by Ann Fessler
My concern for Eleanor was the second reason I had not attempted contact. I assumed she had not told her subsequent children about her experience. I knew that her husband had passed away years before, as had her parents. Her secret, most likely, had been buried with them. Maybe she wanted it to stay that way.
Hazel passed away in 2003, almost a year to the day after I began interviewing. I waited for what I felt was a respectable length of time and then wrote Eleanor a letter. It was not the first letter I had composed, but it was the first I sent. As so many years had passed since I had gone on my journey to find a yearbook picture and was given her address by her unsuspecting brother, I decided to send the letter by certified mail. I could not be certain that she still lived in the same house, or even that she was still alive.
Dear Eleanor,
I hope that this letter does not come as too much of a shock to you but I am an adoptee and my search for information about my biological family has led me to you. I believe you may be my mother.
I sent for my original birth certificate quite a few years ago and have weighed the pros and cons of sending you a letter for a very long time. My hesitation was, for the most part, due to my concern about whether or not you would welcome contact. I worried that this letter would bring up painful memories that you may not want to revisit. I also worried about hurting my adoptive mother’s feelings, but she passed away in June and thus the only thing holding me back since then has been my concern about invading your privacy. But I decided to take a chance and write.
First, I want to reassure you that I have never had any negative feelings about being surrendered for adoption. Having grown up in the fifties and sixties I am well aware of the social stigma and shame that single women had to endure as a result of getting pregnant. I always felt very empathetic towards you, knowing how difficult it must have been.
I also want you to know that I did have, and continue to have, a wonderful and fulfilling life. My adoptive parents, who have both passed away, were completely devoted to my brother and me. Like many couples who turn to adoption, they wanted children very badly but could not have their own. Three and a half years after I was adopted, my parents adopted my brother. We lived on the edge of town in a rural setting. My father had grown up on a big farm in Iowa and though he didn’t make his living as a farmer he raised crops on our 5 acres to keep his hand in it.
I had a fairly idyllic childhood growing up in the country. I was, and still am, a huge animal lover and spent my days exploring the fields that surrounded our house with my dog by my side. My mother, who would have loved to put me in frilly dresses, was always somewhat dismayed that she could never get me out of my cowgirl boots and jeans. I always preferred building forts and growing things to playing with dolls. I loved art and attended Saturday classes at Toledo Art Museum throughout my childhood.
Though I was pretty shy as a small child I became very outgoing and social in junior high school. I used my sense of humor and interest in storytelling to entertain my friends and make them laugh. I always received good grades, but I must say that I was much more interested in socializing and boyfriends than in my education when I was in high school.
I majored in art in college and later went on for two graduate degrees. I have been teaching photography, video, and related art courses at the college level since the mid-1970s. Though I studied drawing, painting, and other traditional mediums, I preferred using photography, film, video, and writing to tell stories based in real experiences. There is much more to say about the specifics of my artwork, but I don’t want to overwhelm you with information in the first letter. I’ll save that for the next one if you want to continue to communicate.
I’ve been living in Rhode Island for the last 10 years and have lived in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Tucson, and St. Louis, since leaving Ohio. My husband Peter works in New York so we have a small apartment there as well. On the weekends we try to put our busy week behind us by working in the garden or repairing one thing or another on our old house.
So now you know a little bit about me and I hope you will be willing to write back and tell me about yourself. I have many interests and personality traits that are quite different than my parents’ and I have always wondered if they were genetic.
My mother was always very open about the information she was given from the adoption agency, though I know that agencies are not always honest about the information they pass on to adopting parents. My family was told that you were from a big farm family and that my birth father was a football player. My adoptive father had been a star athlete in high school so I suspect that his farm background and his athletic ability both contributed to me being matched with my adoptive parents.
I would, of course, also love to know about the circumstances that led up to my birth. I’m hoping that you are willing to share the information and will not hold back for fear I might pass judgment on you. Please believe me when I say that I do not judge you, anything you did, or any decisions you made. I have talked to many mothers who have surrendered children for adoption and have heard every kind of story, so you don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings if the circumstances were anything less than conventionally romantic. It’s just that if I am ever to have any information whatsoever about my paternal lineage, it must come through you. So after telling me about yourself I would really appreciate any information you have about my biological father.
I have no particular expectations or ideas about where to go from here. I will not contact you again unless you contact me first. Take all the time you need. I fully understand if you do not want to take this any further, but I do hope you will at least write once, so I will have the answers to the questions that only you can provide.
