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I was adopted at birth.
For years, I shied away from my dual identity. Raised in a caring, nurturing family, I
shoved aside thoughts of my birth family as if bumping past furniture in the dark.
As a writer, I never guessed that my affinity for others' adoption stories would lead me ever
closer to my own hidden secret. I didn't imagine that seeking my roots
would lessen the fear that nudged me every time someone asked, "Do you
look like your mother or your father?" or "Does cancer run in your family?"
As I was growing up, my parents rarely mentioned my adoption. It didn't
interfere with our life together. They always introduced me as "our
daughter," rather than "our adopted daughter." I was born in the days when
adoption agencies screened genealogy of birth and adoptive families to
choose people with similar characteristics. My Dad and I are both tall
with medium brown hair and blue-green eyes. I looked like I belonged. It
was easy to keep my secret. I only told a handful of people.
My Dad confided that there was a paper he would give
me when I turned 21. I tried to say it didn't matter. But on my 21st birthday, I waited.
Dad drew a manila envelope from a locked file in his study. During my adoption
hearing, the attorney stood next to my Dad, flashing this paper in front
of him as if it were a glimpse at a poker hand. Something was unusual.
Despite efforts to keep everything secret, somehow, my birth mother's last
name was left on the document. My Dad teased, "Do you think you're tough
enough to take this?" Somehow I sensed he asked this question as much of
himself as of me. Dad was a physically imposing and financially successful
man who seemed bigger than life. Now I glimpsed fear on his face for the
first time. A chill passed over me and I drew back. "I don't think you
could find her," he said.
Yet there it was. A long name beginning with S. I felt no spark of
recognition. Seeing the uncharacteristic emotion on my Dad's face that
night vanquished my curiosity. I felt guilt from wanting to know more. I
sensed trauma in my birth mother's past led to my adoption. Did I dare
open this world of past hurt? In ways, not knowing felt safer. I mulled
over the idea of contacting my birth mother for a long time.
Then a strange coincidence happened. Later that year, I began work
as a telephone operator. Someone called from Chicago with the S. last name. For
the first time, I heard a voice speak aloud the name I'd only repeated in
my head. I shivered, suddenly alone in the room with hundreds of other
operators. Chicago? I felt like something had been handed to me.
I called directory assistance in Chicago. When they asked for a first
name, I told them Mary, the name my parents remembered from a social
worker's chance remark. Illinois directory assistance operators reassured
me that there was no Mary with the S. last name. I needed her first name.
Heart pounding, I called the hospital where I was born, making my voice
expectant and naive. A woman answered "Records." I told her I was in town
for the day, working on genealogy. I said I needed to determine my
mother's birth place. I took a quick breath. "Could you please look on my
birth certificate?"
"Your mother's name?"
I spell her last name. Could there be more than one?
I hope against hope.
"Her first name?"
Chills rush. "Uh-I don't know which one she used. She
sometimes went by her middle name or a nickname."
For reasons I'll never fathom, the woman doesn't ask
for possible names.
I sense that she may be new at her job, or confused by my request,
or that my half-expectant, half naive tone causes her to question the usual
procedure. A long wait. Then she abruptly asks, "Were you raised by someone else?"
"Does it say that?" I pretend astonishment.
"Well....I wonder if it could be this one...."
"Which one?" My voice jumps in.
"Susan-"
"And I was born August 31, 1953...."
"Well, she entered the hospital the night of the 30th....and
gave birth at 12:20 a.m. on the 31st."
Bingo. The exact time on my birth certificate. It seems fitting that
I was born right after midnight. A hidden, mysterious time. The time of secret
deeds...
I call person to person, saying I'm calling about a class reunion.
A woman who is probably related to me gives me Susan's phone number. There it is.
My birth mother. I think of the people who spend years, hire private
detectives, travel to other cities. I'm twenty one, naive as anyone that
age. And I have to make this call.
I decide to write a letter instead, thinking I might stumble less.
Looking back, I don't remember a word I wrote, only the feeling that I tried to
approach the topic subtly, rather than accusing her of giving birth to me
and then giving me up.
Two days later, she called the instant she got the letter.
My husband, who I hadn't told about my secret search, answered the phone. He had no idea
who she was. When he questioned her, she hung up quickly. I called later
that night. Her voice, miles away. That night, all I could tell was that
the time wasn't comfortable for her. During intermittent conversations
over the next months, I gradually understood that while my adoption was
the ace in the hand I was dealt, for her it was worse than any other card.
