An excerpt from Childless Mother: A Search for Son and Self, the story of the author’s search during the pre-Internet era for the son she was forced to relinquish when she was fourteen years old. 

By Tracy Mayo

1982

Northwest mountains of North Carolina                                                                    

Tracy is 27, Thomas is 12

The elderly chestnut, lone survivor of the blight, stood as a centerpiece of all that could be surveyed from the expansive front porch. Others of its kind had once covered these Blue Ridge mountains like a shawl over shoulders on a cool evening. The deeply furrowed bark belied the ease with which an exotic fungus had slipped into the cambian and felled its brothers and sisters, once giants of these forests.  

A singular sentinel—isolated, yet resilient. When weather was favorable, I would take my morning meditation in the rocking chair on the porch, facing the chestnut. In spring the flowing white catkins waved like streamers on little girls’ bike handles. Come summer the lush, saw-toothed, dark green leaves shaded the cultivated wildflowers beneath. Autumn equaled yellow blaze. But in late fall, when the burrs should have encased three chestnuts each, there were no harvests. The lone tree was sterile. Even so, it grew its canopy year by year, waiting patiently for a favorable wind to carry news of another survivor.  

Most weeks I spent my day off from our business tending to the ample vegetable garden, which lay between the chestnut and our log cabin. The ancient mountains, worn down now to lush rolling hills, grew a dark sandy loam that needed no amendments other than the occasional side dressing of composted manure. I worked in the partial shade of a four-foot diameter, ground-mounted satellite dish that provided live feeds of sports and the BBC. In early fall, with afternoon’s slanted light, the bountiful harvest brought the last of the corn, the first of the autumn squashes, more tomatoes than I could put up, and the final raspberry yield.

I loved these mountains. It was here that I learned how to hoe the soil on top of the new potatoes; how to differentiate between the fringed gentian and the purple fringed orchid; how to be at the ready with one hundred pounds of black-oil sunflower seed when the migratory flocks of evening grosbeaks arrived in the front fields every April.  

I returned the hoe and the cultivator to the shed my husband had built, next to the chicken house he’d built as well. I poured grain into the self-feeder and retrieved eggs from the six straw-appointed nest boxes, apologizing to the unhappy brooding hen who pecked at my hand as I pulled her warm egg from underneath. Normally the hens laid their eggs, then abandoned them to the morning pursuit of food. But two or three times a year each hen yielded to her instinctive need to raise a brood. If we wanted to manage the flock’s size, we had to faithfully remove their egg each morning. 

She didn’t want to give it up, but I took it from her anyway.  Heartbreaking.

                                                ________

It’s been twelve years since I gave my baby away. 

I was the lonely, only child of upwardly mobile military parents. After our eighth move in my thirteen short years, I longed for a normal adolescence—to have friends, to feel settled.  What I got was a pregnancy at fourteen and exile to the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers in Norfolk, Virginia. There, I bore not only a child but also the weight of the culture’s shame. I was told to relinquish my son at birth and never speak of him again.

It was 1970. They said it would be “best” if I could forget, which only made me more determined to remember.

                                                            _______

I remembered that boy at the bank the previous morning, about the right age—twelve, brown eyes and light brown hair. His face looked familiar. I could find him again; ask about his birthday. Then I stopped, today’s eggs in my basket, shook my head, and willed myself not to go down that unsettled path I had traveled so many times before.  

Three years before, I’d followed a blond-haired, brown-eyed boy at the spring Ramp Festival in Independence, Virginia. I pretended I was interested in the children’s games, but his mother sensed my focus, glared. Once in Durham, my college town, I thought he sat next to his parents and an older girl at my favorite restaurant, Somethyme. 

And one evening, twilight gathering, Duke Forest, I thought I heard his then four-year old voice. I stopped to listen, knew it was impossible, but with clarity beyond the finest crystal, understood he was out there.

 I had left my brown-eyed baby in Norfolk. He could be anywhere, but almost certainly not in the little mountain town of West Jefferson, North Carolina.

