The souvenir birth certificate I filled out for the son I named Jeffrey was the first of a lot of paperwork I would sign over a span of several months in 1969, and most of it was far more official.
It was a lot for a 14-year-old girl to take in.
But three days after giving birth in Columbus, Ohio, I was back in Springfield, standing with Mom before a social worker and putting my name to documents stating I wished to place my child for adoption. Three months later, on Oct. 1, 1969, Mom and I returned to sign another set of papers that made the surrender official. My little boy would be placed in his permanent home just a few days later.
But I did not know that at the time.
In fact, I would not know that for a long time. And not knowing gnawed at me for years.
Somehow, I have managed to hang on to that little birth certificate all this time. I keep it in a manilla envelope that I labeled “child,” and which I filled with all the official paperwork about the adoption. What I did with that birth certificate immediately after filling it out, though, I do not recall. I must have hidden it among all the other papers and brochures I got at the hospital and the Friends Rescue Home for unwed mothers in Columbus. They were good for that. I got all kinds of pamphlets, with titles like "So You're a Little Sinner Bitch." (Not really, of course, but the message seemed not far removed.)
Anyway, I don’t think there is any way Mom would have let me keep that birth certificate if she knew I had it. She would not want to risk someone finding that card and finding out about our secret.
My family was pretty good at hiding things, and I’d get a lot of practice in the years ahead when it came to my first-born.
During my entire stay at the Rescue Home, my step-siblings thought I was off in Iowa with relatives. When I saw them again, we were piling into an RV for a cross-country road trip. As a firefighter, my step-father Ernie could take an entire month of vacation over the summer, and only days after I left the hospital, we were off on our annual trek. We made several stops along the way, including an actual stay with those Iowa relatives. Our final destination was California, where we camped in a park and listened to the first moon landing on a transistor radio.
Despite all those hours in close quarters, across all of those miles of travel, during all of those visits to friends and family along the way, not once was my pregnancy mentioned, let alone discussed. Not once did my mother ask how I felt — emotionally or physically — or even demand an explanation of how I came to find myself in such a predicament. I was neither coddled, nor cussed. From that point forward, my experience would not be regarded as trying, or even as unfortunate, because it was not regarded at all.
To everyone around me, it had never happened.
Not surprisingly, then, I returned to a home life that was exactly as it had been before the Rescue Home. Despite all I had been through — and all I had put my family through — I still did not command my mother’s attention.
I tried to remedy this by running away. I decided one day that I simply would not come home from school. Instead, I snuck into my brother Tim’s house while he was at work. I hid out there for a night. Though I went undetected, I figured that would not last, so I stayed with friends over the next week or so. I hoped that Mom and Ernie would miss me and care that I was gone. If I hid myself well, they would have no choice but to put a notice in the newspaper begging me to come home. So I checked the personal ads every day.
But no one ever placed an ad to ask what had happened to Lynette.
So eventually, I just gave up and reappeared to Mom and Ernie.
At several points over the next few years, my life could have gone permanently sideways. I bounded around a lot, living with my brother Steve and his wife, Diane, for a while. Then it was back to Mom and Ernie’s. Then finally, I got out on my own. I wasn’t even out of high school yet, but I got a job at a local Perkins Restaurant, started making my own money, bought my own car and rented my own place.
I did not even care what I was asked to do at the restaurant. I was a server, I was a line cook, I washed dishes. Whatever was needed. I was independent and, for the first time, truly happy.
After a while, Bill Fox, who owned the Perkins franchise where I worked, moved me off the floor and into the rear office to answer phones. I asked him why he decided to move me, and he told me he knew he could rely on me and that I had manners. This is one of the first times an adult ever had an encouraging thing to say to me.
My work there was changing my life.
Not long after, Bill sold his restaurants to a group from Pennsylvania that included a guy named Rudy Mosketti. When they came, everyone at the restaurant thought for sure the mafia was buying us, and a lot of people quit. But I stayed. I loved the place too much to leave, and besides, Rudy and I hit it off. He treated me like a human being. He cared what the office workers thought. We had staff meetings in which he asked for our input, and he put our suggestions into action.