All my love,
Ann
I mailed the three-page letter and waited for the card confirming receipt. But nothing. I envisioned her refusing the letter, or purposely allowing it to languish in the post office until the ten days were up and the letter would automatically be returned. The U.S. Postal Service Web site indicated that a delivery attempt had been made, but not whether it would attempt another. After a week I called the post office. Three days later the 3½" × 5½" green card arrived in my mailbox with her signature neatly and beautifully written out in uniform script above the line that reads “Recipient.”
A year later, I still had not received a response to my letter. But I could wait a while longer. After all, it had taken me fourteen years to write her and I did tell her to take her time. I did not tell her that I already knew quite a bit. I did not mention the conversation with her brother, my uncle, or the dull gray copy of her senior picture that I had photocopied from her high-school yearbook, which was now tucked away in a manila folder alongside the obituaries of her parents, my grandparents.
I said that I would wait for her to contact me, and I believed that when I sent the letter. But once that first big step had been taken it was hard not to take the next. Since I had not heard from her in such a long time, I concluded that she didn’t want anything to do with me. I was convinced that she was either scared out of her wits or simply did not want this intrusion into her life. Of these two possibilities, I hoped it was the latter. By now I had heard stories of women curling themselves into a fetal position after receiving a letter. I had visions of her in a heap on the floor. I had sent pictures. Maybe I shouldn’t have.
At some point my focus shifted. Now it seemed clear to me that she didn’t want to communicate, but I wanted to know why. I thought I knew. After more than a hundred interviews, I knew the most common reasons, but I wanted to know if the same was true in her case. I mulled it over. I had said I would let her make the next move. Could I really break the first promise I’d ever made to her? I decided to send a little card. The card said, “Still waiting to hear…” I didn’t really expect her to respond. This time I was sending a signal. The card was the promise breaker.
My husband will tell you that what I said about circling and mulling things o
ver is true. I’ve been talking about building a studio in the pasture behind our house for eight years. I draw up floor plans on the backs of used envelopes. I build scale models. I get estimates on the foundation, I speak to builders, I save money, but I don’t build the studio. Instead, I think, “With that same money I could put a down payment on land in Arizona. It would be a start on a winter getaway for retirement.” I look at property in Arizona. I research straw-bale houses. My husband is sick of hearing about the studio I’m going to build and the winters in Arizona.
Two months after sending the card, I called her. “Eleanor?” “Yes?” “This is Ann Fessler.” I had given a lot of thought to how I might keep her on the phone when she tried to hang up. Perhaps I would not even have a chance to ask for a moment of her time. She might say nothing at all and simply return the receiver to the cradle.
She said, “Well, hello…” It was a drawn-out hello, the kind with a slight rise in tone that suggests a pleasant surprise. I said, “Are you willing to talk to me…a little?” “Sure…” I was so unprepared for this response that I forgot everything I wanted to ask her. I said, “Well, I wasn’t sure because you hadn’t responded.…” She said, “I actually bought you a birthday card this year, but…I didn’t send it.” I still couldn’t remember my questions. I asked her if she had any questions for me, and that’s how we began.
She asked me about being a photographer and I explained that I taught photography but that I had been making video installations and short films. She asked more questions and I told her that I had been working autobiographically with the subject of adoption for years but that more recently I had been collecting the oral histories of mothers who had surrendered children, and the conversation continued from there. It was a steady stream of questions and answers in both directions that continued for two hours.
As I had always suspected, she got pregnant on New Year’s Eve. I had already counted backward from my birthday and guessed as much. Her story was not the story of ill-fated love that my parents had been told by the social worker at the adoption agency. They were not a couple who wanted to get married but were prevented by his family, who did not want him to drop out of college. He was not in college. None of that was true. It had always sounded a little too much like a Hollywood script to me. He was not a football player, either. He played basketball. I don’t even like basketball.
The truth, it seems, had been stretched in both directions. By now, I knew that agencies routinely fabricated information when describing the adoptive family to the mothers. But for some reason I had never contemplated what Eleanor might have been told about my parents. The story she was given was that my would-be adoptive mother was a nurse and that my father owned a factory. My mother was a practical nurse but my father certainly did not own a factory; he worked in one. The agency assured her I would go to my new family right away. She seemed a bit taken aback to learn that my parents were not able to take me home until I was three months old.
She, like many of the women I interviewed, had gone to a Crittenton home. Her story was familiar. She had stayed in her parents’ home, hiding her pregnancy with a girdle and oversized blouses until a month or so before she was due. At the maternity home they had to do chores and they were told not to reveal their last names. She learned about the maternity home from the doctor who confirmed her pregnancy.
I asked her who in her family had known. She had told her father, but not her mother. I asked her if that was because she was closer to her father but she said no. She had been close to both of them but she just thought her father would be able to handle it better than her mother. She assumed her father had told her mother at some point but her mother never said a word to her. As far as she knows, none of her sisters or brothers know, nor do her subsequent children, my half siblings.
