“My Own Children”

I finally finished reading Birthbond, which is essentially a narrative of survey results of adoptees and birthparents in reunion. One passage has really stuck in my craw the past few days.

In a section about how adoptive parents cope with the reunion process, the authors recounted a survey response from an adoptee who spoke with his adoptive mother about the infertility that caused her to adopt in the first place. She understood why he would want to search for his birthparents, but her response wasn’t exactly overflowing with empathy, and it struck me for the first time how infertility is sometimes a trauma that adoptive parents can’t get past.

The exchange I can’t get out of my mind went something like this:

Adoptee: “Of course I want to search for my birth mother.”

Adoptive mother: “Don’t you think I wanted my own children?”

How does one even move past that conversation? The adoptee in this story reported that he understood her grief immediately with that one comment. But I’d be terribly wounded if my own adoptive mother told me I stood in contrast to her phantom “own children” she was never able to have.

But I have, I suppose, the luxury of having an alternate mother. Infertile adoptive parents do not have that luxury.

 

44th Birthday

She planned to surprise me in the office. Ron inadvertently let slip the plan weeks earlier. I pretended all along I didn’t know it was happening. Meanwhile, I blocked off the time on my work calendar so no one would book me in a meeting, and I told some of my workmates what they would likely witness on July 24.

At 3:47 she texted to ask “How’s your day going?” and I knew she must be in the neighborhood. So sly! So nonchalant! Then Ron texted to tell me she was indeed nearby; they were in cahoots, but she still didn’t know I knew she was coming.

She walked into my office–a third floor walkup–with a gargantuan vase of 50 pink roses. 44 of them were for each of my birthdays. The remaining 6 were because the florist would sell them only in lots of 10. The thing must’ve weighed 25 pounds.

We hugged. I cried. I relieved her of the flower vase. My colleague Katie wiped tears from her eyes. And all this was happening in front of my boss since the three of us share an office.

Susan was so excited to have pulled off the surprise! What a cute little smug smile I saw on that face that looks so much like my own. She was so proud she even said “I GOT you!” I lasted only a few minutes before telling her I’d known for weeks. Seems I’m physically unable to lie to her face.

We had a couple of drinks at a nearby wine bar, marveled in each other some more, and she gave me gifts. I adored them of course, but even more than that I adored this woman, who wasn’t going to spend one more birthday without me.

Genius Adoptee Uses Facebook to Find Birth Mother With Viral Post

An adoptee photographed herself along with a sign listing details of her birth. She asked people to like and share it on Facebook. 124,000 shares later, someone who went to high school with her birth parents saw it, and her birth mother contacted her.

This woman is a goddamn social media genius.

“Twins Separated at Birth Married Each Other”

This story is five years old, but I just stumbled on it while reading a Guardian article unrelated to adoption:

Twins separated at birth and adopted by separate parents later married each other without realising they were brother and sister.

…

The siblings were recently granted an annulment in the high court’s family division.

…

The identities of the British pair and the details of the relationship have been kept secret, but it is known that they were separated soon after birth and were never told they were twins. They did not discover they were blood relatives until after the wedding.

…

Lord Alton argues the twins’ marriage supports the need for children to know the identity of parents.

…

“The right of children to know the identity of their biological parents is a human right. There will be more cases like this if children are not given access to the truth. The needs of the child must always be paramount.”

I am disgusted. Not because siblings married each other, but because if they had been allowed to know their biological origins, this never would have happened.

Documentation and Identification

I have to renew my driver’s license next week, before my 44th birthday. One of the requirements for license renewal in Maryland is to show up with a social security card. Uh oh. I have no idea where mine is, so now I know what I’ll be doing tonight. Not sure why I have to show a document that proves I’m entitled to social security funds when I turn 65, instead of, say, my passport to prove citizenship, or my birth certificate to prove my identity.

I know exactly where to find my birth certificate. My amended birth certificate, that is. The document that proves my identity as Catharine Robertson.

Of course there’s another document somewhere that proves my identity as Sarah Mathews, but I’m not legally allowed to see it. The only people allowed to see that document are:

• Virginia social workers
• Virginia judges
• Virginia state attorneys

My original birth certificate lies in a filing cabinet somewhere in Virginia. I wonder if, now I know the names listed on it and there are no more secrets, I’ll ever be allowed to look at it.

I never changed my last name, not when I married in 1999, nor when I remarried in 2010. My name had already been changed once, and I wasn’t going to change it again.

What does it mean to even have a name for a person? Does a name have an inherent meaning? Or does it merely denote the thing we agree to call that person?

Did I have inherent Sarahness before my name was changed? What is the value of Catharineness I now carry, almost 44 years later? Is the latter weightier or more significant because I’ve been Catharine a lot longer than I was Sarah? Or is the former more significant because I was Sarah first and originally?

