(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.)
My search for my birth mother seemed to know only two speeds — breakneck and baby’s crawl.
I decided to seek her after delivering my adoptive mother’s eulogy in July 2017 but took no steps to do so until December 2021. Once I started looking, I figured it might take me months — perhaps even years — to identify her. But in a span of just 24 hours in February 2022, I uncovered my birth mother’s name, discovered she was only 13 when I was conceived, and learned the tragic string of events that had marked her life and her mother’s life before her. I also discovered at least two half-siblings.
But now the search was again at trudge. Weeks passed with no reply from Lynette to my introductory email. For the most part, I was at peace, but my wife Debi grew twitchy as a squirrel’s tail. What was going on? Why wasn’t she responding? Was she scared? Angry? Dead?
I checked in occasionally on Lynette’s Facebook page to see if she had made any new public posts — she had not — and stare for a while at the picture of her and the man I had identified as my half-brother, Cain Baugh. I gazed at this tiny lady with the sweetest smile and marveled that I had found the woman who carried me for nine months. I decided the satisfaction and excitement in that discovery would tide me over, as I patiently awaited her response.
Some nights, though, a disquieting thought made return visits — I fretted over the circumstances of my conception. I suffered no personal angst — intellectually and emotionally, I knew I was not guilty for the sins of my father. But if I were indeed the product of statutory rape, Lynette might want nothing to do with me, and for perfectly understandable reasons.
I pondered that possibility almost every night for weeks, hoping I was not reopening a wound. Then, I would think back to Mom’s bedtime story and remind myself why I started this search. Even adults like a comforting tale as they drift off to sleep, I suppose.
Anxiety over recent discoveries further dissipated after I told Dad what I had unearthed about my biological father. I had left his house on the day of the big reveal without telling him what I learned, but I broke the news a few days later during a phone call from my drive home from work. I sensed that a little part of him, as with me, was relieved to learn that this man is dead, though neither of us would say such an awful thing out loud. Frankly, I was ashamed such a thought had passed through my head at all.
I also remained curious as ever about the paternal half-sister I discovered in my Ancestry.com DNA results, but just as unsure about whether to contact her. Of course, that decision would not be entirely mine, anyway. If Melissa were to log into Ancestry — she had last checked in about three weeks before I received my DNA results — she would see that we are a close match. That would certainly pique her curiosity and prompt contact through Ancestry’s messaging system.
I hoped that she would. And I had already decided I would not ignore her if she did.
And I didn’t.
On March 17, 2022, I was checking my email accounts during my lunch break and saw an alert that I had received an Ancestry message. It was from Melissa. I opened the Ancestry app on my phone and read:
Hi! I see we are a very close match. Besides my mom & my son, you're the closest match I have. You are matched by my father’s biological family, which I don't know much about & I don't recognize names on your page but do know a few of our mutual matches. Any ideas?
My stomach turned so many flips, I could not finish my lunch. I scampered back to my office, launched Microsoft Word and began drafting possible responses. After an hour of composing, erasing, editing and recomposing, I replied:
Hi Melissa. I'm very happy to hear from you. I have wanted very much to contact you since getting my DNA results but hesitated because I don't want to unwittingly upset anyone. I was adopted as an infant in 1969 and have been searching for my birth mother. I suspect you are my half-sister and that we share a father. (I think we bear a slight resemblance :-) ). I'm not positive about my father's identity, though. His name wasn't on my original birth certificate, which I recently received from the Ohio Department of Vital Statistics -- not unusual for out-of-wedlock births, as I understand it.
Melissa’s response was immediate, and it upended much of what I thought I had learned about my biological father:
My bio Dad's name is Matthew. …
Matthew? Don’t you mean Robert?
… He was also adopted as most of his family was. He has several siblings, and all but one were adopted out. My bio dad has me and 1 other son who passed years ago...maybe he had another kid and didn't know?! would be cool to have another sibling tho, lol
She followed with a link to her Facebook page and another message: Now I’m really curious. … Can’t wait to hear from you.
I immediately sent her a Facebook friend request. Still communicating on Ancestry, I told her I was curious, too, because I did not expect to hear that someone named Matthew is her father. I told her what I knew about Robert but did not make it clear that my flawed assumption was about the identity of my biological father, not my relationship to her. Presumably, Matthew never came up in my Ancestry research because he was relinquished for adoption and did not share a last name with the rest of his biological family.
