Hidden Girls (eBook)

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Attached to this email was a photocopy of a photocopy of a document, “Non-Certified Copy of Record of Birth Prior to Adoption.” Up until that moment, I believed my surrendered son’s original birth record had been sealed forever by the courts in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, the county of his birth. Catholic Charities had made that promise to my family and me half a century before when they brokered his adoption: all records pertaining to it would be off limits to everyone forever. It would be as if his birth and adoption had never happened, a secret essential to my mother and father, one they maintained for the rest of their lives. (What had happened had not happened.) And yet, there it was on my laptop screen, a bedraggled photocopy of my secret first child’s birth record.

I had no idea that Massachusetts had, in 2008, opened its sealed birth records to adult adoptees born before 1974. Birth parents were not informed. Nor did I know that this stunning change in adoption law happened after a long and bitter legal battle pitting adult adoptees against adoptive parents, adoption providers, and the religious organizations that sought to keep such records sealed.

The copy of my son’s non-certified pre-adoption birth record, his first birth certificate, glimmered on the screen in shades of gray. It connected my current life as a university professor, published novelist, and mother of three, to the troubled teenager I’d been. Scapegoated, hidden, unable to escape the winding cloths of shame and guilt.

The document was blurred by reproduction, its travels through cyberspace, and the decades it had spent in a vault somewhere in Massachusetts. I printed it and held it in my shaking hands, a piece of paper that confirmed the facts of my lost history: the man reaching out to me was my first son, the one I’d relinquished to closed adoption when I was still a teenager. This stunning reconnection was a moment I’d always longed for but hadn’t dared to hope for. It would, I believed, provide the missing piece to the unsolved puzzle at the very heart of my life.

I read and reread the document on my screen, the first time I’d seen documentary evidence of my having given up a child to adoption. I was thrilled but also dizzied, spinning backward to my nearly lifelong secret. In my euphoria, I had no idea that I was heading into danger. ‘Thank you for having me.’ I had no idea that reunion in adoption is shattering; that it often shoves an unprepared first mother (me) back into the skin of the terrified girl she’d been when she got pregnant, a girl without resources who paid dearly, and continued to pay, for her transgressions. The last time I’d seen my baby, named for my loved paternal grandfather, he was sweet and warm and wrapped in a soft baby blanket. Then my caseworker took him from my arms and disappeared with him into a hospital elevator. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.

Minutes after opening my son’s email, I called the cell phone number he included. He answered on the first ring, as if he had been waiting. His was a booming voice, a resonant tenor like my father’s and my brothers’. The sound rippled through me: a MacDonnell voice from a man who was no longer a MacDonnell. The tilted world began to spin. I tried to slow my pounding heart, to breathe steadily and deeply, to listen. We kept it superficial, safe, sharing facts. The area code of his cell phone number indicated Boston, where he was born, but he hadn’t lived there since before his adoption was finalized. He couldn’t quite explain why he used that area code for his cell phone, perhaps as a connection, however insignificant, to the place of his birth. Rather than in the Boston area, as I’d always believed, he’d grown up in the suburbs of Washington D.C. His new father, a lawyer, had served as general counsel, occupying the C-suite, of a major American conglomerate.

Other facts tumbled out, faster than I could absorb them. My son, himself in middle age, was a divorced IT specialist for a national restaurant chain. He lived in a major southern city. He did not have children. He was a combat veteran, a marine who’d survived two deployments during the Gulf Wars. He was the third of four adopted children. He’d grown up in a religious Irish Catholic family, one able to provide him with comforts, even luxuries: lovely homes, sleepaway camps, splendid family vacations. (I recalled my caseworker’s glee as she described his family to me: a perfect ethnic and religious match! They’d even matched hair and eye color! And my own wild jealousy that I could not, as she reminded me over and over again, provide such things for him. )

Rambunctious, rebellious by his own description, he’d flunked out of two colleges before joining the military. (Just as, unbeknownst to him, his biological father had, heading off to Vietnam, never looking back, at least not at me.) After leaving the military, my son put himself through college on the GI Bill, and embarked upon his own corporate career.

We made a plan to have lunch in Philadelphia the next time he was in town for business. Waiting those weeks, I toggled between happiness, anxiety, curiosity and disquiet. I made my excruciating revelation to my other children, among the most difficult conversations I have ever had. They accepted the existence of their older half brother with more love and equanimity than I’d believed was possible.

After that, a vision of happy family took root and shimmered in my imagination: all of us together at the Thanksgiving table or hanging out together at the Jersey Shore, scorching ourselves in the sun, leaping in the waves. In my fantasies, my first son became a vital part of my family, a new addition, albeit fully grown. I’d be able to put the devastation of his surrender behind me, and heal from the deceptions that had been imposed upon me when I was too young and fragile to fight back, or to understand their lifelong consequences.

When the day came for us to meet I was nervous and as giddy as if being spun in an unstoppable revolving door. Who would he be? Would we like each other? Would he look like me?

It was a quick drive from my Camden County, N.J., home over the Ben Franklin Bridge and into Philadelphia and Penn’s Landing, our designated meeting place. I was a wreck, but I managed to park and get out. It was a cold but sunny early spring day. I recognized him right away, among the nearby urban throngs: big and hearty and white-haired, my son! He was crossing a vast parking lot, the Delaware River on one side and Penn’s Landings’ shops and restaurants on the other. My breath caught. He was no longer that swaddled newborn I’d handed off to the caseworker. He was a big man, with a big voice! He wore glasses and was prematurely white-haired, as his namesake had been! We hugged, the first time we’d touched in 50 years. We walked to a nearby Mexican restaurant. We stumbled through our lunch. Between us on that small Formica table, with its caddy of ketchup and Cholula hot sauce, an unexpected canyon gaped open between us. Like so many men in my family, my son was garrulous, and, I thought, accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room. Even so, I sensed a layer of something else beneath his bright surface. Nothing seemed quite real.

We reached as best we could across the canyon, but had trouble moving our conversation forward. It kept stalling out. I don’t remember what we said. I was overwhelmed. We must have talked about our jobs and our families, a safe conversation that tiptoed around the big hole between us, the life we had not shared though we were mother and son....