About two months after I took the first steps to identify the biological mother who placed me for adoption, the big reveal at my father’s kitchen table yielded a lot of actionable information.
And although disconcerting, concerns about my biological father mostly dissolved during the ride back to Beaufort. Yes, I had in store an awkward conversation with Dad. (I left his house without telling him all I had discovered at his kitchen table that Sunday morning.) And yes, I worried that, were we to ever meet, Lynette might find my resemblance to my biological father loathsome.
But as Debi and I considered all that had transpired over the weekend, she helped me realize how much closer I had drawn to my main objective. I not only had several leads to help me find Lynette; I no longer needed to agonize over whether to seek contact with my biological father. A two-car collision in Darke County, Ohio, made that decision for me.
Debi also helped me develop a strategy for approaching Lynette. I now have her physical and email addresses, as well as a phone number and Facebook account. Discretion would be essential, though. I wanted to approach her on cat paws.
Given the constraints I placed upon my search, the physical address would probably be of limited use. I could not imagine showing up on her doorstep unannounced and did not particularly care for the idea of mailing a written letter, either, since there is no telling who else might be checking her mailbox.
Given the circumstances of my conception, I thought it likely that many people who came into her life years later would have no idea I exist. And she might want to keep it that way. As such, I was not keen on the idea of phoning her, either, since a voice call might be overheard or catch her when she was not alone to talk. Worse yet, I might get her voicemail, and I could only imagine what sort of rambling, tongue-tied message I might leave after the beep.
So I settled on a pecking order: I would email her first. If I heard nothing, I would move to a Facebook message, then a text. I would only mail a handwritten letter out of desperation, and a phone call would be my absolute last resort.
Of course, the content of that message would be as important as my method of delivering it.
I had already drafted a letter to my birth mother — the one I let my father and sister read on the day we pored over my adoption records and DNA reports. In the years before Mom’s death, I could not imagine writing such a letter. But even now, I could not fathom receiving such a letter. Obviously, I have never been and never will be an unwed mother. I have never placed a child for adoption. I can only guess at the range of emotions Lynette experienced, and I can muster only the vaguest sense of what she might make of those feelings 50 years on.
Fortunately, I knew someone who could relate to that experience far better than me.
Peach Morrison was a longtime acquaintance of both Debi and me. My wife knew her mostly through their connection with a local Rotary Club. I knew Peach primarily because she works for an organization that promotes tourism in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, and in that capacity, she was an occasional news source for reporters I supervised at the newspaper.
Primarily, though, we were Facebook friends.
Such social-media relationships can be odd things. Sometimes, you develop a sense of familiarity from seeing and liking so many photos of other people’s vacations and graduations and Christmas gatherings. Yet, you might bump into that person on the sidewalk and realize you know personal details about someone you might not even recognize at first glance.
But for all the awkwardness it can abet — not to mention the divisiveness and trolling — social media occasionally fosters genuine connections between people who would otherwise be little more than casual acquaintances.
Peach and I are an example.
After Mom’s death, I sometimes took to Facebook on her birthday or Mother’s Day to post the article she wrote about my adoption. Peach loved that story and once sent me a Facebook message telling me she had recently reunited with a son she had placed for adoption. Long before I started my search — or even told anyone but Debi about my intention to search — Peach offered to talk to me about her experience whenever I liked.
So a few years after she extended the offer, I finally took her up on it.
“So … you think I would be coming in too hot if I sent her that letter?” I said to Peach, as Debi and I rose to greet her arrival at a restaurant near her house. We met there for an early dinner within days of my big reveal. Two days earlier, I sent her a copy of the letter intended for my birth mother and asked for her criticism.
“From my perspective, your letter was a bit intimidating and would have made me feel more guilty,” Peach wrote in Facebook Messenger as we arranged the dinner. “But I think it’s a beautiful homage to your parents!!!”
Now Peach and I were face to face, her voice reverberating between the high ceilings and concrete floor of the empty restaurant: “That probably wasn’t what you wanted to hear,” she said with a warm smile.
“Actually, it’s exactly what I needed to hear.”
Peach and I were about to share intimate details, yet the fact no one was sitting within five tables of us somehow made me feel more vulnerable and conspicuous, not less so. As she slid into the round corner booth, taking a seat between Debi and me, I suddenly yearned for the peak of the dinner hour and the auditory cover that the clinking of beer glasses and the clatter of flatware would afford. I hoped that the more the room filled, the more private our conversation would become.
Peach didn’t seem to share my concern, at least not in any way I could detect. She was self-assured, unabashed and, it seemed, always smiling.
