Sometimes we learn the deepest truths in the most quotidian moments. One afternoon when I was six, I watched a character give birth in an army tent in the sitcom M*A*S*H. I immediately rushed from the den into the kitchen with a very important question for my mother. “Did you give birth to me in a tent like that?” I blurted out, hoping to learn my origin story.
Unexpectedly, my mother dashed from the room in tears. When she returned, she sat me down and broke the news I had somehow always known. “Your Uncle Ana brought you home from the hospital to Mommy and Daddy,” she said. “You’re adopted, which means we chose you.”
I felt relieved to learn this truth, but as it upset my mom, I resolved never to bring it up again. Still, my thirst for details never waned. My parents and I had the same skin tone, but I didn’t much look like them. I was awkward, gangly and bookish; they were not. Despite their love and acceptance, I had always felt like an alien in my family and could never put my finger on why.
In the decades before Google, I was ill-equipped to track down information about my biological parents, especially because I was a minor and adoption records were then sealed in every US state. Shortly after I turned 18, though, I called the hospital where I was born to ask for my records. The clerk, initially warm, seemed puzzled that I didn’t know my last name at birth. After I admitted that I was adopted, a chill fell across the line.
My records arrived in the mail a few weeks later, crisscrossed with thick black marker. The clerk had blocked out every trace of personal information: my birth mother’s name, birth date, address and details about her hospital stay. The redacted records reinforced a sense of erasure. I stuffed them away, and tried to move on.
Years later, as a journalist adept at digging up information about practically anyone and anything, I continued to hit dead ends when it came to learning more about my biological mother. Then, when I was 35, I used part of a tax refund to hire a private investigator to try to find her contact details. He tracked her down quickly: she was a marine attorney living in Connecticut. Elated and fantasising about a joyful mother-daughter reunion, I quickly fired off a letter, gently suggesting she was my mother and asking for medical history and ethnicity details.
My dream turned out to be just that: a fantasy. My birth mother replied, but not in the way I had hoped. In attorney-like fashion, she’d neither confirm nor deny I was the baby she had given up on that late July day, but implied it with her words. “I don’t want to think back on that experience,” she wrote, adding that information about my existence could be “greatly damaging” to her.
Her email left me shaken. Surely she’d want to see the person I had become? I summoned the courage to request a photo and perhaps even lunch (we lived about three hours apart). But she insisted that I never contact her again.
I didn’t know it at the time, but secondary rejection by a birth parent – when an attempt at reconnection with a birth family fails – is rare and considered a traumatic event, for which some adoptees seek therapeutic support. I dealt with the initial blow with long phone calls to friends and probably a little too much red wine. I didn’t have much time to ruminate, though – I was working towards a master’s degree and later that week headed off to a seminar with my professor at her New York City apartment.
During an afternoon tea break, my professor’s partner, a judge, chatted with us at the counter of their cosy kitchen. With a brusque, direct communication style honed in New York City courtrooms, she asked about my life. I blurted out the events of the past few days and told her how I was finding it nearly impossible to focus.
She listened intently. Then, as I imagined she might do in court, she began rapid-fire questioning. “When were you born?” she asked. The early 1970s, I told her. “And your mother, was she Catholic?” “Yes,” I replied, “from an Irish Catholic family. One of seven, I think.”
“And she was young, probably?”
“Yeah – 19, I think.”
She paused. “You know, I’m just about the same age as your birth mother,” she said. “It might be hard for you to understand, especially now, but back then it was tough for an Irish-Catholic girl who became pregnant outside marriage.”
I almost choked on my tea. Was she really defending my biological mother? My birth mother who was rejecting me again out of shame, cruelty or both? “I didn’t know that,” I admitted. “But it doesn’t excuse her actions. She’s in her 50s, for goodness sake.”
Undeterred, the judge explained how pregnant Catholic girls were often sent away to conceal their pregnancies and save face for their families. How the stigma could be overwhelming. She reminded me that abortion was illegal at the time, and Roe v Wade (the decision that legalised abortion in the US) was still a few months off.
As we placed our mugs in the sink, she urged me to try to see the situation through another lens, if only for my own peace of mind. “What’s done is done,” she said. “You are alive, and you have the rest of your life ahead of you.” Now that I knew the truth, the only way forward was through.
For weeks, I clung to my sense of injustice. Perhaps I had grown attached to the bewildering primal wound I’d carted around since childhood. Like many adoptees, I had long been unable to explain why I felt displaced. Now, I had proof. But if trauma and shame are generational continuums, how do we break the cycle?
Over the ensuing months and years, I realised the judge had thrown me a lifeline of sorts. What she said that afternoon had planted seeds of compassion for a woman I could have easily grown to resent. It had blunted the edges of what might have festered into lifelong bitterness, and it fuelled an enduring empathy I’ve applied in many situations since.
Her words also became a salve when I was rejected again by a biological uncle, after we were connected by a DNA test. And they were a shot of confidence when I sought and eventually found my biological father’s family – all of whom welcomed me with open arms and not an ounce of hesitation. Above all, the judge’s words in the kitchen that long-ago day allowed me to let go of the need for perfect answers – and make space for imperfect endings.
Corin Hirsch is a writer who covers food, drink and travel