Plato and Aristotle couldn’t even figure out the name thing. And John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and Saul Kripke couldn’t come to agreement on the meaning of names–or whether they had meaning. I’m certainly not going to figure it out today. I’ve got a social security card to hunt down, a bureaucracy to satisfy.

A Cloak of Otherness

I share an office with the CEO of my company, and we often talk about non-work things like art we’re involved in, or our families. I’ve told him about my reunion, and he expresses curiosity and happiness for me. A few days ago he asked how it was to meet my sister. I’m running out of ways to say “This is going surprisingly well! I can’t believe how natural it all feels.” I said something like that, again, and I imagine it wasn’t surprising to him since it’s in line with how everything’s been going.

But I’m keenly aware that not everyone has such a smooth experience. So when I answer people with my consistently happy updates, I feel it necessary to acknowledge the rarity of the gift I’m experiencing, whether it’s with words to that effect or with a shrug of my shoulder as I’m earnestly delivering good news, as if to say “I know. I can’t believe it either.”

But then the CEO, John, asked me something really interesting: “How does it feel to be turning into someone more normal, less weird?”

Cogent. That same thought had occurred to me a day earlier: My life up until now has been partially defined by this mythology of being adopted, having no history, and being lied to by a state that gave me an “amended” birth certificate–a fictionalized document stating my adoptive mother gave birth to me in the hospital.

I am different, other, an x factor. Throughout my life, though more when I was younger, my being adopted would occasionally merit a mention in conversation. If acquaintances were talking, say, about their inherited traits, and it would come time for me to contribute to the conversation, I would shrug my shoulders and say “I’m adopted.” Many, many times the response to come back to me was “Wow! Really? I didn’t know that?” As if I should have had something visible to signify my difference, or as if I could have been behaving in a more obvious way to clue someone in.

But in retrospect, I think I always wore being adopted like a cloak of independence and stoicism, and of otherness.

There may have been times I was proud the way any mention of the mystery surrounding my origins made me seem exotic. For a girl who never felt like I fit in at school and who wanted to be much weirder than I actually was, having an origin story of having no origins at all was like being a minor superhero. Except I had no powers.

During puberty and teenage years, the admiration was palpable, because so many kids felt alienated from adults anyway. But the admiring sentiment often came from salacious guy friends in the form of “Wow, so you could MARRY your BROTHER??”

As I got older, the feeling of independence and stoicism formed into a self-perceived ability to handle a disproportionate amount of hardship with sinking into depression or drugs. The year I turned 39, I had a long list of events to weather:

• My beloved dog died
• MY first husband and I ended our marriage
• Sold or gave away almost everything and moved into a 3rd floor walkup apartment
• …and promptly broke my leg

I was practically interned in my apartment, with a leg broken in 20+ places, living alone, crawling or crutching up and down the stairs to get to physical therapy or on jaunts to Target from sympathetic friends. I couldn’t put any weight on my foot–not one toe on the ground–for 2+ months.

One might think–and many, many friends commented–that I had every reason to break down, to lose it, to be angry, to succumb to self-pity. But somehow I used that time to become more peaceful, more content, more optimistic. I still don’t know exactly how, but I suspect it had to do with my self identifying as stoic, strong, unbreakable.

Those months I spent mostly alone were pretty inactive. But as soon as I could walk around, go back to work, and drive, I resumed my streak of things that have recently come to define me. The year I turned 40, this happened:

• Moved into a new house I bought
• Had the most immature romantic relationship of my life
• Had swine flu
• Had a house fire
• Lived in a hotel for 3 months

(I went on to meet the man of my dreams later that year, lest you think my life is nothing but accidents and incidents.)

For better or worse, no matter what it says about me, I think I’ve always used being weird or different, or having bad things happen to me, as a way of defining myself. I think maybe it has to do with creating a mythology where none existed before. I never had any history to help define the boundaries of my identity, of my self, before I was placed with my parents in September 1969. No ancestral stories to help explain or form my self image. So I formed it out of things that happened in my own life. And the more things that happened, even if they were awful, the more of a life I was living.

This could all be wrong; I only just thought of this theory today. But it’s making sense so far.

And I don’t know how it feels yet to become less weird. I’ll let you know if it happens. I don’t want to give up my cloak of otherness.

 

 

Strings

My birth father, Dodie, played guitar. I’m learning to play my ukulele. Today Ron taught me all the chords of the C major scale. He says I’m quick, a natural. I got him to promise he wasn’t just being nice because he’s my husband.

Dodie’s playing the electric guitar below. And there’s me with my Fluke uke.

