In twenty years of writing and speaking, there was a topic I never touched-- even though my lifelong dream of writing a book connected with my lifelong secret. I was adopted at birth. Every few months or years, something would remind me of my adoption. I was sitting in my third grade class when my teacher said the Constitution was "adopted." Chills prickled my body and I wondered if my classmates could tell I was different.

My parents always introduced me as "our daughter," rather than "our adopted daughter." I'm 45 now. My Dad and I are both tall with medium brown hair and blue-green eyes. I looked like I belonged. It was easy to keep my secret. I only told a handful of people.

My dad confided that there was a paper he would give me when I turned 21. I tried to say it didn’t matter. But on my 21st birthday, I waited. My Dad drew a manila envelope out of a locked file in his study. During my adoption hearing, the attorney stood next to my Dad, flashing this paper in front of him as if it were a glimpse at a poker hand. Something was unusual. Despite efforts to keep everything secret, somehow, my birth mother's last name was left on the document. My Dad teased, "Do you think you're tough enough to take this?"

He handed me the envelope. There it was. A long name beginning with S. I felt no spark of recognition. Seeing the uncharacteristic emotion on my Dad's face that night vanquished my curiosity. I felt guilt from wanting to know more.

Then something strange happened. I worked as a telephone operator. Someone called from Chicago with the S. last name. In the room with hundreds of other operators, I shook, just like the day my teacher said the Constitution was adopted. Chicago? I felt like something had been handed to me. At the downtown library, I looked up cities in Illinois. I called Directory Assistance. When they asked for a first name, I told them Mary. My mom's name is Mary. From a social worker's chance remark, she thought my birth mother's name might be Mary, too. Illinois directory assistance operators reassured me that there was no Mary with the S. last name. I needed her first name.

Heart pounding, I called the hospital where I was born, making my voice expectant and naive. A woman answered "Records."

"I'm just in town for the day," I said, clearing my throat and hoping the inside of my house sounded like an airport or train station. "I'm working on my genealogy and need to determine my mother's birthplace....." A quick breath. "Could you please look on my birth certificate?"

Long pause. This was 1974. Confidentiality wasn't spelled out as clearly. But still. I'm asking a lot. My heart pounds as seconds pass.

Unprompted, my voices rushes. "I have my birth date and know the time–"

"Your mother's name?"

I spell her last name. Could there be more than one? I hope against hope.

"Her first name?"

Chills rush. "Uh - I don't know which one she used. She sometimes went by her middle name or a nickname."

For reasons I'll never fathom, the woman doesn't ask for possible names.

A long wait. Then she abruptly asks, "Were you raised by someone else?"

"Does it say that?" I pretend astonishment.

"Well....I wonder if it could be this one...."

"Which one?" My voice jumps in.

"Susan -"

Susan?

I grow bold. "What name does it have for her husband."

"Her husband's name isn't on the chart."

"And I was born August 31, 1953...."

"Well, she entered the hospital the night of the 30th....and gave birth at 12:20 a.m. on the 31st."

Bingo. The exact time on my birth certificate.

"Thank you," I say.

I call Illinois cities. Chicago. Springfield. There's a Matthew in Springfield with the right last name. I call person to person.

A woman answers.

The operators asks for Susan S.

A long, potent pause. I sense the woman in Chicago is about to say no.

Measured tones. "She's not here.....but I'll take the call."

What now? Amazingly, my voice starts. "This is a friend of Susan's ...from school. I'll be in town soon, and thought I'd look her up."

"She doesn't live here."

"Oh..." a sinking feeling. "Where does she live?"

"In Florida."

"And her name...is it still S.?"

"No...it's Anderson now. Mrs. Edward Anderson."

I go for broke. "Do you happen to have her phone number?"

She reads me the number. There it is. My birth mother.

I decide to write a letter. I don't remember a word I wrote, only the feeling that I tried to approach the topic subtly, rather than accusing her of giving birth to me and then giving me up.

Two days later, she called the instant she got the letter. My husband, whom I hadn't told about my secret search, answered the phone. He had no idea who she was. When he questioned her, she hung up quickly. I called later that night. Her voice, miles away. That night, all I could tell was that the time was not comfortable for her. It was a while before I understood that while my adoption was the ace in the hand I was dealt, for her, it was worse than any other card. It was being thrown out of the game at the age of twenty. It took time for me to understand that talking to me only brought back painful memories. To this day, it's like a meter ticks away during our conversations.

I grew to realize that she tells the truth the way it feels to her that day. Her stories change. There are several versions of her relationship with my birth father. I think they dated only for a short time, that he was "wilder" than boys she usually dated, and that he was from out of town - a medic stationed on a nearby Air Force base. She was the tenth of twelve children and grew up in a house where the word "pregnant" was whispered rather than said out loud.

She didn't want me to know about--or even be too curious about-- my birth father. She thought if she threw a few crumbs, I would be satisfied.. "I told you his last name, didn't I?" she asked once, in an unusually jovial mood. "Oh - yeah, you did," I said, not wanting to spoil the moment. She never told me.

Now she says. "Yeah - just like Elvis Presley. They might be related..."

"Presley.." I say. .

"Yeah - Presley," she says, laughing. "And his first name was Harold. He was from Tennessee."

I know now that most adoptees look for birth fathers as an afterthought, if they look for them at all. There's an undercurrent of feeling that birth fathers are responsible for both the pain and urgency of the adoption. There's a sense that if birth mothers never met birth fathers, there would be no trauma. They are thought of as men who ruin women's lives and abandon their children.