It was being thrown out of the game at the age of twenty. She said the
time when she relinquished me was so painful that she mentally blanked out
most events so they seemed almost like dreams in her memory. Yet moments
later, she said she clearly remembered torn emotions as she signed the
paper allowing me to be adopted.
I sought warmth and bonding; she granted me crumbs. She didn't have to
tell me I was her deep, dark secret. Our conversations felt furtive and
stolen. I sensed she was oddly flattered by my attention, yet her mood
could turn cold mid-sentence. She sounded wistful saying that my birth
father looked handsome in white and that her own father once published
articles in the Saturday evening Post. Yet if I asked a "wrong"
question--like my grandfather's name-oops-I stepped on a land mine. She
would clam up, turn icy, or say she had to get off the phone.
She said she would tell her three children about me someday, "when they
are grown." Still unwilling to accept her reluctance, I continued to call
and write every few months or years. My gestures were met with pained
endurance from which I pried rare bits of enlightening information. Her
father survived diphtheria. She never missed a day of school. Five years
after we first talked, she phoned to say she was now forty-seven and
menopausal and I could expect the same thing around that age. She shared a
few tidbits about her children, and actually gave a story I published to
her teenage son, saying it was written by "a friend." As time slid by, I
reasoned she held tight control against opening up with me as a sort of
retribution for the helplessness and lack of options she felt when giving
me up. I sensed that maybe I wasn't getting to know the real person-that
somewhere inside her was a friendly, outgoing soul that was more like me.
Eventually, I grew weary of trying to court her friendship.
My occasional letters and phone calls died down so that we were in contact only a
handful of times during the twenty years after we first spoke. Feeling
spontaneous love for my own four children only made her iciness more of a
mystery. But I never gave up hope.
It felt like I was jumping into a cold pond when I wrote my first
adoption reunion story ten years ago. Before the interview I wondered if I could be
objective and sort the interviewee's feelings apart from my own. I tried
to keep myself emotionally separate, and told myself I could make it
through this one story. Yet, when the initial interview hit a silent spot,
my voice involuntarily broke through the ice. "I know how it feels to
wonder where you came from-I'm adopted, too," I ventured, chills darting
up my spine. The interviewee and I shared a common bond. I told myself it
was an isolated instance. I probably wouldn't write about adoption again.
But a social worker I knew saw my reunion story and sent another adoption
story my way. The person I interviewed for that story told the local
adoption support group about me. Sitting in their meeting with thirty
other adoptees, I still wasn't brave enough to admit I was one of them.
Yet they told me their stories, which I wrote and sold. If people
saw how readily I identified with adoptees, would they guess my secret? Soon
people I interviewed all across the country knew I was adopted, though I
didn't tell most friends I'd known for years.
My curiosity about my birth family kicked in again strongly eight years
ago when I wrote about Terry Wesley, a birth father who spent twenty-three
years longing for the son he'd never seen. Could my birth father be out
there somewhere?
From the first, my birth mother varies her story about my birth father
depending on how she feels that day. There are several versions. Sifting
through them, I think they dated only a short time, that he was "wilder"
than boys she usually dated, and that he was from out of town-a medic
stationed on a nearby Air Force base. She didn't want me to be too
curious. As usual, she thought a few crumbs would satisfy me. I thought
she was kidding-or purposely steering me wrong-- when she told me his last
name was Presley, like Elvis.
I know now that most adoptees look for birth fathers as an afterthought,
if they look for them at all. There's an undercurrent of feeling that
birth fathers are responsible for both the pain and urgency of the
adoption. There's a sense that if birth mothers never met birth fathers,
there would be no trauma. They are thought of as men who ruin women's
lives and abandon their children. It was hard not to think of such a man
abandoning me again, if I ever tried to talk to him. I sort of visualized
myself traveling a long distance, then going to his office so his wife
wouldn't know. I imagined him taking one look and saying, "Get outta here
kid, ya bother me." I didn't know if I could face that.
As time passed, I wondered if there was a way I could find out about my
birth father, but not face his rejection personally. Knowing he'd been a
medic, I called medical associations. I also discovered that while there
was only Presley in the Salt Lake City phone book, there were lots of them
in the South-spelled both Presley and Pressley. And I realized he could be
anywhere now-from Africa to Florida to two blocks away. There was no way
to guess.
