(Editor’s note: All events described in this post took place as described, but some names have been changed in deference to the privacy of others.)
Despite all the unsettling things I learned about my genealogical roots — or perhaps because of what I learned — my contact with my paternal half-sister whetted my appetite for contact with my biological mother, Lynette.
But appetite was turning into severe hunger pangs — four weeks passed with no response to my emailed letter, and six more went by without reply after trying to reach her by Facebook Messenger.
“I just can’t believe she hasn’t contacted you,” Debi said one evening as we turned out the lights and pulled the comforter under our chins. “If I got a message like that, I’d have to acknowledge it at least.”
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, trying not to sound glum. “Maybe she just doesn’t want to be bothered. Or maybe she’s scared. She’s remarried, after all. Maybe her second husband doesn’t know anything about me and she’s trying to find a way to tell him. Or trying to figure out a way to contact me without him knowing. You never can tell.
“Can’t worry about things you can’t control.”
But already I was scripting in my head the uncomfortable opening lines of a text message. I planned to send it that weekend, if I could just get through a busy work week.
One of my tasks was an after-hours community forum in Beaufort where my boss, Solicitor Duffie Stone, would speak. My role would be to pass out business cards and literature about our office’s programs, and follow up with community members whose concerns and ideas we could not address in full that night.
The forum was to begin at 5:30 p.m. At 5:29 p.m., as I prepared to enter the small, cinderblock church, I reached into my jacket pocket to silence my phone. Taking a quick last look at the screen, I noticed a Messenger notification.
It was from Lynette M. Amato: Not sure how to respond; fearful of identity theft; scams, please understand. Very interested in speaking with you…. Surprised & elated if this is real! Can you share with me your birthdate and location?
Seventy-five days after learning the identity of my birth mother and 66 days after my first message to her, Lynette had responded! Two-plus months of toggling between patience and anxiety suddenly seemed trivial. Some people need years to track down their birth parents or adopted children. Lynette and I connected in mere months — a veritable blink of the eye. My first thought was gratitude for this good fortune.
My second thought: Oh, crap!
I’d been anticipating this moment, or something like it, for months if not years; now, it would take me at least a couple of hours to respond to my birth mother. I had time only for a quick, cryptic phone call to Debi.
“No time to talk. This forum is about to start,” I told her breathlessly. “But I had to tell you or I’m going to burst — I just got a reply from Lynette!”
“Oh, my God! What did she say? Are you coming home?”
“No, I need to do this first. I’ll call you as soon as it’s over,” I said as I pushed open glass double doors and walked into the vestibule.
I wanted to take a victory lap inside the church and preach my delight from its pulpit. Instead, I shook a few hands, distributed a few business cards and sat fidgety in a folding chair as I tried to focus on Duffie’s presentation.
He did well. I think.
Concentrating was nearly impossible. My heart hammered against my ribs in a wild, uncontrollable rhythm. I sat there pent up and throbbing for nearly two hours, a shaken soda that could not wait to explode.
Finally released from duty, I bolted for the parking lot. Before I could reach my truck, a reporter caught me with a couple of questions. I answered politely, but tersely. Oh, so tersely.
Finally inside my truck cab, I slid my trembling fingers across the touchscreen and saw Lynette sent a second message: After looking at your FB… I am looking forward to speaking with you.
I called Debi and read Lynette's messages to her. We talked through my truck’s Bluetooth connection all the way home, and when I arrived, I went straight to my computer to log in to Facebook. I had waited more than a month for a Messenger reply from Lynette, yet I felt remiss that I had allowed 2 ½ hours to pass before posting my response to her. I apologized for my tardiness and explained what I had been doing that evening. I reiterated that our contact would be at her discretion and thanked her for her reply.
Over the next two hours, Lynette and I traded messages, became Facebook friends, shared photos and arranged to speak over the phone the next morning.
Elated and exhausted, my head finally hit the pillow two hours past my usual bedtime. Debi and I lay there, still too excited to let the night be over, chatting back and forth, wondering what might happen next, until one or the other could not stay awake any longer.
The following day, I sprang from bed to start my usual routine — checking email, wishing Facebook friends happy birthday, squeezing in a short workout. I also made screenshots of my Messenger conversation with Lynette and texted them to Dad. I called him on the way to work, too, to share the good news and tell him I would call him again after Lynette and I spoke.
Arriving at the office, I went straight to Duffie’s suite to tell him and our office’s deputy solicitor, Sean Thornton, what had happened the previous evening — I had not let on while Duffie and I were at the church — and to tell him I made arrangements with my birth mother to speak by phone later that morning. I did not need permission to make a personal call, but I wanted to tell Duffie and Sean the story, anyway, because at that point, I had not even told them I was looking for my birth mother. I thought both would appreciated the search because both, like me, were adopted as infants.
Returning to my office downstairs, I checked my email, read the detention center booking reports and sent a follow-up email to a gentleman I met at the previous evening’s community meeting. I tried hard to be productive until Lynette called because I did not imagine I would be terribly productive afterward.