Melissa understood me to believe we were cousins and, in her excitement, had already messaged Robert’s daughter to tell her she had a brother.
The discussion was quickly getting scrambled. The exchange would go better if we talked by phone rather than by keyboard. So I asked if I could call her on my way home. She agreed. The following two hours were excruciating, but finally, the clock struck five. I dashed to my truck to speak — for the first time in my life! — with a blood relative.
We exchanged pleasantries, then, thinking back to what the adoption agency told Mom and Dad about my biological father, I blurted: “Does your father have red hair?”
“Yes, he does,” Melissa responded.
“And blue eyes?”
“Yes.”
We quickly confirmed what I initially believed to be true: She was indeed my half-sister, and her father, Matthew, was my biological father, too. This news assuaged any concern about being the product of a statutory rape. Matthew was two years younger than Robert and would have only been 15 or 16 when I was conceived — still older than Lynette and possibly still coercive — but not likely a de facto crime under Ohio law.
This also meant that my biological father was still alive and that I again had a decision to make about whether to meet him. But at least my biological father was not a convicted felon, right!
Right?
From what Melissa learned or remembered, Matthew had a difficult childhood in his adoptive parents’ home. They, like Melissa’s paternal grandparents, lived in Springfield. In fact, they lived a short distance from their son’s biological brother Robert, although Matthew grew up unaware of his blood relatives’ proximity. As a kid, he spent much time on the streets and in lockups. During our second conversation a few days later, Melissa told me Matthew had no idea I existed. He remembered a fleeting encounter with Lynette but said that when I was born in the summer of 1969, he likely would have been in juvenile detention.
Within four years of my birth, Matthew had fathered a second son, by his first wife. They named him Matthew Christopher. However, by 1976, the couple had divorced. Sometime after that, Matthew’s wife and son moved to Florida.
Matthew’s time in juvenile hall did not seem to rehabilitate him. As an adult, he racked up two felony convictions for drug trafficking and a third for aggravated vehicular assault, according to Ohio court records. Between stints in the penitentiary, he married and divorced Melissa’s mother.
Matthew’s only daughter was born in 1981, and she remembers a mostly absentee father, who once cursed her out during a call from prison when she did not put her mom on the line right away. Little Melissa, not yet a teenager, warned him never to talk to her like that again.
Another time, Melissa arrived home after school to unexpectedly find Matthew at her house. He was between incarcerations, and Melissa wanted nothing to do with him. So she took the children her mother babysat to a nearby park and waited for Matthew to leave.
She did not see him again for a long time.
Melissa learned only years later that on that afternoon, her mother told Matthew to back off. She issued the warning to protect her daughter, but she did not make that decision unilaterally. She had watched Melissa refuse to take phone calls from her biological father and asked her daughter what she thought of him.
Melissa’s response: “I told her flat out I had a dad, and it wasn't Matthew.”
Melissa’s life got much more orderly and placid after her mother got remarried, to a kind, hard-working long-haul trucker. Melissa considers him her real father and took his last name.
Ironically, the lawlessness that alienated Matthew from two branches of his family connected him with a third. While serving a prison term in the late 1980s or early 1990s, he noticed that when fellow inmates walked past, they often looked at him as if they had just seen a ghost.
One day, an inmate asked him, “Man, how did you get here so fast? I just saw you in the other cell block.”
Now, Matthew was the puzzled one. Knowing he had not, in fact, been in another area of the prison that day, he walked over to the next cell block. Finally, he learned the source of everyone’s confusion. Standing before him in the same prison garb was his doppelganger — Robert, the brother he never knew he had.
The two became fast friends. As they told each other their life stories, they eventually realized they were more than dead ringers; they were, in fact, blood.
Melissa sent me a photo of her and Matthew taken during a prison visit when she was just a little girl. (Sonofabitch. I look like him, too.) Though never quite out of contact, after Melissa’s mother remarried, Matthew stopped coming around. By the time Melissa and I discovered each other, she and Matthew were Facebook friends, but little more. At that point, he had not seen her youngest child in person. Matthew sends her messages occasionally; sometimes Melissa responds, sometimes she does not.
“Matthew didn’t have anyone to guide him through life like we did when he got put up for adoption,” Melissa told me. “He chose the wrong path in life. He is human, and sometimes, that’s the route people go. It took me many years to figure that out about him.”
Unfortunately, life did not afford our half-brother a chance to work through whatever conflicting feelings he might have had about his father. Melissa can’t quite remember when or how she first learned of Matthew Christopher, but she grew up knowing little about him and discovered details of his life only after it was too late to meet him.