Family Trees and Branches

When I was a teenager in the 80s, my mother’s brother did some genealogical research. My grandfather’s family were bakers and had immigrated from Germany. My uncle found descendants still living in the same village near Frankfurt the family had left to come to the US.

My uncle made contact via letter, in English of course. Only the children in my generation spoke and read English, so all contact with this branch of the family was through the kids in my own generation, Christoph and Dorthe.

Letters were exchanged, phone calls were made. My grandfather had died years earlier, but my grandmother reveled in finding her husband’s long lost relatives. My grandmother, aunt and uncle, cousins, and my mom would gather around the phone on Christmas morning to exchange greetings with Christoph, and they would all giggle nervously as Dorthe could be heard on the speakerphone translating questions and greetings to and from their parents and other relatives gathered on their end. The families in both countries clearly felt joy in finding connections to relatives they had never known about, and eagerly gobbled up factoids about hobbies and traits and pored over photos sent via mail.

I would hang back on these occasions, not wanting to join in the conversation. I couldn’t muster any emotions when my grandmother would show me the latest letter from Christoph or photo of my grandfather’s first cousin baking bread in Germany in the 1920s. These people were strangers to me. They didn’t feel like my family.

I had never been curious about the ancestors or far-flung living extended relatives of my adoptive family. That lack of curiosity coalesced into avoidance on every occasion of contact with the German branch of the family.

My adoptive family was my family, of course, but these long lost extended relatives held no sway with me. If genetics was the thing that was binding us all together, then what did that mean for my brother and me, who weren’t related by blood to anyone? And who were asked to pretend that it didn’t matter that we were, in fact, related by blood to people who were hidden from us?

There was an ugly incident that exaggerated this separateness of my brother and me from the rest of the family who adopted us. A relative not in my immediate family once blithely said to our faces we weren’t related by blood to the rest of the family, so we weren’t “real” family. I couldn’t have been more thrilled at that moment not to share one gene with that person, even though this relative had for years otherwise treated me warmly and with affection. They said it to me when I was already in the tumult of puberty, and from already feeling separate from the family because of this new German family branch development. The incident lies in stark contrast to the rest of my family’s treatment of me, I’m glad to say.

I had similar avoidance issues on the other side of the family as well. Every Christmas Eve, my father’s distant cousin hosted a party for all the extended family. I was always told that everyone at the party was my relative, and I understood how everyone was related (my father’s mother and the host’s mother were first cousins), but I never felt related to any of the dozens of people there. Not even the kids who were near my age. Not even when Santa (the host’s brother, dressed up in red and white, complete with a beard, a booming voice, and a couple belts of bourbon in him) came down the stairs bearing gifts for all of us children in attendance.

One year at the party, when I was in my early twenties, I saw a girl I knew from summer camp, Pamela. I’d been a counselor while she was a camper. (We would later go on to become close friends, with each of us in each others’ weddings and I godmother to her oldest son.)

I asked Pamela what she was doing at my family’s Christmas party. In return, she asked me what I was doing at her family’s Christmas party. (Despite the fact I’d never seen her there in previous years, she had attended in years we hadn’t.) It turns out Pamela’s grandmother was also a first cousin to my great grandmother and the host’s grandmother.

Pamela and I were related! Awesome! We joked about it as we became closer friends, with her referring to my father as her uncle. Except I never really felt related to Pamela either, despite our growing as close as sisters in later years.

I didn’t know what “feeling related” to someone would even feel like until June of this year. When I met Susan, I instantly recognized my eyes were her eyes, my laugh was her laugh, my hands were her hands. Later I discovered we walk the same. We have a lot of the same preferences. And she may be responsible for my love of funk and soul music, since she danced while pregnant with me to the sounds of James Brown.

When I met Tessa, Susan’s daughter, my sister, I recognized my teeth were her teeth. (Hers are straighter!) My shoulders are her shoulders. My mouth is her mouth. We ate lunch together recently, and I recognized some of our mannerisms are so similar they must be inherited. Even the way she sat on the floor to pet my dog–that’s what I do.

Now I can’t wait to meet more of the family I never knew existed until just over a month ago. Maybe Weston and Tyler and I share some traits or preferences. Maybe there are cousins of Susan’s who hold their hands like I do, or who hate beans like I do, or who have the same eyebrows. Maybe I will recognize something in Bege, Susan’s mother, when I meet her. I hope so.

 

First Contact

Many adoptees in search of their birth parents agonize over making contact. If you call, what on earth do you say? What words could you possibly say to an intimate stranger that would make sense? Those two words together, intimate stranger, are so opposed I hope it gives you an idea of how untrodden this path is. You are contacting a person who knew you in the most intimate sense possible, but who is a complete stranger now.

