A Peace from My Past

As a 51 year old ‘Damn Yankee”, from New Jersey I have spent over half of my life in living in North Carolina, with the past three years being here in Durham NC. In the past few years, I have started to feel like Ray Steven’s song, ‘I am my own grandpa’, because my story is about growing up with ‘Secrets and Lies’.


Why ‘Secrets and Lies’?
I was adopted by a family member, one who could not deal with the shame she felt, her father had brought upon the family.
A child puts their trust into the adults around them. A blind trust that the grown-up will always do the right things, that they won’t lie, and that they will make the world a safe place for the child. While I was growing up, my trust in adults was shattered at the age of nine. That is when the man I knew as my ‘grandpop’, dropped a bombshell into my world. He told me his wife was my mother. I didn’t know what he was talking about, as I knew my mother would be coming to pick me up the next night. A few years later I learned, what my ‘grandpop’ meant, was that I had been adopted by the woman I was now living with. I was never ashamed of being adopted. My shame came later from what my adoptive mom would instill into me during my teenage years.

You see my ‘grandpop’ and his wife lived in a simple and rustic log cabin. Instead of beds, they had stacks of ‘feather ticks’ (similar to a mattress but these were filled with feathers). They were backwoods people, and were illiterate. They weren’t always clean because they worked hard, it seemed they both always had dirt under their nails. However, I never remember them acting like they were better than anyone else.

As a child, I liked going and visiting with them, fishing in the pond, collecting chicken eggs, and polishing apples to be sold at the wayside vegetable stand out front. I remember his wife carrying buckets of water up to the house several times during the day, and then having her change out large round saw blades hooked up on the back of a old truck that he used to cut up wood, and then he would have his wife take an axe, and chop these down into pieces that would fit in a wood stove.

But it seems I could never bring myself to recognize this other woman as the woman who gave birth to me. I was with my ‘grandpop’ when he died. I stayed and did private duty nursing for him in the hospital as he laid there, after having a stroke. I lost contact with the woman he told me was my mother after his death for the next twenty five years.

At age of forty four, I had a falling out with my adoptive parents, and then started the search for my birthmother. I was lucky, because I had a guardian angel, named Diane from New Jersey, that helped me to find my birthmother, and we were reunited on Mother’s Day 1996.

I found out during my second visit with my birthmother, how her and my ‘grandfather’ met. He had been going out with her mother to start with. Then he wanted to take my birthmother out. She was only a teenager at the time, and he was in his fifties. She moved in with him eventually and she did not have an easy life living with this man, as I later found out, because he put her out into the fields to work, when she was quite young, and she was treated almost like a slave.
She told me how one of his friends ‘took advantage” of her while he was at work one day, and how she was so upset, but she told my grandfather when he came in what had happened. He made her think that it was her fault, because she was ‘stupid’, and in those days, my birthmother was so simplistic, that she blamed herself for this man doing this to her. She thought she had brought this on herself and that it was her fault because she invited him in to talk. As I grew up, I watched many times as my ‘grandfather’ would tell her that if she didn’t do what he told her to, that he would ‘put a boot in her ass’, or he would hold up his fist, and tell her that he would ‘fix what ailed her’ if she didn’t do as he said.
Although, I can’t ever remember him actually hitting her, I knew from the way he said it, he meant every word. He could be very loving to her also when he wanted to be, because every now and then, when he would pull her onto his lap and give her a big kiss.
My birthmother only had an eighth grade education, and she felt that everything was her fault, including signing me away after I was born. She felt that if she had been able to read what she was signing, she would never have signed the papers which gave me away. She told me she wasn’t sure which man was my father, it had all been so long ago. The night of my birth, she went into labor early in the morning. Her water broke and she told my ‘grandfather’ that it was time to go, that they needed to get to the hospital, which was about an hour away. When they got there, he dropped her off out front and then just left her there. Two days later, my adoptive mom (a daughter from a previous marriage of my ‘grandfather’s’) and my ‘grandfather’ coming into the room and they told her to sign the papers that they put in front of her. She said that she was still in quite a drugged state, and she did what they told her to do. A few days later, she went home, but without the baby that she had went into the hospital to have. She told me that this confused her a lot. She didn’t know why she didn’t have the baby, and my ‘grandfather’ either didn’t or wouldn’t tell her why.