                                                ________

The only time I embraced a move was in 1971, a year after my son’s birth. My navy father was ordered from Norfolk back to the D.C. area.  Grateful to escape the compulsion to search for my baby in every passing stroller, I could focus on recreating my life. I could barely imagine how my Florence Crittenton friends, not from military families, lived with the very real possibility that their child might grow up in the next town, or the next block. An unthinkable torment.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

And yet looking back, I can see that I never stopped searching for my baby in every passing stroller. Unlike the chestnut, I wasn’t sterile: I was a childless mother. A mother to my core, my sense of self rooted in the soil of growing and giving birth to a child I’d been forced to give up. Everything I was doing with my life in the mountains of North Carolina—gathering up my resources both externally and internally—was to serve the eventual search for my son.

                                                ___________

That fateful move to Portsmouth in 1968. Of all of them, the one destined to change my life forever.  

The hair-tinged-green-with-chlorine lifeguard. Cartwheels and broad jumps in the park on a sultry summer night. Giggling explorations in the navy chapel. The sweatshirt around my shoulders on a surprisingly cool evening. The hard buttons on the bare blue and white striped mattress pressing into my hip as I accepted the full weight of him. The realization, the fear, the earnest need for my mother. And the pink and yellow pills on my nightstand. 

I can hear my mother’s voice:

 “This is what you get for playing with fire. Just what did you THINK was going to happen?” Mom handing me two girdles and proclaiming: “Wear these every day to school.  Make sure you only change into your gym clothes in the bathroom stall.” 

In my brown-and-yellow-striped footie pajamas, the eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. 

Mom’s voice again: “We could send her to Seattle, make up some story about my parents.” 

And Dad’s reply: “We could say she went to Seattle, but we could send her to a home for unwed mothers instead.”  

And so it was done. 

What might have happened if my mother, as a mother, had acknowledged the exorbitant price I would pay, and stood up for me? If I had been free to help with the baby when I could, while back in school, eventually to college? If Tommy and I had gotten married and reclaimed our young son? All the TM and LSD that I turned to in crisis, the ways I tried to find a unity of being, a still point of connection in the world: It was all about discovering and holding on to the connection to my son. 

                                    __________                                                   

The canning days passed. I put up my lime pickles, the spicy tomato juice, my serrano-infused corn, the mulberry jelly—and beets, green beans, okra. One day we drove down the mountain to the city below to visit museums and a truck farm, and returned with a new hen and rooster, the heirloom breed known as Plymouth Rock. We would breed and allow the hen to raise a few chicks, contribute to the genetic diversity, before the rooster would grow bold enough to challenge the resident Rhode Island Red—and therefore, be fated to chicken and dumplings. 

 I watched the chestnut drop its leaves, pulling its energy down to last another winter. This deeply rooted survivor, the landmark of my life.

On a chilly fall night when Jim taught at Appalachian State University as an adjunct, I stoked the fire, retrieved the precious photograph of my infant son, now twelve years old. Tucked into the same scalloped blue envelope from 1970, a still ocean hidden in a box of note cards, left bottom drawer, my nightstand, the same home it had occupied through all my moves. I examined his tiny face and imagined how he might look today. 

I placed the photo on my folded knees, closed my eyes and started my mantra. I would practice my TM, I would touch the peace and calm of absolute Being, and wherever I went the universe would keep us connected, through a silvery thread, with me at one endpoint and my son at the other.

Tracy Mayo lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and flat-coated retriever.  Her memoir, Childless Mother:  A Search for Son and Self will be released by Vanguard Press on March 28, 2024. 

By David Daniel

My birthmother rode into town on a Greyhound bus one icy February night. We fed her roasted hen, then sat by the fire as she unpacked her scrapbook. Tucked inside a see-through sleeve was a photo of her as an acned teen, leaning back in a hospital bed, cradling the newborn she would soon surrender. Sipping her tea, she handed me a faded certificate of birth—the original one with the original name, inked with imprints of two tiny feet. Come sunup, she ambled downstairs in a paisley robe, blond hair braided to her waist, and we sat in the kitchen eating eggs my wife had made. Outside, it was unseasonably warm, so she walked our kids around the block, and as she did, I sat alone by the blackened logs, eyeing my birth certificate once again—realizing that my real name was cleaved from me as early as can be. As I saw her off at the Greyhound that night, the penny finally dropped: I had sailed through life under a cover name and never even known it.

