Acceptance

First Reunion

Thank you all for visiting on this beautiful October Sunday. I want to share one of my most significant life events. In my hybrid memoir, I MUST HAVE WANDERED: AN ADOPTED AIR FORCE DAUGHTER RECALLS, vignettes, prose poetry, personal letters, documents, and images give testimony to my pre- and post-adoption infancy, childhood, and coming of age, through my search and meeting with the woman who gave me life — my first time with her in conscious memory — a reunion, nonetheless.

I felt lucky or blessed at our mother and child reunion, and still find that peace in my heart. The time we spent together during my intermittent visits in the space of one year, was a gift to us both — not from State authorities, since all adoption records were, at the time, sealed — but a result of my persistence, pre-internet research, and my offer to connect with her, and her unconditional acceptance. I hope the brightness of this memory never fades.

Three high school girlfriends saw me as a worrywart. They knew my dad was strict, in the military, and that we returned to this New Jersey hometown, our permanent home where my grandparents lived, in between transfers. And they knew I was adopted. “Where were you born?” “Rock Hill, South Carolina,” I confidently answered, though I’d much later learn my birthplace was Greenville. “What happened to your real mother?” I shrugged. “Do you want to find her?” Another shrug. With what I felt was a duty to my adoptive parents, I asserted, “I have only one mother. I don’t want to know about another mother. Dad told me back in first grade that she left me.” My first family was as good as a myth. Why would I want to try? How would I try?

Adopted — scrawled across the record, always a shaming dearth of family medical history — I swallowed the loss, secrecy, and lack of disclosure; the consequences of sealed birth records stuck like a lump in my throat. The doctor suggested I might benefit from identifying my first mother. Truth is always preferable to lies. There was trouble in me that seethed through childhood, erupting in adulthood with unrelenting anxiety and panic. My accumulated clinical history was not enough. I had no idea whether cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or other hereditary curses lay in wait for me, or my high school-aged daughter. Neither had I considered to what extent genes influenced my mental health. I would find out. I was determined and would much later realize that through this existential crisis, I would resolve my identity bewilderment and denial.

Enmeshed in a two-year slog of inquiry, search, and discovery, I would be rewarded by long-distance landline calls in the summer of 1993. An elder male cousin and maternal half-sister were the first to accept my brave calls. My birth mother was stunned to learn I wanted to know her. Soon she admitted to my half-sister that a second baby girl was born to her in 1951. “I couldn't bring her home. Your Grandma said she couldn’t take care of a newborn. You were only two.”

I took a sun-streaked morning flight from Lehigh Valley Airport to meet my kin. The early October weather was mild, and my half-sister, Karen, her children, and Momma greeted me warmly at the baggage carousel in the Greenville-Spartanburg airport.

My half-nephews’ acceptance of me.

Reunion Day with Momma and Karen -photo by Mary Ellen

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It’s been over thirty years since I connected with my birth mother. She passed away from heart disease, diabetes, and kidney failure one year after our reunion. “If you hadn’t searched, she would have taken her secrets to the grave,” said my sister. Of course, there were secrets, and we were learning some of them incrementally. Anxiety and shame compounded her losses. Her self-destructive choices became painfully clear as we unraveled posthumous facts. Four children, that we know of, were lost to relinquishment and adoption, and a sixteen-year-old girl, to epilepsy and accidental drowning. Our Momma was crippled with grief and illness. Her parents' isolated, anti-social, somewhat primitive lifestyle outside of Greenville influenced her self-esteem and choices. Among her siblings, there was infant mortality, neurological illness, and diabetes. She likely had a small seizure disorder, too.

I retrieved my adoption and birth records from South Carolina and Catholic Charities last year, the law changed to unseal them, although some restrictions remain. I learned that my mother left me in Saint Francis Hospital with the sisters, stayed away from her parents' home, and her two-year-old, was known to be a vagrant, in a troubled company. After two months, the telegram from Catholic Charities reached her with the warning that I would go into State care if she didn’t sign away her rights to me. My father was unknown. She had, it seems, delayed relinquishment, hoping her mother would relent, and agree to keep me with my half-sister.

I see how my genetic makeup combines with intergenerational trauma and my stressed upbringing to make me who I am. How I was parented bore no resemblance to what might have been. My adoptive parents said they “bent over backward” to understand me, notwithstanding their emotional, and sometimes physical abuse. Still, they were everything to me. I can now embrace their goodness and flaws, just as I forgive my birthmother and myself. With acceptance, I can reconcile the losses and gains.

© Mary Ellen Gambutti 2024