The lows included revisiting the feelings of loss, betrayal, and shame that occurred around the surrender; reverting to the age they were at the time of their loss; experiencing rejection, anger, or ambivalence from their child; or feeling a new sense of profound loss that comes with realizing that the baby they have thought about all these years is a grown person, and that the lost years can never be regained.
Only two of the mothers I interviewed said they questioned whether they would have a reunion, given the opportunity to do it over again. For the overwhelming majority, it was the beginning of the healing process. For mothers who had internalized their grief for thirty or forty years, the reunion was an important awakening, though sometimes an incredibly painful process. Whether set off by seeing baby pictures of their adult child for the first time or by a simple act of kindness and acceptance, the result for some was an eruption of grief and anger that had been bottled up or denied for years.
About 1989 I started thinking more about my daughter. I never allowed myself to go too deep. I was just wondering…is she okay? Sometimes I would pick up the phone and call the agency in Illinois and hang up. I didn’t even know what to ask. I had read nothing on adoption. I didn’t know about nonidentifying information. I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Then, I think it was 1991, I sent a letter to the agency and I put my address and phone number, so if she ever contacted them…this is how they could
get hold of me.
When she called me the first time I cried, but it was stilted; I still wasn’t letting it out. I sent her pictures right away, but I had a hard time getting pictures from her. Finally, I came home from work and in the mail is this big envelope. Oh, I just couldn’t wait to look at the pictures. I was by myself in the house. I was standing in the kitchen, and there was an eight by ten of her as a baby. I can’t describe the sound that came out of me. It was a wail. It was not crying, it was an animal sound. It was like a wounded animal. It scared me. I was so glad nobody was home.
I hadn’t cried all through the years, but looking at the pictures—that’s what burst the dam. That’s what did it. She was about three months old. That made it so real. The reunion unlocked it, but those pictures really burst it wide open. I cried a lot more after that.
One day when we were together I said, “I wish I could put you back in here and start all over again.” And she said, “But I’m too big now.” And that’s the loss. You can’t get it back.
—Christine
While I was pregnant, I wouldn’t look in the mirror at myself other than from the waist up. I had this whole denial system. I thought I was being sensible. If you’re not gonna have a baby, then you can’t have it in your head, either. I didn’t want to see her when she was born. I heard her cry and she was taken away. I stayed in the hospital for a week and I would walk up and down the hall, but I would never go as far as the nursery. Three weeks after I gave birth, I was living in New York. I started summer school at Columbia. I got a job. And it was as if it hadn’t happened.
So what this story becomes is how I don’t feel anything about it after that. But there was this problem about not being able to hear infants cry. I couldn’t stand to hear infants cry. I couldn’t stand it.
I gave birth in ’64 and in March of 1988 I somehow found the wherewithal to sign up for this registry in the state of New York for people who had given up children. I registered and nearly nine years later I came home and there was a slip saying I had a registered letter from the State of New York. I knew what it was. It was like I was in another world.
I know I must have slept some, but I felt like there was somebody sort of outside of me, watching me. I felt like I was losing my mind. But I was at the post office the next morning at nine o’clock.
There had been a match. “If I was still interested in having contact I was to sign and notarize.…” I walked out of the post office and over to the bank. I swear it was not me walking, doing this. I got the letter notarized. I turned around and I walked back to the post office and I put it in the mail. The rest of the day I felt like I was high. There was this amazing sort of feeling. The numbness certainly was still there, but I was so excited.
A couple weeks after that she called me and that’s when I knew something was really, really wrong with me because I was so numb. I couldn’t feel anything. Physically, I felt this incredible pit in my stomach and my heart was racing, but I just didn’t feel anything emotionally. The shame now is that I could just cut myself off like that. I mean, I know I had a lot of help in doing that, but it feels like I was inhuman and that’s horrible to live with. That’s what I struggle with now, trying to not feel like such a robot. I had to make myself into that in order to do what I did.
After I met my daughter, I was getting major dental work done. My dentist is an American-born Chinese woman who is also an adoptive mother. One day I was holding a magazine that had an article on adoption, and I said, “Oh, another thing on adoption.” And she said, “Are you adopted?” And for the first time in my life, in this kind of situation, I said, “No. But I’m a birth mother.” And we both started crying. She said, “How old is your daughter?” I said, “She’s thirty-seven.” She gave me a hug when I left.
I had to go back a few days later and, having told her, it felt scary. When people have asked me if I have children, I’ve always said no. At the end of our session, she gave me this wrapped present. I went out to the car and I opened it up and it was a book about birth mothers. At first, it was like it wasn’t real that I was getting this from her. And then all of a sudden I started to feel her kindness and I started to really cry. I cried for the next three days. I went to work. I functioned. I saw my patients. But I was a wreck.
