Loss and Discovery
An Adoptee's Journey
Hello friends, I do hope you are well. This is a re-post of a piece from earlier this winter. Perhaps it resonates with others in the adoption constellation. Thank you.
Loss and Discovery: An Adoptee’s Journey
On a late spring afternoon in 1991 in our Bucks-Mont Pennsylvania townhouse, I pen a note on a yellow-lined pad. I roll a sheet of ecru bond onto the carriage of my yellow portable Smith Corona Coronet. Typing tapping, tap tap tap to the South Carolina agencies that control the birth records of adoptees, who call the process fair. Inquiring. Seeking. She and I parted in the Catholic hospital forty years earlier, that much I have learned. My first mother.
On the white Ikea desk, the white phone wire is curled, poised like a pale coiled snake set to strike. With a Bic, a landline, and my native determination, I am resolved. But so much is unknown. So much is missing. So much faulty. Falsified. I need leads, not misdirection, losing me time and money. Many weeks. An adoptee ally; Ann, a local gumshoe historian, copied Greenville directory pages of last name Lee. The crucial data: my name at birth, Ruth Ann Lee. My optimistic, knee-jerk reaction, leads to frustration. It is her married name, given to the baby she had in August 1948, when she divorced Lee, two years before I was born. The social services note shared by the search angel — the grandparents had the two year-old with them at the time of my birth. Abandoned. Our mother “couldn’t ask” her parents to take another baby.
The agency witheld her maiden name, so I was stuck. Misdirected. Pay another fee, and they may be able to give me her name, and the location of her parents’ home at the time of my birth. Another year goes by. There is no more to tell. No identifying information available to me. Until the record is breached, and I have my mother’s maiden name. If only this vital information had been given to me two years earlier on request! The infantilizing of adoptees. .
I pass the vital information to a Greenville genealogist who has compiled a comprehensive cemetery survey. Ann tells me she’ll send me the report. Summer of ‘92, I have the manila envelope in PA, and open and unfold the report on my kitchen table. ln a rural Greenville Cemetery, the name, Cox, and related Lenderman family is highlighted. My kin! The layout and list of graves include Frank and Corrie Cox, my mother’s parents, their first-born newborn boy, Frank’s parents, John and Mary Lenderman Cox, their parents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, and infants, their markers and monuments. I have ancestors. A heritage. Not my adoptive parents’, but my own. In the envelope are the locations of their nearby farms and boundary lines: The Fork Shoals of the Reedy River, and the Grove pioneer settlement. Ann has tucked phone directory pages in the envelope for hours of cold-calling, rejections, denials, wrong numbers, and parties unknown, until a second cousin, warm and welcoming, Lawrence, is happy to put me in touch with Karen and Leila, my birth mother, and my half-sister. My heart is full!
Thank you for reading!
More to come in a future post…
I'm reading your memoir but haven't gotten to this part of the story yet. I enjoy your writing enormously. It is rich in detail and makes me feel like I've stepped back in time with you.
I have a similar story. I was never adopted but spent all of my childhood in orphanages until I was 18. I was able to contact Catholic charities and received information about additional family members. It was a long long process.