Rudy also took a personal interest in me. He saw to it that I learned bookkeeping, and I discovered I had a talent for numbers. Perkins had a program that allowed me to take classes at a local technical school. The attention Rudy paid to me and his trust were, without a doubt, the most transformational forces in my life. I owe so much to that man. I worked for him for more than three decades, and we remain friends. I still do tax work for him.
For all the personal growth I experienced under Rudy’s guidance, though, I still had a lot of rough edges. And I still ached to know what happened to my son.
In fact, I told my first husband, Stephen Baugh, that there was one condition to our marriage — if the boy I gave up for adoption ever reappeared in my life, he would have to accept that. He agreed without hesitation. He is such an understanding man. Although our marriage eventually ended, I still consider him a dear, dear friend.
My second pregnancy was an even bigger surprise than my first, if you can imagine that. Stephen told me he was sterile, so I was not on the pill or very careful about birth control.
While I was pregnant with Cain, though, all seemed normal — no red flags through the first eight months — until he arrived prematurely.
Cain’s due date was June 16, but he was born May 31. Stephen and I were at a Memorial Day party at a friend’s house, playing volleyball. Every time I jumped, I felt like I was peeing my pants a little. It happened several times, and so I decided to get checked out at the emergency room. I told Stephen not to worry about going with me, so he didn’t. I drove myself there.
I am not sure why neither of us thought it was important for Stephen to go. I was so close to the due date. I suppose we were both unfathomably clueless about such things. In our defense, however, I was in no pain, and what I was experiencing did not seem like labor. So I was not worried.
As it turned out, my water had broken and I was experiencing upper leakage of amniotic fluid. It would only discharge through the top when the amniotic sac was pressed — as when I landed after jumping to hit a volleyball. The doctor admitted me to the hospital and decided it best to induce labor. That took a long time, though, and fortunately, I still was not in any pain. This also bought Stephen time to get to the hospital, though he did not come into the delivery room with me. We had not taken any Lamaze or natural childbirth classes, and it was the norm back then for the father to sit in a waiting room, cigars poised, while the mother gave birth.
I had Cain through a normal delivery, but as soon as he was born, I knew something was wrong. They would not show him to me, which brought back all sorts of bad memories from my first delivery. This time, however, I spoke up.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Well, we’ve got a little problem,” the doctor replied.
Cain was born with his lower intestines exposed. I did not get to hold him or touch him. He was flown immediately to the children’s hospital in Columbus.
And once again, I found myself in a maternity ward with no baby.
Doctors sent Cain to a neonatal intensive care unit, where I could only be with him 10 minutes every hour. This was not the best bonding environment. I had to wear full scrubs and a face mask. And the first time I entered the unit, I was embarrassed and heartbroken — I realized I could not pick out my baby! They all had tubes and wires attached to them. I broke out in tears but kept searching for some clue that would indicate which child was mine. I finally figured it out, but even having identified Cain, I could not touch him directly. I had to wear gloves.
Cain was in the unit for about a month, and I would not have made it through that period were it not for my brother Steve and his wife, Diana. They had moved to Columbus by that time, and I came up after work several times a week and spent weekends in their house. Diana would take me to the hospital every time I came. I would stay for hours, but she was never allowed to go back and see Cain. She must have been bored out of her mind, but she never once complained. What a kind thing she did for me. God bless her.
Despite his sickly start, Cain grew into a healthy boy, and aside from the unusual scars on his belly, to look at him now, you would never know about the challenge he faced to start his life. I was grateful that he was nursed to health and grateful to be his mother.
However, in many ways, my second chance at motherhood only accentuated my anxiety over my first child. The son I never knew was never far from my mind, and now that I was a mother again, I could compare the experiences. I thought of how Cain was whisked away from me in the delivery room and of how similar that was to my first birthing experience.
This put all kinds of awful thoughts in my head.
Rationally, I knew my first child suffered no similar health problems at birth — I saw for myself in the nursery that he was in a crib just like all the other babies. He was not hooked to tubes and wires as Cain had been. Nonetheless, I could not shake my concerns about his health.