All of a sudden it really hit. What did I do? I had been this robot and I gave up this child. I just fell apart. I started getting flashbacks of being with my parents and then being in the hospital and not walking down the hall to the nursery. All this came back in wave after wave after wave. I was out of my mind. I just hurt. I hurt about who I was and what I had done. You just don’t take somebody out of your body and deposit them someplace where you won’t see them or know them. You just don’t do that. I just felt I was so inhuman that I had participated in this. I was just frantic and nobody got it. Nobody understood the hell that I was in, including my therapist. I was having nightmares, one after another and they were always back then, thirty-five years ago. I told my therapist, “I think I have post-traumatic stress disorder.” The next time I saw him, he said, “You’re right. That’s what you’re describing.”
I began to see how my whole life had developed around this. It had a hell of a lot to do with why I had no children, and why I was so lonely, and why there was no man in my life. There’ve been men, but really inappropriate men who didn’t mean anything to me. There was a certain kind of depression that I’d lived with for years and years. I did everything I could to not feel that attachment. With that wall breaking down, I started to feel just what I had done and what had happened to me, in a way and at a level that I had never felt before. I was no longer numb.
—Judith III
SUSAN II
The guy that I had been dating had problems scholastically, and his parents decided to send him to private school. So he came to say good-bye. My parents had a very, very big yard and he parked his car under the trees and we were out there necking and petting and doing the things that boys and girls do. He had been after me for some time to begin a sexual relationship and I had not done it. We hadn’t even really explored. I mean, beyond petting there wasn’t any exploration. And to this day I really have no clue what possessed me to do this, but I decided that this was definitely the night that I needed to give myself to my boyfriend and give up my virginity. And that was the night I got pregnant.
My boyfriend came to see me during winter break. I remember him in the living room of my grandparents saying to me, “Sue, I’ll marry you. I will marry you.” And I said, “What, are you out of your mind? You’re eighteen.” I wasn’t even seventeen, I was sixteen. I said, “We can’t get married.” And it was then that he told me that the year before he moved to our town he had gotten another girl pregnant and he didn’t want to lose another child.
The agreement was for me to go to Florence Crittenton Home in March. From January to March, I went to day school there. My mother drove me every day. My grandmother was enlisted to take care of the two little kids while my mother took me in so that I could keep up my schoolwork. I mean, I graduated from high school at Florence Crittenton, and it’s really thanks to my mother, who insisted I was going to finish school.
In March, I went to live at the Crittenton home and I stayed there until my baby was born in June. When Karen was born the doctor, who was the only female on staff, came out to the waiting room and she said to my mother, “Would you like to come in and see your granddaughter?” Think about that. It’s 1965. That is not what happened for most women. That is not the treatment women were given. But my mother went in and actually held Karen before I did. My mother was there when they cut her cord. So she saw her first grandchild, and held her even before I did.
At that time, the rule at this Florence Crittenton home was if you chose not to see your baby, then you never saw your baby. But if you chose to see your child, then you lived in for the next seven days. You fed the baby several times a day, changed diapers; they brought the baby to you constantly. And I wanted to
be with my baby. So Karen and I spent the next seven days together bonding. I mean, I remember every day, I remember every moment, I remember every feeding—I remember it all.
And I also remember, and this is really hard to say, but I also remember wanting to get home. I wanted it over with. And that’s hard. Because the memory I would much rather have had was that I didn’t want to let her go. But I was so conditioned by that point—so many people telling me that I couldn’t do this, there weren’t any options, it was a fait accompli. So I just wanted it over. And I didn’t realize how precious those days would be later on.
When I look back, the social worker who had worked with me was wonderful. There was never any question this baby was going to be given up for adoption, so there was never any discussion about keeping her. Never. But I think it was either on day two or day three I decided I wanted to go home. I was done. And I called over to Florence Crittenton and I left a message for this social worker and I told her, “I want to go home. Please take the baby, I want to go home.” And she wrote me a letter and had it delivered and said, “No. You’ll want these days later. You have to do this. You have to go through this experience, Susan. You wanted to be with your baby and, believe me, in the years to come you’ll be glad that you did this.” And she was right. I needed to spend those days with my baby.
My parents and my boyfriend’s parents had spent a lot of money on my incarceration, so my future was very different than all of my other friends’. Going to college was out of the question. I went to work and I went to night school. But one thing I can say unequivocally: my daughter drove me all my life. I never ever wanted her to find me and to find somebody less than the most successful woman on this earth. Karen was my beacon; Karen was my beacon all through those years. I was driven to be the very best that I could be for her. I knew the day I kissed her goodbye that we would see each other again. I never doubted that she would be back in my life ever. Ever.