I told her what Debi and I had discovered about Lynette over the weekend and asked her for advice on approaching her.
“I feel like I’m doing this for the right reason, but I want to do this the right way, too,” I said, lowering my chin and hunching in toward Peach as I furtively scanned nearby tables and waitress stations for eavesdroppers. “I don’t want to scare her off, and I certainly don’t want to hurt her feelings or create problems for her family.
“I just want to bring her some peace if she needs it.”
Peach smiled, which put me at ease. I smiled back, raised my chin and straightened my back a bit. I told her more about the discoveries made over the past weekend — including my biological father, his arrests, divorces and death. Then, we ordered drinks and dinner. As we awaited our micro-brewed beer and gourmet burgers, Peach told us her story.
She grew up a 90-minute drive away in Summerville, a bedroom community of Charleston, S.C. In the mid-1980s, she enrolled at the College of Charleston and moved out of her parents’ house, even though it would have been close enough to commute. She did not return home during the summers, either, opting to live in town and wait tables at a restaurant where she made good money. By no means was she at odds with her parents, though. On the contrary, she was close to them both, particularly her father.
The couple’s youngest child was a tomboy, and Peach often fished and roamed the outdoors with her dad. They were much alike, and she felt she could tell him anything.
Except that she was unwed and pregnant at 22.
So, at first, she told no one and wondered if she would carry her baby to term.
“I went horseback riding a lot,” she said wryly, “and I sometimes thought, ‘Lord, take this child.’ But he didn’t.”
Peach then made two momentous decisions and did not waver from either. First, she decided to deliver her son but place him for adoption. Second, she would tell as few people as possible about her pregnancy and conceal it from her parents altogether.
“It’s not that I thought I would be ostracized or that they wouldn’t support me,” Peach said. “But I was just too embarrassed. I felt like I had let them down, and the only way to atone for that was by dealing with this on my own.”
“Wow!” Debi said, cocking her head in surprise. “You were so close to them, and you practically lived in the same town. How did you manage that?”
Peach explained a confluence of events that helped keep her secret.
Her pregnancy went without complication and without much discomfort to anyone except her pet cat. Ace liked to cuddle on Peach’s stomach, but he was startled and sprinted away whenever he felt the baby kick beneath him. Mostly, Peach hid her condition in plain sight by sticking to her routine. She worked at the restaurant well into her pregnancy. About the time she finally needed to be off her feet, it closed for a renovation, leaving long-time employees like Peach eligible for unemployment benefits.
“It worked out nearly perfectly,” Peach said.
Nearly.
For the first time in her life, she would not be with her father on his birthday — on October 6, she was giving birth at St. Francis Hospital in Charleston. Her rambunctious boy threatened a breech birth before making a final, head-first swivel as doctors prepared for a Cesarean delivery. This was one last bit of good fortune. Her son’s last-minute turn spared Peach what would have been difficult-to-explain belly scars.
Peach endured all of this on her own.
The child’s father — an intelligent, handsome student at the College of Charleston — was not there because he did not know Peach was pregnant, either. The couple had only dated casually and stopped seeing each other before she was showing. Peach knew they were not ready to commit to each other, let alone to a family, so she decided it best not to burden him with the news.
After the delivery, Peach was allowed to hold and bottle-feed her son for a few hours, but soon he was taken away — never to be seen again, she imagined.
Life resumed more or less as she had known it before, albeit with a touch of melancholy. She found a new job and a husband, moved to Beaufort, got divorced and remarried — all over the course of three decades.
She never had another child, however.
And over that span, she relieved the pent pressure of her secret a little at a time, as if bleeding air from an overinflated tire.
She told her son’s father of the pregnancy within a few weeks of giving birth. She won tickets to a Sting concert from a Charleston radio station and invited him to accompany her, breaking the news on their way to a Dream of the Blue Turtles tour stop at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. He seemed relieved by her decision, not angry, and Peach remained friendly and in touch with him for many years.
It was more than a decade, though, before Peach told Buddy Morrison he had a grandson with whom he shared a birthday.
Although her father’s health was beginning to fail, the revelation was more spontaneous than planned. One afternoon during a family vacation at Edisto Beach in 1998, Peach found herself alone with her father walking along the shore. Through the years, they had enjoyed many talks and many outdoor activities together, but never did they walk the beach. That was not Buddy’s thing.
Yet, there they were. Alone. With a couple of beers in their bellies and a late-afternoon sun casting its golden tones across the Atlantic surf.
To Peach, this seemed like a sign. Or at least an opportunity. So, unrehearsed, she nervously explained to him the circumstances of the only birthday celebration of his that she ever missed.