And those were not the only worries. I wondered where he was. How he was doing. Whether his new parents were abusing him. At times, these worries bordered on fixation. And whenever the week of Jeffrey’s birthday, June 21, arrived each year, I was fraught with depression and sometimes spent days alone in bed crying.
Stephen and my second husband, Vince, were among the few people I ever told about my experience, though. I did not want to explain my 13-year-old self to anyone, even people dear to me. And I certainly did not want to broadcast my past to people who were not so dear.
In retrospect, though, I am not sure how well I actually concealed my secret.
For instance, there was this episode at a public pool in Columbus in the early 1970s. I was visiting my brother Steve, and I brought Tim’s daughter, Jamie, with me from Springfield. Diana and her sons, Michael and Tony, were probably there, too. All the kids were very young. Jamie was the oldest, but she could not have been more than four or five at the time.
Anyway, a boy about her age — he would have been about Jeffrey’s age, too — caught my eye. He had big, blue eyes and strawberry blond hair, and I just knew he was my first son. I sprang up and ran to him on the other side of the pool and began following him as he toddled around the deck. Years later, Jamie told me she remembers clearly how I muttered, “I think this is my little boy, I think this is my little boy.”
It was just wishful thinking, though. I must have looked like a lunatic. I wonder what that child’s poor mother thought.
Although I never had another episode quite like that, I was definitely a seeker. At Cub Scouts, birthday parties, and ballgames, I always examined the boys of a certain age, wondering if I was looking at my child.
I also held out hope he was looking for me — so much so that my stomach knotted every time the doorbell rang. Vince and I are both pretty social people, with a wide circle of friends who are always welcome in our home and know to enter through the back door. So if anyone ever came to the front door, I knew it was either a Jehovah’s Witness or my son.
Thoughts like these persisted for years, so in late 2000, I decided to do something about them. I mailed paperwork to the National Adoption Registry, which could help my son get in touch with me if he ever went looking. I also filed basic information with Search Angel, a nonprofit service that helps birth mothers locate the children they have relinquished for adoption. I gave them information about the circumstances of my first child’s birth, and in a little while, they returned to me contact information for nine people born in Columbus on June 21, 1969.
One of them was deceased, which made me very sad and imparted a sense of urgency to my search. I was about to start going down the list, contacting the other men listed — among them was a “Jeffrey Kidd” in Beaufort, S.C. — but ultimately, I decided to stop. I thought about what might be going on in his life by then — maybe he was married and raising kids. Maybe he didn’t even know he was adopted.
I just figured that I had made my decision to give him up long ago, and that if we were to reunite, the decision ought to be his.
Besides, even under the best circumstances, any reunion would be challenging. For instance, I would have to tell many people what had happened to me and what I had done when I was 13.
Cain was among them.
I had always intended to tell him he had a half-brother, but I never seemed to find the appropriate words or the appropriate time. When I hooked up with Search Angels, he was working with me at Perkins, but he was out of the house and just a few months away from marrying Beth, one of our co-workers.
It was a happy time, and I decided not to burden either of my sons.
Despite all the dysfunction I’ve experienced and the sadness that visited me every June 21, my life was not without happiness or a comforting rhythm. I enjoyed motherhood and grandmotherhood. Though not conventional, the blended family Vince and I created brought me the love and fulfillment that was largely absent from the homes in which I grew up.
I progressed professionally at Perkins, and when I left the company, I had the skills I needed to start my own bookkeeping and tax-preparation business. Vince and I also purchased several rental properties and a winter home in Florida. I took up golf and made close friends. Every challenge I have encountered taught me something about the world, myself or both. That is not a terrible life. And for years, I bobbed along telling myself that if I never got to meet my firstborn, I could cope with that, too.
Until suddenly, I was no longer coping.
For my entire life, I have been blessed with good health and often pooh-poohed people who complained about ailments that seemed to me to be minor. I held the same attitude about the mental-health challenges of others. “Suck it up, buttercup” was my basic philosophy. I never understood depression or debilitating anxiety until I was the one coming unglued.
