By Kathleen Shea KirsteinAt the end of each Wednesday evening writing class, the instructor gives us a prompt to write on for the following week. She instructs us to write for 20 minutes and limit editing. We need to have the piece ready to read at the next class gathering. The last prompt was to write about “a lie I told.” I’ve never been good at telling a lie, so this was a hard assignment. When I was a kid, I got caught whenever I told even a little white lie. There wasn’t any point in lying, so I stopped. It took me a few days after getting the assignment to remember a lie I had told.

I needed a passport because I was planning to go to Cancun, Mexico in September 2005.  I applied and later received a letter in the mail saying my application was denied because I hadn’t submitted documentation to explain why my birth certificate was filed 14 months after my birth. The first call I made was to my mother to tell her my passport had been denied and ask if she knew why my birth certificate was filed so long after my birth. She said it must have been a clerical error and hung up. I called the town clerk’s office in the state where I’d been born. The person who took my call couldn’t help and advised me to contact the probate court. I called the court and was told to write a letter to the judge stating dates of the trip to Mexico, including the passport application denial and the reason for the denial. I was hoping the court could actually find the documentation explaining that reason. I wrote and mailed the letter the next day

After this experience, I began to wonder if I was adopted, so I left some messages on adoption reunion boards with basic information, such as the year and location of my birth, hoping to connect with someone who might have some information about me. At that point, I was willing to try anything. I just wanted an answer to this mystery. I’d mentioned to my family that I might take a day off from work and go sit at the Probate court to see if I could get an answer to my letter.

Then I had an idea. I’ve always gotten my medical care at the clinic in our town—the clinic where I’ve worked for years—so it occurred to me to go to the medical records department and review my chart. I spent my lunch break on August 22, 2005 reading my medical records. The first line of the last page in my chart—essentially the first page documenting my life with the Sheas—said “Adopted Baby, 4 lbs 4 oz.”  Finally, I had confirmation that I’d been adopted.

Armed with this new information, I called the probate court and asked them to search for my adoption records. Hopefully, with the information they contained, I’d then be allowed access to my birth certificate and could get my passport.

I scheduled a lunch meeting for two days later with our clinic psychologist to problem-solve how to approach my parents. Forty-nine years is a long time for them to keep the secret. I wondered what kind of defenses they’d built up. I wanted advice about whether I should tell them I knew I was adopted.

I was surprised when my Dad called me at work on the morning of August 24 and asked me to come over to the house right away. My intuition kicked in. Somehow, I knew my parents were going to tell me the truth about my birth. I grabbed a long stem red rose from the gift shop on my way out the door to give to my mom. Dad clearly remembered that I said that I might go to probate court to see if they would hear my case sooner. He must have realized I’d find out the truth, so he likely convinced mom they had to tell me and they had to do so that morning. They were not aware that I’d read my chart, so the timing of his call was coincidental.

I left work and arrived at my folks house a little after 9 am. Standing in the living room, Dad asked, “You know why you are here?”

“Yes, I said. “I’ve known since Monday I was adopted.”

Mom then told me that the state did home studies, even back in 1957, and that caused the delay in filing my birth certificate. She remembered that she wanted to make a good impression, and since she loved to sew, she made me a new dress for each meeting with the state worker. Once the home studies were satisfied and my placement approved, the court finalized my adoption when I was 14 months old with a little ceremony that changed my name. I can’t help but wonder if that’s similar to what happens when a person enters the Witness Protection Program. What did I witness that I needed protection from? My original mother?

My mother was upset. She told me the day I won the trip to Cancun was the worst day in her life, and that she felt like her life was over. I think in that moment our roles reversed and I became the mother, making sure she felt secure and nurtured. Nurturing was never her strong suit. She was better at keeping up appearances.

I reassured my parents and told them that nothing in our relationship was going to change, and it became my job in a way to forever prove my loyalty until they died.

And that was the lie I told. That nothing would change. Because everything changed.

I thought of them in a different light. That’s when I realized they’d kept me at arm’s length most of my life. Over the years, even my kids have observed I was treated differently than the sister I grew up—their biological child. The pedestal I kept my parents on began to crumble. When the truth came out, I kept thinking about how they lied to me on those occasions when I point blank asked if I’d been adopted. I was consumed with wondering how they could have lied for so long without giving something way, especially after I learned from my mother’s cousin that my mother had the entire town under a gag order. My friends all knew.

Looking back, I see there had been a few close calls when I was growing up. I worked in a multidisciplinary clinic as an oncology-certified RN and administered chemotherapy to patients. The time I pushed medication in to patients’ IVs was always a chance to chat and get acquainted. Talking to one patient, I mentioned that I knew her daughter-in-law. She asked what my parents’ names were, and when I told her, she said, “Oh, are you the one they adopted”? I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t think so. I called my mother that night to ask, but she insisted I wasn’t adopted. “People are always confusing us with a family in town that adopted a baby the same time you were born,” she said. I didn’t think my mother would lie to me, so I believed her. And I thought I had her hands and looked a little bit like her, so I trusted what she told me.