Her father visited her a few times during her short stay in the maternity home. It could not have been easy for him to leave his farm for a day and drive more than two hours there and two hours back. Her boyfriend also visited. In fact, her boyfriend and her father drove her to the home together the day she checked in. This boyfriend was not my father. Between the time she discovered she was pregnant and the time she went away, she had met the man she would marry. She didn’t know she was pregnant when they began dating. They married a month and a half after I was born. He had left the decision about whether to bring me home to be raised by the two of them up to her. He did not want her to resent him later. She felt it would not have been fair to him.
I asked her if she could tell me who my father was, and she said she didn’t know if she should. She had written him from the maternity home once, because she felt he had a right to know, but she did not hear back from him. She thought he was still alive and probably married. Maybe his wife did not know. She didn’t want to cause any trouble.
We moved on to medical information: she has problems with her heart. Then we covered genealogy. After learning her identity, I had visited a family-history center and scrolled through lengths of microfilmed census records to chart the maternal side of my family tree. We compared what we had learned about our ancestors and then returned to the present.
We are both gardeners. We talked about the varieties of lilacs we have in common. We discussed the perennials and roses and shrubs we plant. She has a nice selection of trees, including a couple of catalpas. She said the pods make a mess but it’s worth it when they bloom. She said, “They’re real pretty when they bloom.”
I asked if she would be willing to meet and she said she would, so I asked her to think about what she would like to do with our day together. In the meantime, I would look into reservations and send her pictures of my garden. Afterward, I felt baffled by what had just taken place, shocked even. It was not at all what I expected. I thought the conversation would be short or she would hang up. It was so hard to absorb the fact that the woman I’d just been speaking to, and whom I had just made plans to go visit, was my mother.
We decided on a town south of where she lives and a month later I returned to the farmland I had traversed fourteen years earlier in search of her picture. I checked into a hotel the night before and that is where we met. I was less anxious on this trip. The wondering and circling were done. The desk called my room at 10:00 A.M. and I walked down to the lobby, where my mother was sitting in a chair waiting for me. We had a quick, brief hug and then set out on our day together. We had made plans to visit a public garden. I drove and we talked the entire time. It was easy and comfortable and she was generous and open with information about everything except my father, whom she said I resemble. I studied her face and kept an eye out for mannerisms, but I recognized nothing. I could have known her all my life and never guessed.
As we meandered on back roads, we talked about the chronology of major events in our lives. She and her husband built two houses; I have renovated three. I must have gotten my fort-building and power-tool gene from her. She told me about family members and their interests and I confessed that I had already met her brother. He had never mentioned the stranger who stopped by and asked questions about her.
At the end of our drive we returned to my room to look at the pictures she brought of her garden. It is elaborate and impressive and I was awed by her ambitiousness. She arranged a group of snapshots end to end, so I could try to make sense of the layout and see how the flower beds connected. Still not understanding, I asked another question and she flipped over the envelope that had held some of the pictures and began to draw a schematic that looked precisely like my sketched plans for garden plots and studios and houses in Arizona. And though I said nothing to her, I think that was the moment that I knew she was my mother.
I’m still not sure whether she was eager to meet or merely felt she owed it to me. She said she was told at the time of the relinquishment that she was never to have any contact with me. And though she did not say it directly, I suspect that the agreement she made was at least a part of the reason she did not respond when she received my let
ter. She is from a generation of women—unlike my own—that generally did what they were told.
I cannot fathom this event from her perspective. At seventy-five years old, she has just sneaked off for the day to meet a woman who is a both a stranger and the newborn she surrendered almost fifty-six years ago. But like the women I interviewed who were near her age, she does not talk easily, or emotionally, about her experience. We talked about feelings and about adoption in the abstract, as Hazel and I had done earlier. But at one point she did ask, “So you did have a good life?” And I assured her I did. There were only two times that I detected a crack in her voice. The first was when I was talking about how some of the women I interviewed had suffered and she said, “Yes, when you walk down the street you look at every little face and wonder.” And the second was when we were leaving my room to walk her to her car and she pulled a ring from her finger and gave it to me.
And so our reunion has begun, with neither of us terribly emotional—at least on the surface—and with no particular expectations and no specific plans. We will start with our common interest in gardens and sketchy plans on the backs of envelopes, and move forward. Not knowing whether that visit will be our last, I tried to write down the details before they escaped me. But my mind kept returning, again and again, to the image of a ring. Not the one she gave me when we parted but the one she mentioned in passing—an old high-school class ring that belonged to my father that she said is still in the bottom of her dresser drawer.