It started in October 2019 with a terrible bout with shingles. I was in constant pain. I lost my appetite and a lot of weight. I could not sleep. The medicine I was on left me punchdrunk. It took about 14 months to get that medical condition under control, but right on its heels, in the winter of 2021-22, I inexplicably fell into a depression that I could not shake.
Mental pain replaced my physical pain, and it was every bit as enfeebling. I lost interest in my friends. I stopped playing golf — blaming it on my shingles, which had mostly subsided — and holing up in my room for long stretches.
My God, what is wrong with me? Was this what it was like to suffer a nervous breakdown? I was no longer in charge of my life.
I decided to find a psychologist because I had so many thoughts I wanted to unload and no friend who I wanted to unload them on. Many of those thoughts were about my first son, the big semi-secret I had harbored my entire adult life. It would be too awkward to explain to my closest and most sympathetic friends why I had not already confided in them. I figured a detached, objective opinion might be better for me, anyway.
When I first walked into the psychologist’s office, I was suffering through a lot of “pitiful me” stuff; by the time our sessions ended a few months later, my thoughts were better ordered, if only a little better understood. I still did not feel quite like myself, but I was at least well enough to start playing golf again and get out in the sunshine.
Then one evening in late April 2022, I plopped myself on the sofa and thought I would take one last look at my phone before hooking it to the charger for the evening.
“That’s odd,” I thought. “I wonder what this little message notification means.”
I was not very well versed in Facebook Messenger and seldom opened it. But for some reason, a notification from that app caught my attention. At first, I thought it must be connected to something on Facebook Marketplace — Vince and I would be returning to Springfield in a few days, and we were selling some stuff we did not want to lug back to Ohio. So I touched the icon … and then there was the message I had been praying to read for decades.
Had I been standing, I would not have kept my feet — my heart was racing, my ears ringing, my head spinning so fast. Fortunately, I was sitting on the couch. Vince was in his chair just a few feet away. I could not say a word to him, though. I could not look at him, either. Tears welled in my eyes. I’ve got to get out of this room.
I rose and went to the bathroom, taking my phone with me. I must have been in there for an hour. I read it and I read it, and I cried and I cried. Then, I thumbed a reply: “Surprised and elated if this is real.”
I had some doubts simply because, well, it was Facebook Messenger, and all kinds of crazy, malicious stuff can come at you on social media.
The other thing that threw me was the name. Jeffrey. The same name I had given my son the day he was born. How could someone know that? Was I being scammed?
When you pray for something your whole life but it takes a while to come to fruition, it can be difficult to grasp that the thing you want so badly is actually happening. You wonder if your mind is playing tricks. You wonder if you are worthy.
But the longer I sat there in that bathroom and thought it through, the more convinced I became that this message was just what it appeared to be — a long-desired gift, delivered in God’s perfect time.
And I do not say that blithely. Had I seen this message when it was sent more than a month earlier, there’s no telling what it would have done to my psyche or how I would have reacted. I know that I would not have been ready for it.
But now I was, despite my jumbled nerves. I read the reply I had typed once more, took a deep breath and hit the send arrow. It was 5:29 p.m.
Three excruciating but joyous hours passed before I received a reply. In the meantime, I looked at this man’s Facebook page. From that, I knew he was indeed my son. I just knew it.
However, a few new concerns arose. Chief among them was that I did not want to have this conversation with my firstborn, only to be kicked to the curb. If he just wanted to check in and then go on his merry way, I could not handle it. I did not want this to be the beginning of nothing. So I continued to fret, wondering what his next words would be.
Finally, I received a message back.
“I’ll leave the next steps up to you,” he wrote. He told me how happy he was to find me and gave me his cellphone number, apologizing that Messenger was too awkward and impersonal for our first conversation. We continued to message back and forth for the next hour or so, though, and arranged to speak by phone the next morning.
That conversation was surreal. I was so nervous dialing his number, but after a few minutes, my nervousness went away and the discussion just flowed.
He told me about his parents, his wonderful childhood, the extended family that doted on him and that never once treated him like an outsider. It made my heart so happy to hear this. I told him a lot about my upbringing, his half-brother Cain, and my brothers.
