(If you haven't yet found your way to Mothership's account of her 9 month ordeal a pregnant unwed teen in 1967, do check it out.)

Everything I Knew About Myself: 1968-1989

The sum total of information given to my parents on the day they picked me up from Catholic Social Services was a simple list of my birthweight, length, and nationality (Belgian-English-Irish, the document said, although actually it turned out to be Dutch rather than Belgian).

Oh, and, Dad told me years later, somebody mentioned that I might be artistic. Because my birthmother was.

That's really all anybody needs to know about their brand spanking new baby, isn't it? Here you go, Mom and Dad--your bundle of joy, a tabula rasa, no history, no heritage. Yours and yours alone. Go forth and raise it up right.

I grew up pale Irish and freckled in a town full of dark-eyed, dark-haired, even-pigmented Eastern Europeans. Surrounded by Kovacs and Novaks and Hudachkos and Tutkos and Palaschaks and a hundred other kinds of other -kos and -aks, I stood out. Couldn't help but.

The benchmark of beauty where I grew up was dark. Athletic. Sturdy. The benchmark of human worth was physical prowess--how fast you could run, how high you could jump, how far you could hit, how many pieces you could turn out in a shift on the assembly line. 

Me: none of the above. 

No, I was a misfit. Imaginative, daydreamy, distractible, uncoordinated, wimpy, artistic, bookish from a very young age.

^{First birthday: Mom and Dad and the Italian side of the family. Grandma, on whose lap I sit, just just turned 91. Grandpa Joe, behind Mom, lived to be 104 and essentially died of boredom.}

“Oh,” said the mother, “that is not a turkey; how well he uses his legs, and how upright he holds himself! He is my own child, and he is not so very ugly after all if you look at him properly.

“...he is not pretty; but he has a very good disposition, and swims as well or even better than the others. I think he will grow up pretty, and perhaps be smaller; he has remained too long in the egg, and therefore his figure is not properly formed;” and then she stroked his neck and smoothed the feathers, saying, “It is a drake, and therefore not of so much consequence. I think he will grow up strong, and able to take care of himself.”

The Adopted Family

My first storybook was The Adoptive Family. Mom made sure I knew the word "adopted" meant "chosen." My memory does not include a period in which I did not know I was a special child, a child they had prayed for, a child received as a gift from somebody else who couldn't keep me. 

I wondered about her, from the first time my family read that book together. Who was my First Mother? Where was she now? Did I look like her? Where did I come from?

My brother (two years my junior) was Mom and Dad's joyful "Oops" who arrived 18 months after I did. They hadn't planned to get pregnant again--their first son died only hours after he was born of a congenital heart defect. But born David was, and he was most definitely their child, through and through.

My family was earthy. Emotive in the extreme. Lived in and for the moment. Prone to explosive outbursts. Pragmatic. Reality-bound. Commonsense. Tough-headed and tough-hearted.

I loved them, of course. We were family. But I was an alien. They bounded out of bed at the crack of dawn; I was a natural night owl. David was always outside, riding bicycles, running, jumping, climbing trees; I coccooned in my room drawing and reading. 

You don’t understand me,” said the duckling.

“We don’t understand you? Who can understand you, I wonder? Do you consider yourself more clever than the cat, or the old woman? I will say nothing of myself. Don’t imagine such nonsense, child, and thank your good fortune that you have been received here. Are you not in a warm room, and in society from which you may learn something?

Filling out medical forms made me crazy.

"Do you have a family history of X?"

I don't fucking know.

Mom and Dad always understood my frustration and curiosity about my biological roots, and they both let me know it was natural. To a large extent, they shared the frustration. Both made unsuccessful inquiries on my behalf when I was in my teens with the adoption agency, trying to find out more information about where I came from. Turns out they didn't know the right questions.

My first serious attempt to find out something about my family of origin came in 1989. I'd begun to research how to go about finding biological parents and was pleasantly surprised to find that I was entitled to a "Social History." The agency required that the request come from Mom, not me; she was happy to oblige.

And so, age 21, I received the following.

Grammatically incompetent and wildly disorganized, my Social History read like a very bad soap opera script.

• "Denise's birthmother...was described as an attractive, intelligent girl who was rather quiet and very personality in her manner, speech, and dress."  (??? very personality in her manner??? Is that even English?)
• "Her father had two younger sisters...His youngest sister had some emotional problems. She had a hysterectomy after her second baby and has since needed psychiatric care."
• "Denise's (birth grandmother) was described as very high strung, talkative, and nervous. At age six she was hit by a grocery truck...As a result of the accident she was very nervous." (For years, my first husband and I joked about my genetic predisposition to be hit by grocery trucks.)
• "Denise's birthmother was the oldest of five children. A sister, 13, had a bad case of pneumonia and was born with some allergy. (sic)A brother, 11, had emotional problems. The entire family was seeing a psychologist for counseling. A sister, 9, had some difficulty breathing when she was born but was healthy in 1967. A brother, 5, was in good health."
• "Denise's birthfather...had a severe case of acne and enlarged tonsils which were not infected all the time but they were always swollen."

Surely you can see why I couldn't WAIT to find these people, yes?

