Part 1: The Discovery
I am an adoptee. In my case, it was later in life -- I was just shy of my 32nd birthday -- and purely by chance that I learned of it; with the who, when, why and how of it all arriving in dribs and drabs over a period of ten or more years. When I first made the discovery many friends asked me some variant of the question “so, are you going to try and find out who your real family is?” That question always bothered me; I would tell anyone who asked that as far as I was concerned, I already knew who my “real” family was; the mother and father who loved and cared for me; the many cousins and aunts and uncles with whom I’d shared Easter and Christmas and birthdays, trips down the shore and up to the lake, and long Sunday dinners at grandma and grandpa’s house that began in the afternoon and lasted until well after dark. So in every case here when I talk about “my parents,” or “my mother” or “my father” I mean the people who raised me and loved me – Mike and Vickie, the only mom and dad that matter to me.
I have to say at the outset that it was mostly curiosity, coupled with a vague desire to give my birth mother some closure that motivated me to search for my biological parents. After all, I wasn’t some adolescent, confused about my identity to begin with, fantasizing about how much different (and better) my angst-ridden teenage life would be with my “real” parents, who would certainly let me stay out later or have a TV in my room or not bug me about the length of my hair. I was a 32-year-old married man with a baby and a house and the beginnings of a career in the theatre. And, at the point where this story properly begins, I was also an orphan.
My mother, who had been widowed ever since 1962, died herself in 1985 after a long illness. Despite repeated attempts over time to convince her to sell her house and come up to New England to be near me and my wife, she remained what I used to call one of the “diehards;” a dwindling group of neighbors who had clung to home, parish church and each other in spite of the urban decay that was slowly creeping in on them. Her house had been broken into on a few occasions; she had even chased off a would-be burglar, whom she discovered one day standing in her kitchen. Neither the increase in crime nor the rapid, sad decline of the condition of many other houses in the neighborhood dissuaded her from staying; she argued that uprooting herself, leaving her home – the house she had lived in for years with her father and brothers even before marrying my father -- and everything and everyone she knew, would be far worse for her than staying where she was. Which is precisely what she did, up until only a few days before she died, stubborn to the last.
About two weeks after her funeral I made a trip back to this house that was no longer my home to begin the process of sorting through her life and packing up her possessions to take back with me; I had also arranged to meet a real estate agent who would put the house on the market. What I saw when I unlocked the door and walked in showed just how much, and how quickly, my childhood world had changed. The house was ransacked; in the brief interval that had passed from the day I said goodbye to her for the last time, looters had torn out all the metal piping (copper and iron; you can get a lot of money for scrap metal) and all the radiators. They had also stolen some of the smaller articles of furniture, and had flung old clothing and other possessions everywhere. A half-empty bottle of rotgut wine sat perched on the stove in the kitchen; interior doors were torn off their hinges and windows broken. I called the police, who came right away and were very sympathetic but who could actually do very little to help me, except to promise to keep an eye on the place, while the real estate man offered to make the arrangements to secure the property from further damage until I could sell it. I spent the rest of that day salvaging what I could and packing it into my truck, and returned home to my wife and infant daughter.
In the weeks that followed I began the process of paying her last bills and settling her modest estate. This was somewhat complicated by the fact that many of my mother’s important documents, like the only copy of her will, and her insurance papers, were missing; they had been in a small, locked strongbox that she kept in a bedroom closet. Not surprisingly, given the state of most everything else in the house, this strongbox was nowhere to be found and I presumed it stolen. About a month or so after the funeral a large manila envelope arrived in the mail; it was addressed to my mother and had been forwarded to me. The note inside was from a woman I knew to have been one of my mother’s friends who lived just around the block; she had recently found a bunch of papers and documents with my mother’s name on them dumped in a corner of a vacant lot that bordered her house, so she thought to pack them up and mail them to the old address with the expectation that they would (as they did) find their way to me. It was clear that whoever stole them realized they were of no monetary value, and so just flung them away.
I was grateful to have them; so much so that I sat down right away and wrote a note to the woman to express my thanks. When it was done, stamped and mailed, I turned my attention back to the bundle, which included, to my relief, the missing insurance papers and the sole copy of her will, along with a several other documents. One particular bit of paper caught my eye; it was obviously a legal document, old and worn. On the front it read: “In the Matter of an Adoption by Michael G. Dell’Orto and Victoria R. Dell’Orto."
Now, I have to pause here to provide a bit of background – two things, actually. The first is that my parents had often made reference to a “little Italian girl” they had tried to adopt from the old country; this illusory sister was usually brought up on those occasions in my early childhood when I asked why I didn’t have a sibling. The second was an odd encounter I had when I was about 12 years old. My mother and I were visiting an aunt who lived in what was then a very rural part of New Jersey. One afternoon, we were all walking through a picked-over field of cherry tomatoes that bordered her property, along with the neighbor whose field it was. As I ran ahead in the company of my aunt’s dogs, I caught bits and snatches of the grown-ups’ conversation. At one point, as we were heading back to the house, the neighbor had remarked to my mother “He’s gotten so big – it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? I remember when you got him.” It struck me, at the time – young as I was – that this was an awfully odd phrase to use. Limited though my knowledge of the world most certainly was at that age, I knew that married people “had a child,” or “gave birth to a child,” or something like that. “Getting” a child sounded a lot like a transaction, as if I had been bought like a bag of plastic Army men in the toy aisle at the 5 & 10.
