On March 15, 2014, I assembled a lasagna. For once, I scarcely thought about the drudgery. I'd bought fresh noodles from Russo's in Watertown, now closed and gone. I'd dirtied most of my pots, bowls, and saucepans from parboiling the noodles, cooking the bechamel, mixing the ricotta, mozzarella, and Parmesan. When I had assembled it, I wrapped it tightly in tinfoil and put it in the refrigerator.
The next morning, exactly ten years ago as I write, I packed a duffel. I took a short walk to a car rental office. I drove back home, fetched my duffel and the lasagna, and began a 380-mile drive due west on Interstate 90: the Mass Turnpike out past Worcester and Springfield and the Berkshires; the state-line crossing and the towering Castleton-on-Hudson Bridge; the northward bend around Albany and onto the westbound New York Thruway past post-industrial cities, woven together by the Mohawk River and the towpath of the Erie Canal; past the Finger Lakes--Otisco, Skaneateles, Owasco, Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka, Canadaigua. All of this was new to me. On the front passenger seat were directions I'd scrawled on a scrap of paper torn from a yellow steno pad. I almost missed the exit. The name of the town I was looking for wasn't on it.
Twenty minutes later I knocked on the apartment door of the woman who had given birth to me thirty-nine years before, whose face I had not seen, whose voice I had not heard, whose hands I had not touched, since I was a newborn baby. Whose identity was an official secret I did not unlock until six months before this moment, right now, when she stood in the doorway, her face smiling in the way I've since become accustomed to seeing as she said, "Hi!"
March 16, 2024 is the tenth anniversary of my face-to-face reunion with my birth mother.
The status of the secret had changed over my lifetime. I was born in Alabama, an "open records" state that permitted adoptees of legal adulthood to receive a legally invalid set of copies of the birth records the state kept under seal. Growing up I knew nothing at all about the laws governing access to my birth records. My adoptive parents had never spoken about it. They never asked me if I might want to search. I don't remember them asking me anything about my feelings about the family I had lost through adoption. The unspoken assumptions were clear enough. They were my family; they had love in abundance; they were all I had and all I needed.
In 1990, when I was sixteen, the state of Alabama joined the majority of the rest and passed legislation ending adoptees' unrestricted access to their records. Ten years later, the state repealed that law. I could ask for them and get them, no questions asked.
It was fourteen years before I did. It was fourteen years before I learned that I could.
My adoptive mother died in 1995. She clung to me, her only child, with a painful and desperate love. It was clear to everyone who knew us. "She coddled you," a close friend of my parents said to me during the gathering after her funeral. As I had watched her struggle with separation from my father, with fitful attempts at finding work, with drinking and other forms of self-abuse, I sometimes wondered if she felt I was the only thing she had. And I was away at college, devoting myself to my studies, and in love with a fellow student to whom I had proposed marriage when we were only nineteen.
In graduate school, my mother's death four years behind me, I felt the first stirring of a curiosity strong enough move me to action. The World Wide Web in 1999 offered little to support a search. I learned about the International Soundex Reunion Registry, which operates by mutual consent, putting birthparents and adoptees in contact if their identifying information matches closely enough. I registered, although I knew next to nothing--just my birthdate, which proved accurate, though I never imagined it could have been falsified, as is all too common with adoptees' birth records; and some details about her age and ethnicity that also proved broadly accurate. The ISRR did not yield a match.
A year after I had ended my dabbling, Alabama reverted to open-records status. But I had read no adoptee memoirs; I knew nothing about adoptee-rights activism, not even that there was any such ethical or political issue. I had never heard of Jean Paton or Florence Fisher or Betty Jean Lifton or Bastard Nation or The Primal Wound. I'd never entertained a thought about any "right to my own records."
I didn't think about it again until the second time I had to tell a pediatrician that I had no family health history to share for my child. Then, for the first time in fourteen years, I went back online. I was shocked to find that my records were available on demand.
Six months later, I was sitting next to my birth mother on her couch, wondering nervously if I should try to take her hand in mine, while we looked through her photo album and talked about music we liked.
Later that evening, she and I drove to the house that belongs to one of her three sisters, and is also home to a second--and had been home to my grandparents, who had both recently died. I missed meeting my grandfather by a few months. He died a few weeks before I applied for my records. His online obituary was my skeleton key to unlocking the entire secret.
Both those sisters welcomed me inside. There also, with his wife, was their brother, one of two. The other, and eldest of the sextet, had died at forty. We exchanged hugs and handshakes. I remember the flow of events that night only vaguely. I brought in my lasagna and baked it in my aunt's oven. I barely moved from my place at the dining table. Just before the lasagna was ready, my aunt brought out salad and salty, buttery garlic bread.