The duckling had never seen any like them before. They were swans, and they curved their graceful necks, while their soft plumage shown with dazzling whiteness. They uttered a singular cry, as they spread their glorious wings and flew away from those cold regions to warmer countries across the sea. As they mounted higher and higher in the air, the ugly little duckling felt quite a strange sensation as he watched them.

^{Dad--er, ahem, Santa--Mom, and me, the year I got the Barbie Townhouse.}

By 1989, when Mom obtained my Social History for me, it was down to just the two of us. Dad had died in 1985 of a massive, sudden heart attack in the middle of my Senior year in High School. Mom had already moved to Southern California; David and I dodged social services long enough for me to turn 18 in January, and we finished out that school year.

In 1987, David died in a car accident. He was just a few months shy of 18.

Mom is one of the strongest human beings I have ever known. To lose not one son, but both, and to go on, and to retain the ability to laugh...I cannot imagine the wells of emotional reserve that flow within her. I only know that I cannot fathom what she has been through as a mother, and I am privileged to be her daughter.

“I will fly to those royal birds,” he exclaimed, “and they will kill me, because I am so ugly, and dare to approach them; but it does not matter: better be killed by them than pecked by the ducks, beaten by the hens, pushed about by the maiden who feeds the poultry, or starved with hunger in the winter.”

I had to get my birth records opened. At 27--I think I was probably dieting too much, because I developed a slight heart-skipping-beat thing--I suddenly had a good medical reason to go searching again.

I didn't tell the docs about the dieting; screw that. I needed a good medical reason to pursue "identifying information," and a wonky heartbeat would work just fine.

Turned out sometime in the intervening 5 years, Ilinois adoption law had changed, allowing for a "confidential intermediary" search. Gold. The Mother Lode (no pun intended.) I scraped together $350 (not an easy thing to do when two young spouses are in grad school together, living off $8K teaching stipends--thanks for that, Michael) to send to a church I'd left long ago.

I went to the college psychologist to be certified as sane-enough-to-search.

And lo and behold, the floodgates opened.

The agency reached my bio-grandparents within a day (they'd never moved), and they in turn contacted Mothership.

Who absolutely flipped her lid.

She'd been waiting and hoping for a call or some kind of contact from me since I turned 18, she told me later. When that call didn't come, she figured I wanted nothing to do with her.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

^{The first photo I ever saw of Ellen--yet another reason to make my heart skip a beat. Sweet Jesus, we looked like twins.}

I wrote a long letter to my birthmother, introducing myself, telling her I in no way wanted to intrude, but I had always wondered about her, about so many of the quirks and idiosyncracies that set me apart from my family. I caught her up on my life--as much as you can sum up 27 years in just a few pages. I sent the letter to the adoption agency (they were still acting as an intermediary) and included my real address and phone number.

Three days later, I received a letter back.

^{Yes, that is her handwriting. Not a font.}

^{The entire letter, laid out on my table}

Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, “I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”

The reunion itself was really quite amazing.

For one thing, when Ellen and I found each other, we were living in "twin towns" in Iowa and Missouri (just barely across the state lines from each other). Kirksville, MO and Ottuma, Iowa (yes, Radar O'Reilly's hometown)  share a common TV station (KTVO) and are just 60 miles apart. We later realized we should have milked the reunion story for some airtime. :-)

Odder still, had I been able to afford my first choice of college--Grinnell--Ellen and I would have been living in that very town at the same time. We could hypothetically have encountered each other in the grocery store.

Our first meeting (a couple of days after we first talked on the phone) was, as I've alluded to elsewhere, very much like the moment E.T. was reunited with his family on the Mothership after he'd been taken in and cared for by Elliott and his friends. At last! My people! This is where I come from! This is where I was made! 

¹⁹⁹⁶

When The Big Maternal Family Reunion happened, I was over the moon. My memories are hazy mostly because they are so crowded together with the overwhelming nature of finally finding, not just a few people with whom I shared a genetic heritage, but HUNDREDS of them.

I told Mothership, "I always wanted to know who I looked like growing up. [pause, looking around]  Damn. It's EVERYBODY."

I got to meet my grandparents and my great-grandmother. They were warm, welcoming, full of hugs and kisses and tears.

I sat up with Mothership, and with her brothers and sisters (none of whom resembled the psychotic clan described in my Social History, it must be said) and their spouses until the wee hours of the morning. We made the same kinds of jokes. We shared the same absurd and sarcastic sense of humor. We revelled in each other's stories. We toasted Family.

When Mothership and I finally crashed to get some sleep in the reunion hotel room we were sharing, we discovered we both sleep in the same position: On the left side, in fetal position, with one pillow over the head and one under.

Weird.

Mothership and I have been friends and family for almost 15 years now. We've shared a home for several months. We've shared ups and downs and side-to-sides. We're friends who just happen to share DNA, and yet we're also more than that.

She also is friends with Mom--the woman who wanted me, and raised me, and is still Mom. Last year, we went on a joint family vacation of sorts, when Grandma turned 90 and Ellen (and some of my aunts and uncles on that side of the family) all took a grand cruise to Mexico. Me, Mom, Mothership, Uncles and Aunts from my family, and Birth-Uncles and Birth-Aunts, all sitting together at a group of swaying tables in the Pacific, made family by the very presence of...me. Silly little me. The baby that two women wanted, but only one woman could raise.

How odd.

How wonderful.

How sad that so many adoption reunion stories don't have such a happy ending.