late discovery adoptees

When I was 38, after both parents had died, I found out my mother wasn’t my birthmother. My parents had taken the secret to the grave.

But like a gravedigger, I pried the secret out of the ground. I dug through every possession in the house they had lived in for 25 years, and I found some strange evidence—baby books with the dates changed, whited out and written over; baby photos with only my father and no sign of a mother. And hiding in plain sight, The Ring of Truth, when I took a good look at my mother’s wedding ring I saw it was engraved with a date a year after I was born.

I was going to Hartford for Passover with my father’s first cousin Paula; maybe she would know something. She was frantically cooking Seder dinner when I joined her in the kitchen. Against the smell of brisket and chicken broth, I laid a stink bomb. “Paula, I’ve been finding all these odd things in my parents’ stuff, can you tell me what’s going on?”

Paula, with her back to me, gripped the stove as hard as she could and said, “All that happened so long ago, I think you should just put it behind you.”

Kaboom. Three days later Paula flew to Washington DC and was in our living room telling me and my husband that my father, yes he was my father, had an affair with a girl from Portland, Maine named Peggy Foley, and that weeks after I was born her sister called him and said “come and get the baby, Peggy can’t take care of her.”

My father, a single man in Maine in the 1950s, swooped in like a rescue hero to pick me up. He showed off his baby girl to some of his cousins who were impressed by his diaper changing skills; and his best friend/lawyer helped arrange for foster care for me in Freeport, Maine with a family called the Wards. That explained the mysterious photos of me in a high chair with one candle on my birthday cake, flanked by two strangers, a mother and her son.

Then when I was several months old, along came Lynn Holroyde, a 43-year-old divorcee with an adult son. She took one look at me, a sweet little pretty-in-pink motherless baby, raised her hand and said, “I’ll take it from here.”  Well, some version of that. She married my father, one of the nicest men on earth; they formally adopted me, and then escaped the “scandal” by moving as far away from Maine as possible to Tucson, Arizona. They were fish out of water in a city out of water. But in Tucson they could present as a nuclear family with no questions asked.

I was the one asking the awkward questions.

“Why was I born in Portsmouth? I thought we are from Maine?”

“Your father had business here,” my mother said. Portsmouth was where my birthmother lived.  

“Why don’t I have a middle name?”

“We thought Margo Warren would look better in spotlights,” my mother snapped. They had changed my given name Margaret Rose Warren.

“Did you breastfeed me?”

“Yes,” my mother lied.

“How was my childbirth.”

“Painful as hell,” my mother said. Well, maybe she was referring to the birth of her older son, but it wasn’t me. 

I thought I was an only child, but I am one of six. My DNA surprise was my half-brother, four years older than I am, a result of Peggy’s affair with a married man in Hartford. After being bounced around for 18 months, he was adopted and raised by what he describes as a cultured, educated couple.

Peggy had four more children, two girls and two boys, after me and my half-brother with a man she married less than three weeks after I was born.  She abandoned them when they were eight, six, four, and a newborn she left on a pool table with a note to her husband about where to find him.

“She was very, very sick,” a newly discovered half sister-in-law said. Peggy had severe bipolar disease, documented in detail in letters from her second husband, a Russian 25 years her senior, to his son. “She is running, running, running,” he told his son.

Peggy was also an alcoholic, a gene I thought had mysteriously inherited from two “normal parents.”

I’ve been in recovery for decades. Peggy was untreated for both of her diseases. “She couldn’t help it,” a cousin told me in her defense, and to an extent I agree. Under different circumstances she might have gotten well.

I never doubted that Lynn was my mother. She smothered me with love. We even had the same high forehead, a fivehead. We passed. My father, as I’ve said, one of the nicest men in the world, also loved me beyond measure. I had a happy, privileged childhood.

I am profoundly grateful. I consider myself the luckiest of the litter.

But I’m also furious. I’ve spent most of the last 30 years trying to figure out who the hell I am, to find answers that my parents could have easily provided.

They were members of the Silent Generation, and they kept their silence. They thought appearances were important, and they wanted my life to appear as a perfect story. So, they made it up.