I stewed about this for the rest of that day; some weeks later I finally got up the courage to ask my mother if I had been adopted. You would have thought I had asked her if she had murdered my grandparents with an axe; she began to shout at me (as only she could; my mother was possessed of a particularly colorful vocabulary that I’m certain would have embarrassed a Marine drill sergeant), and told me that I was crazy and where did I get such a stupid idea, etc., etc. Being no fool, I let the matter drop.
Now, some 20 years on after that incident, and confronted with a piece of paper with the word “Adoption” and my parents’ names clearly printed on it, interestingly enough the first thing that went through my head was that I now had confirmation regarding this sister from Italy that never was. I opened it carefully, so as not to tear the fragile paper. I began to read, slowly; and one phrase practically leapt off the page and grabbed me by the arm: “a male child born May 12, 1953; who shall henceforth be named Michael G. Dell’Orto, Jr . . .” I sat for a minute and just laughed. “Well, that would be me, wouldn’t it,” I thought. Then I called my wife at her office, and told her that I had something I needed to read to her. She actually dropped the handset onto the floor before I was done.
The next few days were taken up with phone calls to old neighbors and especially aunts and uncles. The account that emerged from these conversations was a surprise, but also not surprising. It became clear that I was the only person involved in this story who hadn’t been aware I was adopted. Everyone knew. My aunts, uncles and cousins never brought it up because they assumed that I had been told at some point; the same could be said for some of my mother’s friends and many of my teachers (both grade and high school). I spoke about it to my mother’s best friend, a woman who lived two doors down from us in Jersey City, and she told me an interesting tale. All “the girls” were having coffee one day in her house; those few women in the room who knew that I didn’t know about my birth had remarked to my mother that, now that I was getting married and might, at some point sooner or later, have children, wouldn’t it be a wise idea to let me in on the secret? My mother’s reaction was pretty much the equal to the one she’d had when I’d asked her about my origin all those years before; she swore up and down and told them in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want me to know. And that, as far as she was concerned, was that.
I’m pretty sure that no one would ever have brought it up to me had I not come across the adoption papers. As I said, a lot of people in my family just assumed that I already knew, and I would have had very little (if any) reason to remain in contact with my mother’s old friends as I got older and they, inevitably, died off. Given the circumstances it is certainly possible that the whole business never would have come to light – the papers in that strongbox could just as easily have been tossed in a trash bin and hauled off to the dump, instead of thrown into a vacant lot. I suppose I should be grateful that the thieves were inconsiderate enough to be litterers as well.
All of this begs the question as to why my mother was so adamant about the whole business; a number of people, including my mother’s friends, several of my aunts, and one of my best friends from high school (who had also been my mother’s lawyer), have weighed in on the subject, and the consensus is that it was a mix of things; a little pride, a lot of fear. One aunt told me she had been afraid that, if I knew, I somehow would not think of her as my mother any more, or I would be upset, or embarrassed, or not want to have anything to do with her and go off searching for my “real” mother. I was also told that some of my father’s family, especially my grandparents, were not thrilled about bringing a “stranger” into the fold, at least not initially (once I showed up, however, their resistance faded, if the photos of infant me with my grandparents are any indicator – I was an adorable baby, if I have to say so myself). This was complicated by the issue of “fault;” yet another aunt (my father came from a very large family, eleven in all -- six girls and five boys) told me that my mother allowed her in-laws to think that it was she who could not have children, when all of his siblings knew that it was my father who had been irreparably damaged by the malaria he contracted (and its subsequent treatment) while he was in Burma during WW II.
So now, here I was, married and with a child, already fully possessed of an identity and a family history that was, as far as I was concerned, the only history and identity I needed. Learning that I was not technically a blood relative to any of these people – mother, father, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents – was (and I know this is going to sound odd) largely irrelevant to me. They didn’t suddenly cease being my family because of this; these were the people who loved me, cared for me, educated me. Outside of the fact that I owed a certain measure of gratitude to two strangers for bringing me into being (never forgetting that I was an accident, not a choice), I felt no connection – or, rather, I felt no need for connection with them.
As I said at the beginning, two impulses motivated the search I eventually conducted. First, the idea that there could be a really interesting story behind all this was intriguing enough in itself; it appealed to my sense of theatre. Second, the reading I’d done indicated that, in general, birth mothers of this era (since all information about the subsequent adoption of a child in those days was kept strictly under wraps by the state, private agencies, attorneys and the like) tended to agonize for years over their decision to surrender a child; wondering if the child was healthy, happy, well cared-for. I thought, if nothing else, to tell whomever this woman was (if I could find her, if she wanted to be found, and if she was even still alive – three very big “ifs”) that I was grateful for what she had done. So I knew that at some point I would attempt to locate one or both of my birth parents. But there was never any sense of urgency to it. In fact, I waited almost eight years before I began.
Very Nice.
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