Had I had a phone number, I would have called Susan instead of writing her. There is solid advice for the recommended script of this monumental phone call, including the following steps:

• Identify yourself.
• Ask for verification of the found person’s name.
• Immediately give a number where you can be called back in case of disconnection.
• Say you have a private matter to discuss, and ask if the person is alone.
• Say you were born on [insert birthdate here], and ask if that date means anything.

Here is where most first contact advice ends. The conversation will by then, one assumes, already have overtones or undertones, or whatever unspoken vibe is going on that one or both people can feel.

Even though I spent several years improvising onstage, I’m rather happy my first contact ended up as a letter (via Facebook). I had a chance to hone my message for tone. Not too clingy, not too aloof, very open, appearing sensitive, yet warm. Some details about myself so she could feel assured I have a full life, and so she could relate to my being a dog lover. I had found in my several days of searching before contacting her that she’s a dog lover too.

Knowing what to say when you write a letter to a stranger is a challenge in any circumstance. To say nothing of contacting the intimate stranger who is your birth mother. How do you connect? What can you say that most assures you of acceptance, not rejection? Or worse, no answer at all?

Several people have asked what I said in my first letter to Susan–how I identified myself, what I said. I’ve decided to share it with you below. I hope it’ll be useful to anyone else who’s searching. Here it is:

Dear Susan,

I was born Sarah Elizabeth Mathews on July 24, 1969, at Johnston-Willis Hospital in Richmond. I’m contacting you because I believe you are my biological mother. I want you to know I’m really happy and content with my life. I am looking only to connect, and to thank you for making a terribly difficult and courageous decision. I have thought of you often over the years.

This is incredibly awkward, and there is no good timing nor any etiquette for this type of communication. I know my contacting you will stir up painful memories, and I’m very sensitive to that.

I’ve wanted to phone you but can’t find a working phone number for you. I’m also not confident of a valid mailing address to send you letter by mail. I’m at xxx.xxx.xxxx (I only have a mobile), catharinerobertson@gmail.com, or here on Facebook. You can also find me at @cathro on Twitter (twitter.com/cathro/). Feel free to Google me before reaching out. You might see that I love dogs, I work in IT/design, I occasionally perform in comedy shows, and a few years ago I remarried a wonderful, supportive man I can’t wait to grow old with. We live in a tiny, cozy house in Baltimore with our rescue dog, Clark. We think he’s a mix of Great Pyrenees, Golden, and Basset Hound.

I want you to feel safe, and to know who I am–who I am proud to be, because you gave me a chance at life. Life has had its ups and downs, but I wouldn’t have changed any of it.

Warmly,
Catharine Robertson

I attached the following four photos:

 

[Edited to add Susan’s response, at her request after she read this entry.]

Susan’s response came an hour and a half after I hit “send.” Here is what she said:

Catharine,

I cannot begin to tell you just how happy I am to see your beautiful face and how much I appreciate your having the courage to contact me. I have not been able to get any information from the adoption agency in Richmond, but I am thrilled beyond words to hear from you. I welcome any email, phone calls and perhaps a face-to-face meeting in the future if you are willing.

Just reading your lovely letter tells me what a kind, loving young lady you are. Never a day goes by that I don’t ‘speak’ to you, somewhere out in the universe, hoping we could be together somehow.

Here is my information:

[She began her contact info, but it was truncated when she hit Enter to get a hard return. Oh, Facebook.]

hit the wrong button…I am a bit shaken as I am sure you were writing to me..

[more contact info]

I am completely overwhelmed and appreciate so much whatever you have done to find me. I would like to find you right back!

Susan

So there you have it. An adult adoptee writing to her birth mother on Facebook, and her birth mother responding with acceptance within an hour and a half. I dearly wish our example will give hope to adoptees and birth parents in search.

Proof of Life

Susan and I share a love of words and writing. We write to each other every day. Making up for 43 years of no contact is challenging for both of us in different ways. I never knew her face, her smile, her touch, and didn’t know if she would even agree to acknowledge me if I contacted her. I had no expectations. For the 10 years before I found her, I had reason to think she didn’t want to be found, and that she had possibly taken steps to confound a search.

She, on the other hand, has 31 days worth of memories to both sustain and torture her these past 43 44 years. (My birthday is in a couple of weeks.) For 31 days after she gave birth to me, she held me, kissed me, rocked me in a rocking chair, and sang me showtunes. She secretly slept under my crib instead of in her bed, as mandated, because she wanted to be near me until the last possible minute.

Today one of her emails made plain for me what not knowing and now knowing me has been like, and with only a few words:

I reread our notes to one another over and over. It is akin [to] ‘Proof of Life’ family will request when a person is kidnapped.

Proof of life. Reason for Susan to believe I’m both alive and well. Able to be reunited. Able to walk forward, unhindered.