Working calmed my nerves, and soon my nervousness was entirely overwhelmed by a sense of peace that was becoming as familiar as it was counterintuitive. At so many junctures in my search — points at which I would have guessed I’d be clawing out of my skin in anxiety or too nervous to breathe — I found myself remarkably calm.
Not even the incoming call from a number with a Springfield, Ohio, area code perturbed me.
I leaned back in my office chair, looked at the smooth, undisturbed surface of the office park’s retention pond outside my window and noticed a lone, buffy brown cardinal flitting amongst the usual sparrows on the ground beneath the hedges.
I swiped right to answer.
“Hello, Lynette,” I said, trying to sound the way I felt — bright, pleased and unfazed.
Her reply was nearly immediate, but the fraction of a second was plump with anticipation. I wondered what her voice would sound like, and now I was about to hear it for the first time.
“Hello, Jeff,” she said in a husky tone that was not the mousey squeak I expected from one so petite. Hearing her voice, I realized I had frozen her in time, lingering on the scared 14-year-old wondering what to do with me. She did not sound frail, and I was glad of it.
“Are you as nervous as I am?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose I am,” I fibbed out of courtesy, still strangely calm.
“I have prayed for this day for more than 50 years, but I just cannot believe it is happening,” Lynette said, her voice quivering but not cracking.
She had just come from a massage that she hoped would help her relax. She planned to sit in a restaurant near her spa to talk, but suddenly feeling vulnerable and conspicuous, she returned to her car, where our conversation might feel more private.
Since reading my message the afternoon before, Lynette’s mind had been careening down a hundred different roads at once. She was not sure who to talk to first, or who to tell what. Her husband, Vince, knew that she had given up a child for adoption, but she had not yet told him about our contact. She was nervous to break the news but not worried about his reaction because he was well aware how much she pined for a reunion.
They were together, after all, when she went looking for me more than 20 years ago.
Lynette explained how she had enlisted the nonprofit organization Search Angels, which helps reunite biological parents with adopted children. They provided her a list of nine likely names with current contact information, but as she started to work her way through the list, she relented.
“As much as I wanted to find you, I just couldn’t barge in on your life,” Lynette explained. “I decided that the decision needed to be up to you.”
I stopped to recall what I might have been doing around the time Lynette went looking for me and how I might have reacted to contact. I’m not sure. Debi and I would have been married no more than a few years, and I would have just left The Beaufort Gazette for its sister publication, The (Hilton Head) Island Packet. Mom would have been very much alive, and I would have been very uninterested in anything that would have thrown any of these relationships into a tizzy. I cannot imagine I would have been rude to her; I also cannot imagine I would have been enthused about the contact.
I told Lynette that it seemed like events unfolded in God’s perfect time.
I also told her I felt I had an unfair advantage — I cobbled together quite a bit of her background while searching for her, while she knew relatively little about me. I was happy to answer her questions, and I began by explaining how my family wound up in South Carolina. I told her how Jen came along shortly after my adoption was official, about Mom and Dad’s roots in rural Kentucky, my fanatical love of baseball, how I became a journalist and then an ex-journalist, and how Mom’s death stirred in me a desire to find her.
Lynette expressed her gratitude to my parents for raising me and her desire to meet my family, if it was OK. The conversation was strained only when it turned to my paternal relations. I explained how I first made contact with my half-sister Melissa. How I learned of the death of my half-brother Matthew Christopher. How I had reservations about my biological father, Matthew.
Lynette had the same reservations. Actually, she had much more than reservations. After chatting nervously and continuously through the first half of our conversation, Lynette grew increasingly quiet. She confirmed that Matthew was my biological father and stressed that what happened between them, while consensual, was not a pleasant memory and not something she wanted to talk about with me in any detail.
“I mean you no disrespect and absolutely understand if you want to have contact with your biological father’s family, too,” Lynette said, “but I don’t want anything to do with him.”
I did not want to press her, and after an awkward silence, I told her I understood. However, I sensed in her voice a hint of worry — perhaps that she had not been forthcoming enough about how she and Matthew came to cross paths. As if to atone, she started telling me about her childhood, particularly the tumultuous time in the years after her father’s death at age 38, in 1963.
In the ensuing years, Lynette wanted for little, materially speaking. Her stepfather, Ernie, made a good living as a firefighter. They had a pool and typically took month-long family vacations during the summer. Her mother was practical and intelligent — she graduated first in her high school class at age 16 and completed a degree by age 18, at a time when most women did not go to college — but a lifetime of tragedy left her remote and disengaged from her children.
Starved for attention but left to her own devices, Lynette was eight months pregnant with me before Carolyn even noticed — and only then because Lynette forced her hand. One day, Lynette reported to the junior high school nurse that she had a stomach ache and needed to call home. Lynette convinced her mother to arrange a doctor’s appointment, knowing that once the physician examined her, he would have little choice but to confront Carolyn about her daughter’s pregnancy.
After that awkward doctor’s visit, Lynette huddled with her mother and stepfather. They had to decide what to do next. Her parents presented several options.
But in Lynette’s mind, there was only one.
And it would entail more pain and discomfort for her — pain and discomfort she will explain to you herself better than I ever could.
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