The Girls Who Went Away (40 page)

My marriage has been affected. Since reunion, my husband’s gotten much more distant. At first he was real empathetic and close, but it goes on and on and on and takes so much of my emotional energy. He feels shafted and helpless. There’s nothing he can say or do. So it’s had a huge effect. I guess the question would be, Is there any part of my life where it hasn’t affected me? I doubt there is.

—Glory

A common reason for adoptees’ not wanting a reunion, or backing away, is anxiety over conflicting loyalties to their adoptive parents. Perhaps the saddest reason that adoptees cite for not wanting a reunion is the belief that their mother has already rejected them by her act of surrender. A few of the women I interviewed located their adult child only to find that the child did not want to meet them. But sometimes adoptees who do not initially desire contact change their minds with time.

I called the Crittenton League and the woman said, “I will contact his parents. I cannot give you the information, but I can tell him you’re looking for him.” A few days later, she called back. I was so excited. But she said, “He doesn’t want to meet you.” I was devastated. I was completely devastated and my daughter, who very much wanted to meet her half brother, was very disappointed, too.

Then about two and a half years ago, my daughter called me and she was crying. I thought she had a fight with her boyfriend. She said, “Mom, guess what? My brother wants to meet me.” I guess this communication had been going on for about a month. She said he sounded really nice and they had a lot of similar interests. They’re both artsy, music-y type people. Then she said, “Mom, he wants to meet you. He and I are going to arrange everything.”

My son said he had a great life but his personality was so different from his adoptive family’s. Once he started to meet all of
us, I think it made him understand where he came from. He’s very outgoing; he’s a singer. It has just been wonderful. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would see him again.

—Charlenea

I didn’t give myself permission to search for my daughter until after my dad died. He died twenty years ago and one of the first things that came to my mind is it might be safe now to look for my daughter. It still took me a while to get up the courage. I was really afraid. Maybe I was afraid of the rejection. I don’t know what it is that scares you.

I called Catholic Welfare. I wrote a letter and they sent that letter to her. She sent one back to me, through them, telling me about her life and included a few pictures. The letter concluded with her saying that she wanted to thank me for giving her life and for giving her to the family she had, and that she had never made room for me in that life and she hoped that I could accept that. In other words, this would be our last correspondence.

I could accept that. I knew now that she was happy and I knew that things had worked out. As much as I would have loved to have been able to meet her, at least I could see a picture of her and I knew that everything was okay.

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.