He looked at her with kind, clear eyes. “Damn, you’re strong,” he told her.
“Please don’t tell, Momma,” Peach pleaded.
Buddy died two years later, without ever meeting his grandson but without ever spilling his daughter’s secret, either. Peach knows this for sure because her mother was thoroughly surprised when, about eight years after sharing her secret with her father, she told her mother, too.
“She was pi-i-i-i-ssed that I hadn’t told her,” Peach recalled, tucking her chin and raising her eyebrows for emphasis.
But the secret, once revealed, lifted a weight from Peach and did not seem to crush the relationship with her mother, her initial displeasure notwithstanding. And so again, Peach’s life went on as before.
Then, in May 2016, came a jolt. Peach’s second husband, Michael David Skidmore, struck his head in a fall and suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. He spent the next 3 ½ months in a coma and died that September.
“I didn’t know what else to do but deal with it and just keep going.”
Peach coped with the grief by working incessantly. And there was plenty of work to do. Within weeks of Mike’s passing, she was helping promote Beaufort’s annual Shrimp Festival. Two weeks later, she helped assess and document the damage to the Lowcountry’s tourism industry wrought by Hurricane Matthew, the brunt of which skirted the Atlantic coast but caused widespread flooding and power outages in Beaufort.
One evening in mid-October, as she was about to fling herself exhausted into bed, she decided to check her email before retiring. She saw that she had received a message from an unfamiliar address, from a woman she did not know.
Brenna apologized in advance if she was contacting the wrong person, though given Peach’s unusual first name, that did not seem likely to her. Her husband, Brooks, was born on October 6 in Charleston and given up for adoption, Brenna wrote. He was trying to find his birth mother but was afraid she did not want to be found. He had sent a Facebook message to someone by her name about a year ago but never received a reply. Brooks found this email address, too, but hesitated to use it because he does not want to upset its owner. He just wants to let his birth mother know he is healthy and happy and that he is willing to meet.
However, he would not bother her again if further contact would be too awkward or painful, Brenna concluded.
“The main thing that set me at ease was that they left me totally in control of the situation,” Peach said.
Immediately, she sent a reply email. “You have the right woman,” she wrote, “and I would be thrilled to speak with my son.”
The next day, as she barrelled down Interstate 26 on her way home from a business trip to Columbia, Peach set her cruise control and dialed the number Brenna had provided.
“Hello, Brooks,” she said.
“Hello,” he replied.
An awkward silence followed, but it lasted only a moment. Before the end of the hour-long call, Peach and Brooks were cracking jokes and even letting a cuss word or two slip without embarrassment or offense. It was like a conversation between long-lost friends.
Later, Peach had a DNA test to confirm the relationship, although it was hardly necessary — Brooks was the spitting image of her father, Buddy. And like the grandfather he never met, Peach’s son liked to compete in amateur weightlifting events. She gave him one of her dad’s old competition T-shirts, awarded to him after winning his 60s age group. One of Peach's prized possessions is a picture of Brooks wearing that shirt from the Summerville Bench Press Classic.
She doesn’t know why she never saw Brooks’ first Facebook message, but it most certainly did not go unanswered for the reasons he might have believed.
“I thought about him a lot over the years but always believed a reunion should be his prerogative,” Peach said. “Sometimes, you just have to be patient and hope. The way I see it now, God needed Mike, so he took my husband, but at the same time, he gave me back my son.”
Not only was Peach grateful to be discovered; her mother was thrilled to have a new grandson and great-grandchild, for Brooks and Brenna had a year-and-a-half-old daughter, Mayson.
Then on July 21, 2020, Peach received the best birthday present of her life — a second granddaughter. Just as Brooks was born the same day as Buddy Morrison, Peach shares a birthday with her grandchild. Brooks and Brenna named her Malone Morrison.
“That’s incredible!” Debi exclaimed as the waitress left the check on our table.
The restaurant was packed and clamorous by the time we finished dinner, and the din of the crowd and the intrigue of Peach’s story had long since overwhelmed my apprehension.
I departed with renewed focus and an amended plan. I needed to trim my message and shift its focus from the mother I love dearly to the one I hope to find. Lynette would need to know first and foremost that we would proceed at her pace, if at all. There would be time later to tell her all about the family I was so fortunate to join if she wanted to know. Our conversation also confirmed my decision to start with the least intrusive means of contact.
But perhaps as important as the plan, I departed the restaurant with cautious optimism. Brooks gained a family that was thrilled to receive him, and he came into Peach’s life at a time and in a manner that seemed practically ordained.
Now I dared hope for a happy reunion of my own.
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