I remember wanting to impress these people. To seem smart, to seem funny, to assure them I had "turned out alright"--to allay worries about my fate after relinquishment. And to make them feel I was one of them.
Because I was thunderstruck by the resemblances.
I had already come to expect the physical resemblances. Scouring Classmates.com, I had found yearbook photos of all of them except the eldest, their older brother, whose likeness I still have never seen. I had boggled at the photo of my birth mother at age 17, comparing it with one of me, stitching them into a single image to share with my friends, who gratifyingly shared my sense of wonder. But not my adoptive family. It would be some time before I let any of them know what I was now doing.
Two of the sextet had earned PhDs, like me. One was the aunt in whose house we were eating my lasagna, and books from her academic career were on shelves near the front door, not far from the tall rubber boots she wore to tend to her horses in their stalls just outside. I saw philosophy books there: Foucault, Descartes, Derrida. I was not raised among readers of books like this. I knew of no relatives who had attended graduate school, and only two who had completed college: an uncle by marriage to my father's sister, and my father himself. He was mostly indifferent to reading, but both my adoptive parents--especially my mother--encouraged it. With no siblings, a restless imagination, and love of absorbing trivial facts, I spent my childhood mostly inside my head and inside books.
I sat at the table, watching their mannerisms. The siblings loved to banter about their lives together growing up. I could understand that this might have been a performance for my sake, but with time I noticed that they enjoyed this kind of reminiscing whenever they gathered. Listening to them I tried to discern what made them laugh, what piqued their interest. I noticed my uncle's penchant for geeky jokes. Above all, I noticed how relaxed they were with each other. They were gentle with each other, considerate. My adoptive family's gatherings are boisterous. These people were quieter--lively, but less theatrically expressive. More like me. I loved their camaraderie, and I wanted to share in it.
After dinner and a little more time at the table, I drove my birth mother back to her apartment. She insisted that I take her bed, while she slept in her living room. I fell asleep in her sheets. Did she take this to symbolize anything? She was kindly, but not effusively affectionate. We began using the word "love" quickly: "I love you;" "I love you too" closes every phone conversation we have had since reunion. But I had noticed that when I reached for her hands, she gently drew them back. And now I was in her bed, in her home. Were we repairing an ancient breach, or was I overreading the moment, in thinking of it as reclaiming the last opportunity to mother her small child?
The next day we regathered at my aunt's house, the barn alongside, and her three horses, retired from trail service, moving between the field and their stalls. She told me my grandfather loved to groom and feed them. She said I would have liked him.
I met the third, and oldest, of my birth mother's sisters. She is the second in the birth order, and my birth mother is third. This aunt had arranged a place in Birmingham, Alabama, far from the family home in Pennsylvania, for my birth mother to spend her pregnancy and give birth to me. In an email the previous Christmas this aunt had told me that hers were the first arms in the family to hold me.
I remember less about that day--only that the mood was joyful. We posed for photos.
We said goodbye, and promised to keep in touch. I left my birth mother at her sister's house and headed back to the highway.
After about 60 miles, I noticed something on the passenger side floorboard. It was my birth mother's pill organizer. At the next exit, I turned off, looped over the highway, and headed west again. The siblings were puzzled to see me back in the front room. I stammered something about my forgetfulness, something that aimed to be witty. I still wanted them to like me. I headed out again.
Please consider subscribing to this newsletter! If you would like to support my work, you can become a paying subscriber as well.
I spent about ten hours on the highway that day. I drove mostly in silence, eschewing the music playlists I had been cycling through. I thought about who I was now. It was clear to me that for all of us, this was not just an "adoption reunion" but a family reunion. Together, we had chosen to build an addition to the living, ongoing enterprise that is a family. Not just acknowledge a limb on the tree, but to live as family. This required no open discussion. At least, none then. And I think everyone felt it. In some ways most gratifying was the attitude of my uncle's wife, the only in-law present at the gathering. She was especially open and easy about what was taking place. To her, this was fun. It was fun to have the nephew back that she had known about for so long. She told me we were welcome at her home any time. She meant it. I have taken my two children to stay at her home many times. We've gone to the Pennsylvania State Fair. We've gone to Hersheypark twice. We've toured a cave. We've eaten at brewpubs. We've "made" ice cream at the "Turkey Hill Experience." Her house is conveniently near those of my spouse's Pennsylvania relatives, just one town over.
I think everyone really did enjoy the lasagna.