David Daniel is a writer and adoptee based in Virginia. 

By Patricia Knight Meyer

I wake from a bad night’s sleep, full of tossing and turning in sweaty sheets. Menopause? Maybe? Most women would ask their mother, but for adoptees like me, that’s rarely possible. At 54, girlfriends say it’s good I still have my periods. Late onset of menopause helps prevent Alzheimer’s they say, so maybe I’m lucky.

I’ve woken up early because I’m also lucky enough to have an award-winning journalist, a pioneer in adoption reform, and a first mother, Lorraine Dusky, author of Hole in My Heart and Birthmark, waiting for me to call her. She’s beta-reading pages of my forthcoming memoir about being sold as a baby on the black market and is ready to give feedback. During my reunion with my birth mother, I’d asked about menopause, and she told me she could tell me nothing, having had a hysterectomy before 40. So I’m almost tempted to ask Lorraine, but I don’t. Boundaries Patricia. Boundaries. Of course, asking my adoptive mother wasn’t possible, as she’d lost her uterus to the tubular pregnancy that had led her to me. And well, she died long before I’d had menopause brain to begin with.

My adoptive mom liked to tell me how maudlin and bizarre I acted my 13th summer, the month my period came. “You locked yourself in your room. Watched TV day and night. Refused to see friends, and sat at the kitchen counter sobbing and eating fried pies. One after the other.” She said she was resolved to take me to “a shrink,” but lucky for me the day before the appointment, I began to flow, and suddenly her daughter’s fall into madness began to make sense. If the going out is anything like the going in, I might be in for something.

What I do recall about that summer was being upset that my best friend took another friend to Europe, not me. Thank God we didn’t have social media back then. I can imagine how hard it would have been to watch them in their parachute pants, spikey hair, and Ray-Bans swinging off the Eiffel Tower. I also recall the summer of ‘83 being the summer I learned my adoptive parents didn’t know my birthday and had no birth certificate for me either. Unluckily, the attorney they used had decided to extort them out of $30,000 in exchange for getting to keep me, their paperless baby. How lucky for me they didn’t call the police and get me taken away, I remember thinking. In retrospect, even if I’d been invited to Europe, I couldn’t have gone. No birth certificate equals no passport, of course.

I end my call with Lorraine, which luckily goes well, by sharing that I am headed off to make the 1.5-hour drive from my birth father’s ranch in the Texas Hill Country to meet the couple renovating the 1952 Spartan trailer I was conceived in. Luckily, the trailer was still there the day I met my birth father, and the passion project of restoring her is now in full swing. Even on his deathbed, Pop lectured me, “Don’t drop the ball. She’s our legacy.” I agree. Today he’d be down-right proud of the plans I have in place for her. She’s going to be home to a non-profit adoptee creative writing residency.

Pulling down his dusty drive. I never forget how lucky I am to have found him. Yes, I was one of the few lucky adoptees to reunite and have not just a good, but a great, reunion.

As I head off for the long trip into town, I pull up sociologist Gretchen Sisson’s new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood on Audible. A 20-year study of birth mothers and analysis of the outcomes of their open adoptions, the book gets me thinking about my close call with becoming one of the statistics between the book’s covers. Pregnant at 18, I wonder if mine was not a subconscious attempt to stand in my own birth mother’s shoes, to right the wrong, to better understand her choice somehow. Would I make the same decision? I found out I would not. Back then, in 1989, I thought it was all a matter of conviction. I would never abandon my baby. No one could ever force my hand.