Matthew Christopher’s mother took him to Duval County, Fla., after splitting from Matthew. She and her son were living there in December 1988, when my then-15-year-old half-brother and three of his friends pulled into a skating rink parking lot in a stolen truck. A Jacksonville Sheriff’s Department patrol officer, who moonlighted as a security guard at the rink, noticed the vehicle looked just like one his neighbor had recently reported stolen.
The officer stopped the boys and asked for the truck registration, which confirmed his suspicion. He pulled his department-issued, semi-automatic 9mm pistol and placed the boys under arrest. As he attempted to pull the driver out of the truck to handcuff him, a skirmish ensued. His gun still drawn, the officer’s finger slipped into the trigger guard, and he accidentally fired the pistol.
The bullet struck Matthew Christopher in the head.
Melissa managed to track down Matthew Christopher’s mother many years after his death, hoping to learn more about him and perhaps get a photograph of the brother she never knew. More perturbed than touched to hear from another of Matthew’s children, Matthew Christopher’s mother finally agreed to mail a photo during a tense telephone conversation. However, Melissa never actually received a photo. She got another cold reception during a follow-up phone call and, though upset and saddened that Matthew Christopher’s mother seemed to be taking out her unflagging grief on her, Melissa finally decided to let the poor woman be.
The story of Matthew Christopher’s death is a narrative with which I became far too familiar after leaving journalism to work in a prosecutor’s office. Fatherless young men all too often chase their misshapen masculinity down a path that gets them killed, albeit far more typically by another delinquent than by a law-enforcement officer. Nonetheless, I was stirred most awfully, not only because I, like Melissa, will never know Matthew Christopher, but also because his death might be the only detail I ever know about him.
Matthew bears no direct blame for his son’s demise, of course, but it is not difficult to imagine how a boy left to run fatherless and feral winds up a passenger in that pickup. I tried to recall the details of my own life, to figure out what I would have been doing about the time a bitter woman in Florida buried the brother I’ll never know. That was in December 1988. I was a college sophomore, no more than a few days from meeting Jessica — an odd and unsettling juxtaposition, and a reminder my own moral conduct is better only by degrees.
I was sorrowed by what I learned of my half-brother but grateful for my half-sister. I was grateful, as well, that she deflected most of the chaos our biological father seems to leave in his wake and that I averted that chaos altogether.
Part of me pitied Matthew, though. As Melissa noted, I suspect his childhood did not equip him well for the trouble he found. I know nothing of his adoptive parents and do not want to speculate what they were like or how they parented. But I cannot help wondering how much differently Matthew’s life would have turned out had someone like my parents taken him in or if he had experienced a stabilizing influence like the man Melissa came to call her father.
According to Melissa, Matthew also seemed hurt no one ever told him about me. This tugged at my heart, too. He was probably just a dumb, untethered 16-year-old when I was conceived, after all. My search was primarily about permitting my birth mother to cast off age-old demons that she never had cause to carry in the first place. Maybe Matthew deserved the same grace. Maybe I should take the high road with a simple Facebook message or phone conversation to tell him everything turned out well for me and that I hold no grudges.
Because honestly, I don’t.
Yet, the hard truths I learned about his life are not inert. His wives became widows of a living man. His gruff, disengaged parenting caused Melissa emotional hardships she did not deserve and was part of the chain of events that led to yet-harsher consequences for Matthew Christopher.
As I hung up the phone after my first conversation with Melissa, I thought about what advice Mom might give me regarding contact with Matthew. She was a gracious and forgiving soul. But she was no fool, either. I remember her telling me once — several times, actually — that your life is determined not so much by the genes or circumstances you inherit, but by the decisions you make and the company you keep.
If Matthew seemed sympathetic, he also seemed tragically irresponsible. While I am willing to take the woman who carried me as I find her, I would not afford the same to my biological father. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe one day I’ll change my mind.
But as it stands, I believe my duty as an adult son is to keep dysfunction away from the family that kept dysfunction away from me as a boy. Matthew was more of a risk to Dad and Jen’s peace of mind than I was willing to take. And if I ever got to meet Lynette, she would certainly want his chaos held at bay, too. By all evidence, her life diverged completely after her encounter with Matthew and bloomed into something happy and admirable. I wanted to congratulate and thank her.
I should not do so with the back of my hand.
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