I wonder what would have happened if those close calls had been fully realized and if I’d pressed my mother harder. If I hadn’t blindly trusted my parents, would I have known sooner? Would knowing sooner have a made a difference? I didn’t realize it then, but I lied to myself and my parents that day in their living room when I told them nothing in our relationship would change.  Everything has changed. Nothing could be the same because the person I was changed in those moments.Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a registered nurse.

By Kevin GladishOn May 26, 2015, thanks to a change in Ohio law, I received a copy of my original birth certificate in the mail. That day, I finally learned a truth that I had long suspected but denied my entire life — that I was adopted. I was 43 years old.

Six weeks later, I began writing and speaking publicly about it. And I haven’t really stopped.

I had no idea then how writing and storytelling would save me. In those first days, my words were raw and filled with both a newfound freedom and a newfound grief. Learning that I was, in fact, adopted, was like putting on prescription glasses for the first time after years of not even knowing I couldn’t see. But it also meant seeing how long I’d been lied to and what believing those lies had cost me.

I posted my blog to Facebook and waited. At first, my confessional ramble felt like a selfish act of rebellion. Until then, I’d only told a few people what I’d learned. I knew that the news would come as a shock to most — not so much that I was adopted, but that I had only just now found out.

It was embarrassing, like finally admitting that I’d been pretending to laugh along with a joke that I never got, a joke that was on me the whole time. And yet there was also a relief. Despite how I felt, I knew it was not my fault. I simply could not fathom that the father I loved and trusted my whole life, a man I still today sometimes miss terribly despite everything, could look me in the eye when we were both grown men and lie. But that’s what he did. Having seen one too many clues, I’d finally gotten the guts to ask him if I was adopted.

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

I had a decision to make, and I did what I think a lot of people do when confronted with whether to believe someone they love. I chose to ignore the growing mountain of evidence: photos and timelines that made no sense, memory fragments, and my own reflection in the mirror. I chose to believe my father.

None of this changed what I’d always felt inside. I’d spent a lifetime averting my eyes and changing the subject whenever the conversation turned to family ancestry, a topic that inexplicably made me uneasy. I’d say I was mostly Slovak (I know now I’m mostly Irish) and taught myself to repeat lines like, “I take after Mom. My sister takes after Dad.” In truth, I looked like neither, and deep down I’d always felt like a fraud playing badly at a game of charades.

That first blog post was read by hundreds of people and passed on. I got calls asking if I was OK. People connected me with online support groups of other late-discovery adoptees, with whom I shared more. And for the first time, I felt a layer of loneliness I never even knew existed begin to fall away. I began to relate to people, for the first time, as me.

Of course this was also frightening. At times I was seized with sudden irrational panics squeezing my throat and chest. I imagined losing everyone, being rejected and abandoned for telling the truth. I was sure that somewhere a meeting would be called to decide that I had stepped out of line and needed to be punished. And though my father by this time was gone, and my mother was in the grip of severe dementia, I still believed there would be dire consequences for exposing the truth.

None of this happened, of course. It was all in my mind. But such is the power of deeply held shame.

Until I began telling my own story, I’d been a character in someone else’s made-up tale. It may have been a nice story, but it wasn’t mine. And it wasn’t true. And just as I had been putting my health at risk each time I walked into a doctor’s office and wrote down someone else’s family medical history instead of my own, I was making myself soul sick every time I repeated it.  Now, I could finally start to get better.

It would be a while before I could begin to trust myself. My first instinct, to this day, is to assume that I am always wrong. “You need to listen to your gut,” I’ve been told, and it’s good advice. But what if you’d spent a lifetime convincing yourself that your gut was telling you lies? Journaling and meditation help, along with honest friends I trust. But I’ve got a ways to go.

Years later, I am still new at this. Every word I write and speak of my truth is a battle against self-doubt and uncertainty. But that’s precisely why I keep doing it, long after some would prefer I “get over it.” Again and again, I am saying: “This is me. This is true.” And every once in a while, someone will say, “Thank you. Your story helped me.” I hear not only from other late-discovery adoptees but also from those who are healing from their own family secrets and inherited shame. I listen, and our stories become a conversation, one that saves us both.

Of course there’s always a risk in telling a true story. Not everyone will want to hear it. But someone, somewhere, will need to hear it, just as badly as you need to tell it. I hope you will. I’m listening too.Kevin Gladish is a late-discovery adoptee, writer, and storytelling performer living in Chicago. He started documenting his discovery and search for birth family soon after finding out he was adopted at the age of 43 and is working on a full-length solo performance piece that is yet unnamed. He’ll take suggestions. Check out his blog, A Story with No Beginning: A Late Discovery Adoption Journey.

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