But even decades later, I still asked myself, had I been selfish to make my child grow up in a single-parent home, on food stamps? Sure, I went to college, but my six-year-old daughter came home to an empty house and stayed with the neighbors at night while I swung around a pole to pay for my sins, for being dumb enough to get pregnant, smart enough to get into the University of Texas, and nowhere self-sufficient enough to afford it. Even with the Pell Grant, we went hungry. What life could she have had if not with me? I’d asked back when I was still in “the adoptee fog” of things.

Had I been able to see all those hard times coming, would I have made the same choice? At the time, my 32-year-old boss/Baby Daddy said he’d help me, and my adoptive parents were thrilled to have another baby to help raise. My father hadn’t died yet, and it was their support that had made it seem possible to keep her. But the adoptee in me was blind to the holes in the precarious net I was so sure would catch me. I just knew nobody was going to take away my baby. Lucky for me, nobody wanted to.

If you ask me today, I would not change a thing. But the me then, had I known what lay ahead, I would have been shaking in my boots.

I pull into the workshop of the master woodworker who’s working on the trailer. He and his adoptee wife have an adopted son. And it was this lucky synchronicity that swayed them to assist this hapless middle-aged lady in turning my tin can conception time capsule into what I hope will be an adoptee’s legacy. I am happy to see she’s coming along fine, and I head across town to talk to a guy about a shed. Actually, a large metal structure meant to canopy the trailer. Protect her from the elements.

As we sit down to bargain, I think, hey, why not throw in the adoption reunion story? It’s guaranteed to bring a smile, and sometimes even a discount. So, when I do go with the whole “I was conceived in a tin can” story, usually like magic, the person on the other end offers their own. This cowboy? Well, his wife had herself a good ole’ DNA surprise. By God, her daddy just wasn’t her daddy after all. And then she found him. And well, it got nasty. So unfortunate, I sigh, feeling for the woman.

“Well,” the man chirps. “Like I said to her, and I’ll say to you. Lucky you weren’t aborted.”

“Yeah, there’s that,” I say, tightening the let’s make a deal smile on my face.

“I mean, I’ll go straight up an’ to tell you I’m a pro-lifer. I mean that fetus. It’s you. It’s my wife.”

“It’s complicated,” I say.

“It’s a life,” he adds matter-of-factly.

“You know what I think,” I counter. “I think if we are bringing all these babies into the world, we need to make sure we do all we can as a society to help those mothers keep their babies. And the dads too for that matter. That’s what I’m for.”

“Well, good luck with that,” he says, eyebrow raised.

When I’m in Texas, I never forget I’m in Texas. And despite the talk across the aisle, the desk I mean, he’s a friendly enough man, and I still hope we can make a deal. I ask for a quote, and I watch him ping, ping, ping, all the costs into a 1980s-style adding machine. I watch the paper roll off in one long untorn spiral to the floor, and I’m reminded of the old-school days, ways, and mindsets my adoptee community is up against.

I shake the man’s hand and let go, feeling lucky to have sociologists like Gretchen Sisson and journalist Gabrielle Glaser (author of American Baby), leading the way for first mothers and adoptees like me. If this guy’s buddies in Washington won’t listen to us, maybe one day they will listen to experts like Sisson and Glaser.

He pushes me a very nice number across the desk. I smile, accept the deal, and appreciate his help in bringing this adoptee’s dream of creating a space to support our community that much closer to reality. How lucky I am.

Patricia Knight Meyer grew up as an undocumented, never legally adopted black-market baby, sold to a dysfunctional couple already denied by the system. Her decades-long search led to a reunion with both her first parents over a decade ago. Since that time, she’s been active in the adoptee community, supporting adoption reform, and speaking and blogging on adoption and reunion. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir and is involved in both adoption and writing communities. She writes and speaks frequently at adoption conferences, and appears on adoption-centered podcasts and blogs on her website. Her reunion video with her first father has 280,000 YouTube views. To learn more about the Spartan Trailer, home of the adoptee writing residency project, follow her Trailer Project. Look for her on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok @myadoptedlife and in Instagram at @patriciaknightmeyer and @somebodys_baby