I also asked him to forgive me for not being able to take care of him when he was born. He told me he was not seeking an apology; instead, he wanted me to know how well my decision had turned out for him, how he loved his precious mother and how his only regret about what was unfolding was that I would not be able to meet her. The more he told me, the more grateful I was to Linda and Glenn for providing exactly the kind of home I wanted for my child, the kind of home no 14-year-old could have provided.
That afternoon, I told Vince all that had transpired. He took it quite casually. He was entirely unfazed, in fact, but happy for me. We looked at some photos of Jeff on Facebook and then more or less went on with his day as usual. Our talk helped me build some momentum. I had been so hush-hush about my first child my entire life, and finally I could speak freely.
So I called my brothers to tell them, too. They were much more emotional about it than Vince because they were there for me through my pregnancy and knew full well the circumstances. They were my rocks, my only source of emotional support, through that period of life. Steve and Tim both had the same reaction: They wept. I don’t think I had ever seen either of them cry before, maybe not even when Dad or Mom died.
Their joy at my news was incredibly validating. Steve told me, “I can’t wait to meet him.” And Tim told me, “I can’t wait to meet him.” I realized this really was a good thing happening to me. I’m not going to get any rebuttal from anyone. If this made my brothers happy, I did not care what anyone else thought.
Over the next few days, I had a few more phone conversations with Jeff, and we settled on a face-to-face meeting in early June. I was in Florida when we first made contact, but I would be back in Springfield for the summer a week later. I had so many people to tell and such a narrow window to do it!
The more I told the story, the easier it got to tell. And I was particularly gratified that so many people — friends and family alike — seemed genuinely touched by the story and happy for me.
But my greatest remaining anxiety was telling Cain. To get through this, I knew I had to orchestrate it carefully. This discussion must be face to face, and if at all possible, it needed to be at my house, on my home turf.
But even as I gathered my courage, I kept running into the same obstacles that had prevented me from telling him years earlier. We just could not seem to make our schedules jibe. He had dinner with Beth’s family on Sunday. During the week, his boys had a couple of tennis matches after school that he planned to attend. Another night, he had to go straight home because he was having groceries delivered. The night after that, he had to pick up his dog from doggie daycare on time or get charged for an additional day.
“It will only take five minutes,” I pleaded with him.
Finally, he agreed.
I waited for Cain in the garage and walked him through the side door and into the living room when he arrived. I directed him to the first chair he came to, a rocking recliner, and I sat on the edge of the couch a few feet away. Vince was on the back porch, where I had stationed him. I told him that if I stood up and looked at him, he should come quickly because that meant things were going sideways.
As Cain and I sat, I turned to face him and felt a little faint. I pursed my lips to squeeze some moisture into my mouth, which was suddenly bone dry. Then, taking one deep breath, I began.
“Cain, I don’t know where to start exactly, but I have to tell you that as a young girl, I had a child, and I gave him up for adoption.”
I paused.
“Were you aware of that?”
I thought some way, somehow, he might have already known. Maybe he once overheard a conversation among the few adults in the family who knew. Maybe he once stumbled upon some of the paperwork I had kept stashed away all these years. Among my greatest fears was that he had known all along and resented me for not telling him sooner.
“No, Mom, I wasn’t aware,” he replied.
I exhaled.
The corners of Cain’s lips gave a faint hint of a smile. His eyes were calm. He did not seem breathless in anticipation of what I would say next. In fact, it was as though I could have stopped right there, and he would have been perfectly content to hear no more. That reaction did not discourage me, though. On the contrary, I was more encouraged by what I did not see — any sign that he was angry, threatened or even uncomfortable.
In my lifelong embarrassment, I had not given my son enough credit for his emotional maturity. Though he was not effusive, he was empathetic. Sometimes, after sons marry and their own families grow, mothers feel them drifting away from them. Cain’s look told me there was not as much distance between us as I had feared. I felt as though I had two sons returning to me.
“Well, that’s what happened,” I continued. “His name is Jeff. …
“And he’ll be here Friday.”
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