"Background Check"
by Tricia Shore

(Originally published in Urban Hiker, Durham, July 2002)

     When I was four years old, I stood watching as a car with Virginia license tags pulled in the driveway.  I knew little about my birth, but I began reading at an early age, taught by no one.  I read my falsified birth certificate, which listed my city of birth as Richmond, Virginia.  Although I loved Beauford and Ann, the wonderful people who adopted me, I hoped that the young couple in the car were my natural parents. I said nothing about my desire and nothing about my disappointment when I found out that the couple was lost and looking for directions.  Over thirty years later, when I gave birth to my son, I would understand the desire I felt that day, the bond that nature creates through conception and childbirth.  I would learn that this bond is often broken unnecesarily.

     I never stopped looking for my mother, but there were months, even years, when I tried to forget.  On my thirteenth birthday, Ann asked me if I’d ever thought about my natural mother.  I slammed the door, refusing to talk about it.  I had blue eyes, as did Ann and Beauford, and Ann and I shared dark brown hair--I could pass for their natural child.  Pretending I was their child was easier somehow than facing what I believed was reality, that my mother had not wanted to keep me.

     Only after my reunion with my mother would I find out that she, like many other mothers who have lost their children to adoption, was highly encouraged to give me to someone else.  No one encouraged my mother to breastfeed me, although her milk would have been in my best interest.  No one allowed her to hold me tightly and love me, as is natural for most new mothers.  Social workers discouraged these actions because they did not want my mother to express her natural feelings for her firstborn.  Doing so may have made her want to keep me and that would have prevented the lovely couple with the house and the yard from obtaining a child.

     My teenage mother was encouraged to think of me as a thing.  Although she was not old enough to vote, social workers allowed her to sign away the right to raise her firstborn.  I have since learned how the adoption industry, a $1.4 billion business with an expected growth rate of 11% per year for the next five years, thinks of babies, especially healthy white infants.  I was a commodity.  No one respected the sacred mother-and-child bond.  Instead, my mother had produced a product for an infertile couple.  I was a gift that my mother gave to someone whom social workers deemed far more worthy to raise me than the mother that God and nature had given me.

     Sometimes it helps to know that my mother loved me and wanted to keep me, but a deeper part of me cannot understand why my mother turned off every maternal instinct to sign the papers that released her right to raise me.  After talking with many other mothers who have lost their children to adoption, I have learned that the pressure to give away their infants was great.  Many were coerced, drugged, and forced into signing papers.  I have yet to meet a mother who does not regret her decision.  I have yet to meet an adoptee who has not suffered as a result of this separation.

     My mother’s loss was so painful that she was unable to talk about it, even with my maternal grandmother, who later regretted that she had helped my mother give me away.  Social workers told my mom that she was acting in my best interest and that she would forget about me and go on with her life.  My mother did not forget.  I have sat in a room with mothers who lost a child more than forty years ago and still they grieve.

     For all the talk in the United States about family values, adoptees’ natural families are hidden; we are supposed to be satisfied that we do not know our ancestors.  My true birth certificate is sealed in an office in Richmond and can only be opened by a court order.  Perhaps if I had some fatal genetic disease, a good lawyer, and a sympathetic judge, I could retrieve it.  But wanting to know my ancestors for me and for any children of mine is not reason enough.  After a private detective found my mother, through sources and means she will not reveal, my mother called the state of Virginia and asked for my birth certificate, the one that she had signed.  An office worker told her that she could not have access to it, that “it’s as if you never had a child.”

     A few years ago I published an article about my search for my natural parents.  I showed it to Beauford.  He seemed to understand and went to the adoption agency with me.  I assured him that I loved him, but that I needed to know my ancestors.  He wore his best suit.  He listened as I asked for information.  The post-adoption counselor tried to steer me away from my birth, concentrating instead on my adoption story, as if that yarn took the place of the nine months I spent inside my mother and my transition to life outside her.

     It is illegal for the counselor to give me any information about my mother, even if my mom had requested such information be given to me.  Years after our meeting, I learned the stake that the agency has in closing my adoption records.  Agencies claim that they are protecting the rights of mothers, but in reality most mothers want records open.  Successful lobbying by that agency and other adoption businesses keep adoption records closed.

     During our session at the adoption agency, I began my biggest leap into denial.  Beauford and I had our picture taken in front of the bassinet where I had been waiting for them to peruse me and see if they wanted me.  Only after my son’s birth would I understand the tragedy of that bassinet, how many babies lay in it wondering where their mothers were, how many mothers were suffering a far worse post-partum depression than most of us will know, having been separated from the child they held in their womb for nine months.

     After we left the agency, over biscuits at Hardee’s, I told Beauford how finding my mother would not diminish my love for him.  He started to cry.  Only later would I learn that he, like many other people who adopted, had been told that if he raised me properly, I would never be curious about my natural family.