As maybe ten years passed, I'd furtively look up the name Presley every
once in a while. Besides being a writer, I'm a part-time library customer
service specialist, and researcher for a national magazine. Names, places
and dates cross my desk regularly. I'd look every now and then. A woman I
was interviewing about her own adoption reunion story gave me a number to
call to find men who had been in the military. The man who answered found
two Harold Presleys. "This one died in 1962-can't be him. But there is
another one out there." He wouldn't tell me where, without a military
service or Social Security number. For sixteen years, I told myself that
if my birth mother-a woman who carried me inside her body for nine
months-could be cold to me, my birth father would probably be even more
distant. I was scared he would reject me.
Yet I'd still look up the name Presley. Three years ago, I
decided to put off researching the Presleys until after Christmas. There were gifts to
buy, Christmas cards to address. My time was hectic. But then I felt an
odd and unmistakable shove. I had to move ahead. By then, years of writing
adoption stories had coincidentally led to my book of reunion stories. In
search of more magazine stories, I called BigHugs.com, a national reunion
search agency. The vice president and I hit it off. We were both adoptees,
both of the same religious faith. She knew about lots of stories-but she
was looking for someone to write a book. I'd wanted to write a book since
I was seven years old. Both then and at the moment she mentioned she
needed an author, an electric charge filled me. It felt surreal...and yet
totally right from the first moment. A dream I'd almost given up was now
headily within my grasp. Before that moment, I never thought I'd write a
book about adoption. But fate had other ideas. My book chose me. I didn't
see the threads of "back story" entwining in my life as I began to finally
began to examine the fact that adoption was part of me.
Sharing feelings as I interviewed the other adoptees for my book kept
bringing my own search to mind. I found my birth mother because her name
was rare. Did my birth father really share a last name with a celebrity
icon? Presley? The name certainly wasn't rare. Lots of people want to be
related to Elvis Presley, so many genealogists have researched his family
tree. I wrote to one of them, Marlene Webb. She sent back a chart listing
the Harold Presley who died in 1962. She told me that if Harold was my
birth father, she believed that she and I might be related to Elvis
Presley generations back through a shared ancestor. But she didn't have
definite proof. On the other hand, she sent pedigree charts showing that
Harold was a third cousin to Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on
the TV show, Bonanza. As a little girl watching Bonanza, I'd always
thought Hoss smiled at me as if he knew me. Now it appeared we might be
fourth cousins.
By now I knew that death and rejection can be the ultimate results of
adoption searches. But still, my thoughts raced. "No. My birth father
can't be dead. He's alive. He can't die before I meet him."
I sent more information, thinking it might lead to another
Harold Presley who was alive. When I answered the phone two months later, Marlene's voice
quavered with emotion. "We think that the Harold Presley on the chart is
the right source. I talked to his sister. She said as soon as I told her,
she just knew it was her brother you were looking for. She called her
other sister. They both said you can call any of them any time." Not a
man, who would reject me, but women, who said I could call.
I phoned Harold's sister, Rhoda, that day. "I didn't know anything about
you, but I'm sure glad to hear from you," were her first words to me. We
danced around our conversation, wondering if we could really be connected.
I recited a sentence from my birth mother's first letter. "She said he
went home and married his old girlfriend, which was why they didn't
marry."
Rhoda paused. "No. He never married."
For a moment, we both doubted. Adoptees long for proof, often
without a name on a birth certificate or a DNA test result.
"The genealogist asked if he was ever in Florida. I didn't
remember that he was," Rhoda said. "But Mama saved every letter he wrote. I looked in
her old trunk and found letters from Florida in 1952."
I was born in 1953. We agreed to exchange photos of our families. After
what seemed like an eternity, a letter with a Memphis postmark arrived.
Two black and white photos of a man in an army uniform. I showed the
pictures to my oldest son, Aaron. "Who do you think this is?" I asked. He
paused. I heard him inhale before he said, "Mom, you have his face."
"He's dead," I said, as a cloak of grief abruptly draped me.
I called my birth mother to ask if she knew Harold died. "Oh..." a swirl of emotion. I
could hear years of wondering in that single sentence. After twenty years
of holding our emotions in check, it was our greatest bonding moment.