At this writing, my adoptive parents and I have had another falling out, but I would like you to know that my adoptive parents raised me the best they could, and gave me things that if I had stayed with my birthmother, I would have never had. For that I am very grateful but I feel that the readers of this story should have the truth.
My adoptive mom, was also brought up as simple ‘white trash’ from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ in the same conditions my birthmother and ‘grandfather’ lived in. However somewhere along the way she worked hard to bring herself out of that poverty and for that she should be proud. But then she learned to put on airs. She learned how to look down on people, even her own father, and the way they lived. She started to think somewhere along the line that she was better than everyone else. There was a hidden shame my adoptive mom had about her father. How could he involve himself with such a young woman after divorcing her mother, and then get this woman pregnant also. How much shame could her dad bring on the family? A shame that she could not handle mentally.
I have thought lately, what would she say if she had adopted me thinking that I was her father’s illegitimate child, and I was actually the result of the rape, because I don’t think she knew about the rape?
It was many years later when I asked my adoptive mom “who is my birthfather”, and she said “your grandfather”.

As a result of the shame my adoptive mom had regarding all of this, she then began to instill this shame into me about the conditions that my birthmother and ‘our’ father lived in, as I grew up. A shame that even after being reunited with my birthmother, I would have to go into therapy to overcome, because it all came flooding back into my mind.
Shame about them never having indoor plumbing, or that my birthmother was always dirty.
After ‘our’ father passed away, my adoptive mom changed the locks on her fathers house, and wouldn’t let my birthmother back in so that she could get her things. I learned this from birthmother when we were reunited. So then my birthmother and my sister, went to live with another friend of my ‘grandfathers’ and they moved up into northern Pennsylvania. It seems, she didn’t have an easy life with this man either, but fortunately they never married. During our reunion, I learned my sister had also been ‘taken advantage of’ by an older man at the age of 16, and had a beautiful daughter. She told me the family wanted her to put her child up for adoption, and something made her fight to keep her daughter. I am very proud of her for what she did in standing up to them. Since then, I have been able to help my sister see that her daughter, who was classified as being mentally retarded at a young age, is probably not mentally retarded at all. At best, she may have a learning disability. I have come to love both of them very much, and just wish they lived closer.

Since being reunited with my family again, I have had them down to North Carolina for the Special Olympics, and even took them to the beach to see the ocean for the first time in their lives. My birthmother also had the chance to meet her two grandchildren, and three great grandchildren for which she was overjoyed at, and now I have pictures of four generations together, that I cherish. I brought my birthmother down for the month of January in 2000, and then went to Pennsylvania and saw her a few times after that.
My birthmother passed away on her birthday in August of 2000, but I am happy I had the opportunity to be in my birthmothers life, if only for four more years. Not all adult adoptees are given this opportunity. Some adult adoptees never find their birthparents, and for some the birthparent has passed away, or else they find and are rejected a second time. I am so grateful that I was able to have the time I did with my birthmother. I am more like her, than my adoptive mom. I am a simple person, laid back, and I don’t like to take advantage of others. I found out that as I get older, I look a lot like my birthmother, and that means a lot to me, knowing who I look like. I have an ongoing relationship with my sister and niece, and hope someday they will come down off the mountain and join me here in the Triangle area. I think that they would enjoy living down here, but it would be a big change from the simple small town that they currently live in.

Fifty years later, I know the woman I called mom, was actually a half sister, and a maternal grandfather was actually my father. I know that my birthmother did not just give me away, I was taken away, and my birthmother should never have felt ‘stupid’ for signing those papers. She was taken advantage of once again, but this time by family, something she could do nothing about. I only hope that wherever she is in this great cosmos, she knows that I love her, and I am happy that I was able to share a part of my life with her.