     I decided that day that finding my mother was unnecessary, as the counselor had strongly suggested.  I donated money to the adoption agency.  I thanked Ann and Beauford for rescuing me.  I went to graduate school, all the while submerging feelings about adoption and about finding my natural family.  I complied with what society and the adoption agency wanted me to do.  I tried hard to convince myself that the adoption counselor was right: the adoption had been for my best interest and finding my family may cause more problems than it solved.  In truth, I was tired of feeling like a criminal for trying to find the family that nature gave me.  In my state of denial, I had two incidents that, if I had listened closely, would have told me the denial wasn't working.  On the other hand, what alternative did I have? Breaking into the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics?

     The first incident involved a dog that I loved very much.  After my first husband, Jeff, and I separated, Jeff asked me to keep Cokey for a day.  I realized how much I needed and loved Cokey and asked to keep him around for a while. And so I kept Cokey for a few months, but because I had little money, I felt I needed to move to a less expensive place; I could not find a place that allowed dogs.  I tried for three or four months to find someone to keep Cokey for me until I graduated, but no one did.  Finally, at Lake Johnson one day, I saw a man who liked Cokey and I asked the man if he wanted to keep him.  The next Sunday, I was crying as I took Cokey to the man's house.

     Beauford and my boyfriend at the time encouraged me to give Cokey away, but in my heart I knew it was the wrong decision.  I told Cokey over and over why I was doing it and in hindsight, I see how closely that was related to trying to understand why and how my mother gave me away.  I replayed that scene, except the dog was me as an infant and I was my mother.  This would be different, I told myself—it was an open adoption.

     When Jeff realized what I'd done, he offered to retrieve Cokey, but, replaying the adoption tapes in my head, I told him that I couldn't tell him where the man's house was, that I'd given him away and he belonged to the other man now.  A few weeks later, I realized what a dumb thing I'd done and went against Beauford’s and my boyfriend's suggestions and called the man about Cokey.  He said Cokey had run away.  I taped up ads.  I took long drives through the man’s neighborhood.  Jeff went looking for him also and called me when he found what he thought was Cokey, lying dead in the road.  I guess he'd been trying to come back to my old apartment.

     Only since my reunion do I understand how this incident is directly related to adoption.  I wanted so badly to know why my mother gave me away.  I could never give away my child, so I thought in giving away a dog, I could understand.  I was, as my mother had been, "doing the right thing."  What a joke.  I dedicated my master's thesis to my dog Cokey, but nothing will ever bring him back.

     This same boyfriend that had encouraged me to give Cokey away is the one I became pregnant by.  Oddly enough, if I'd continued the pregnancy, the baby would have been due around my birthday.  And so I was subconciously repeating, once again, what my mother did, even down to becoming pregnant around the same time, difficult to do in the long distance relationship with my boyfriend.  When I terminated the pregnancy, I was saying, subconciously, that adoption is such a cruel thing that an abortion is a better alternative.

     Only now is it clear to me how closely this incident was connected to adoption.  In a room filled with mothers who have lost children to adoption, the grief was so intense that I could not stay for the entire meeting.  I have never met anyone who had that kind of grief from an abortion.  As much as I sometimes regret my decision, I did not think it was fair for me to bring a child into the world who would only know only the father’s side of his or her family.

     Shortly after, I broke up with my boyfriend and married the first man I dated after that.  Three years later, I had decided to move out of North Carolina, something I had not wanted to do until I had found my natural family.  One Sunday afternoon, I received a call from a detective agency.  The detective had searched for her daughter over 20 years ago and now searches for other people’s relatives. “We found your mom,” she told me.  Thinking I would never find my mother, I was shocked and surprised.  I had forgotten that I registered with the agency ten years earlier.  It took me three months and a personal loan to pay for the information, but one miraculous day in June, my mother and I met at a rest stop half way between my home in Raleigh and hers in Wilmington.

     “You’ve got a dimple,” she said through tears.  I noticed her smell.  I have since heard that if a mother and child are together for five minutes after birth that they will always remember each other’s smell.  My mother’s smell was sweet and attractive.  I remembered how I had not felt the same about Ann’s smell, something that had nothing to do with hygiene and everything to do with nature and our DNA.

     A few months later I became pregnant with my son, Caleb.  His middle name, Smith, is my mother’s maiden name and was my original last name at birth.  Caleb was due around my birthday and was born two weeks later.  I had been due on my mother’s birthday and was born two weeks after that.

     My mother and I are now over the honeymoon phase of our reunion.  It is hard to deal with our separation of over 34 years and right now we deal with it by talking sporadically, a vast difference from the early days of our reunion; we had talked every night.  No matter what happens, I will not forget how miraculous it was when my mother flew from North Carolina to California to be with us for a few days after my son’s birth.  My husband picked her up from the airport and brought her to the hospital.  Just before I left to go home that day my husband asked us to look at the camera.  He snapped a picture of my mother, me, and my newborn son.  “Three generations,” he said.  It was a moment I’d only dreamed of, one I will never forget.