Though everyone else went to Harold's funeral 35 years earlier, for us, he
died only a week before. I could feel her grief blend with my own.
My birth father's death was termed "mysterious." After a life
of military stations in foreign countries, he died in New Orleans at the age of 31.
Harold Presley was a good-looking man who lived fast and died young. He
chose not to marry or have a family and never settled down in Arkansas
like his brothers and sisters. From the way things looked, he had a secret
daughter who lived hundreds of miles away who loved mystery, too.
The day I left to meet the Presleys, I mailed my publisher a
draft of my book, "Together Again: True Stories of Birth Parents and Adopted Children
Reunited." I knew that my own emotions of the past twenty-three years
often found their way into the voices of characters in my book. As I
interviewed the other people touched by adoption, events in their reunions
recalled emotions of my own search. The book was released this past July,
a year after I met my birth mother in a tearful reunion before traveling
to meet my birth father's family.
The day before Mother's Day three years ago, I got a phone call.
"This is Susan S. I'm here in Salt Lake," my birth mother says, as casually as if
she lives a block away. She's calling me on a Saturday, at work, and this
is my lunch hour. We stumblingly agree to meet at Marie Callenders,' down
the street. She and her husband-who I didn't know knew about me-are
standing in the doorway of the restaurant, smiling, when I arrive. As soon
as she saw me, she ran up and hugged me and wouldn't let go. It was a
primal moment-there was an electric, physical sensation that seemed to
finally bind us together. We were the only people who sat outside at the
restaurant, under an umbrella-topped table. We laughed, talked and shared
pictures. At one point, she picked up my hand and gazed at it. Another
time, when I spilled whipped cream on my chin from the strawberry pie, she
wet her napkin and wiped it off, like someone who knew me well enough to
do that. Her husband and I cried together, and he told me he'd surprised
her by bringing her through Utah on a trip they were taking. He hid the
family photos in his suitcase and didn't tell her she would see me until
the night before. "I thought of it as a Mother's Day present for both of
you, " he said. He told me that a year before, when Susan underwent
chemotherapy for colon cancer, he wanted to send me a ticket to fly out to
see her. She still has not told her whole family about me and wasn't ready
for that. I don't know if she will ever tell them.
Fifty four Presleys all hugged me on the front steps of
the family farm house in Batesville, Arkansas. We spent a week talking, eating and
getting acquainted. They knew things about me that I didn't know; that my face
sweats the same as my aunt's and grandmother's and that my hand is shaped
like my cousin's.
It seemed miraculous that while I was writing stories about other
families' adoption reunions, my own reunion was also taking place. A man I
wrote about has a picture of his mom and birth mom hugging each other. He
told me, "It's probably the most important photo I have-of the woman who
gave me life, and the woman who kept my life going." Birth families and
adoptive families often share love for the same people. The bridge built
by reunions can strengthen both families and create calm and soothing
unity.
The Presleys and I continue to share conversations, recipes,
Christmas cards and an occasional visit. I tell them repeatedly how happy my life
has been and how much their acceptance means. I read somewhere that no
matter how perfect an adoption is, there are still abandonment issues to
deal with. And acceptance from a birth family is wonderfully healing,
although it doesn't change the past. "Your parents did a great job with
you, and we love them for that," they told me again and again. "Give them
a hug for us."
Before I met my birth family, I was more preoccupied with
searching for my identity in other ways. I had my aptitude measured, my colors analyzed,
and my aura read. Each time, I expected unusual results and hoped for a
defining moment. Now I'm less inclined to look inward. There was a calming
peace in solving the puzzle of my roots. The results of my search are both
profound and simple-that I descend from a family like any other with its
share of strengths and sorrows. My life once began on Chapter Two, and the
complete story makes more sense now that I know Chapter One. I feel like
my own story kept moving toward me as I wrote adoption article after
adoption article. I was actually starting to face myself as I wrote about
other adoptees.
Meeting a long-lost birth family feels like acquiring a new
sister in-law or stepparent by marriage. We'll never share childhood memories, but
there's an undeniable bond and a sense of future closeness. In ways, we
feel like we've always known each other. Sharlene Lightfoot, an adoption
researcher explains the motivation and hope of those separated by adoption
in three short sentences. "They really just want to say, 'Hello again. I'm
here and I'd love to know you. I want to tell you that things turned out
okay."
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