As maybe ten years passed, I'd furtively look up the name Presley every once in a while. Besides being a writer, I'm a part-time library customer service specialist. Once I was interviewing a woman about her own adoption reunion. She gave me a number to call to find men who had been in the military. The man who answered found two Harold Presleys. "This one died in 1962 - can't be him. But there is another one out there." He wouldn't tell me where, without a military service or Social Security number. The information came in slivers and chunks, all of which I had to sift to decide which move to make next.

Two years ago, I decided to put off researching the Presleys until after Christmas. There were gifts to buy, Christmas cards to address. My time was hectic. But then I felt an odd and unmistakable shove. I had to move ahead right then.

That same week, I happened on an unusual book, Presley Pressley -- a genealogist's book about the Presley family. The author was Marlene Webb of Adrian, Texas. I called her, and she suggested I write. I did - and she sent back a genealogical chart listing the Harold Presley who died in 1962. I thought to myself, "No. He can't be dead. My birth father is alive. He can't die before I meet him." Then I sent her my non-identifying information, thinking maybe she could look further, and find the other Harold Presley who was alive. She called and said, "This sounds just like - " and broke off in mid-sentence. Seconds later, she said, "I'll call you back."

Two months later, during the 10:00 news, following a Sunday night movie , my phone rang. Marlene's voice quavered with emotion. "We think that the Harold Presley on the chart is the right source. I talked to his sister."

"What did you say?" I asked, incredulous that this bridge was already crossed for me.

"I told her I talked to this really nice lady who was looking for her daddy and had reason to believe -"

"What did she say?" Soothed as I was by Marlene's relaxed Texas drawl, I could not wait another second.

"She said as soon as I told her, she just knew it was her brother you were looking for. She called her other sister. They both said you can call any of them any time."

I wrote down the name Marlene gave me. Rhoda Dutton, in Memphis, Tennessee. Not a man who would brush me aside, but a woman who said I could call.

I phoned Rhoda that same day. "I didn't know anything about you, but I'm sure glad to hear from you," were her first words to me. In our conversation, we danced around each other, wondering if we could really be connected. I remember reciting some of the sentences from my birth mother's first letter. "Susan said she had more than her share of dates, but nothing quite like him. She said he was at least 6'2" , and real well built," I said, quoting verbatim.

"Yes - all my brothers were tall and big and good looking," said Rhoda.

"She described him as a free spirit."

"Yes. And he liked practical jokes."

"She said he went home and married his old girlfriend, which was why they didn't marry."

Rhoda paused. "No. He never married. He was engaged once, and when they broke up, she married his brother, who played for the Chicago White Sox. He didn't play baseball, but his brother did."

So we still weren't sure. After a moment, Rhoda said, "Marlene Webb asked if he was ever in Florida. I didn't remember that he was. But Mama saved every letter he wrote. I looked in her old trunk and there were letters from there. He was in Florida in 1952."

"I was born in 1953."

We both waited.

Somehow, after the moment passed, we agreed to exchange photos.

I gathered lots of pictures. Of me and my children at different ages. Wedding pictures. Baby pictures. I mailed them and waited.

After what seemed like an eternity, a letter with a Memphis postmark arrived. Two black and white photos of a man in an Army uniform. I showed the pictures to my oldest son, Aaron. "Who do you think this is?" I asked.

He paused. I heard him inhale before he said, "Mom, you have his face."

Then, with gentle discretion, my son pointed out my wide forehead, angular cheek lines, and the way one of my eyebrows arches more than the other--all similar features to the man in the photo. Then he said, "Look how tall he is." touching the photo where the man in uniform stood much taller than a large, thorny-looking bush. "I'd like to stand next to him," said Aaron, who is 6 '7."

"He's dead" I said, as a cloak of grief abruptly draped me. My birth father's death was termed "mysterious." After a life of military stations in Arabia, Africa, Germany, Florida, California and other places, he died in New Orleans at the age of 31. Harold Presley was a good-looking man who lived fast and died young. In ways, he fit my birth mother's assessment of being a "free spirit."

A funeral home in Arkansas went to bring the body back. His niece, Phyllis, "A few weeks before he died, he took me shopping with him. He bought two new suits. I felt an eerie feeling at the funeral when one of his friends wore one of those new suits. The same friend was wearing his watch. I had a bad feeling about that friend."

From what I can tell, Harold was the brother who lived a fast, exotic life in foreign locales and came home only to visit. He did not fit the pattern of his brothers and sisters who married, had families, and mostly stayed in Arkansas. His life, like his death, was mysterious. And from the way things looked, he had a secret daughter who lived hundreds of miles away who loved mystery, too.

Somehow I could not wait for Rhoda's thoughts about the pictures I sent. I probably called the day she got them. "Do you see any resemblance?" I asked. She paused. "Oh, yes. You have his eyes. And your little girl looks like Mama."Her voice sounded gentle. "Would you like to see some of our family pictures? The family has been gathering them up...and if it is as we think, I want you to have his other things, too."

We all longed for proof. There was no DNA, no name on a birth certificate. I had to shoot for the next best thing - a statement from the one person who could tell me if this was actually my birth father. I had to think of a way to convince my birth mother to give a straightforward answer.

I started with the truth. I told her honestly that I was working with a search agency to write a book about adoption reunion stories. Then I veered off. I told her that the agency felt I would be more effective as a writer if I experienced my own reunion. So they set their agents to work for me and found a man they thought might be my birth father. I stopped talking. "Did you know that Harold died?" I asked her.

"Oh..." a swirl of emotion. "Did he die?" I could hear years of wondering in that single sentence. It was our greatest bonding moment. Though everyone else went to Harold's funeral 35 years earlier, for us, he died only a week before. I could feel Susan's grief blend with my own.

"I always pictured him living on a Tennessee farm, with a lot of kids...."

A long silence. Later, I tell her I will send the photos that "the agency" found..

Days pass. I return late on a Saturday and ask my husband if anyone called. "Yes, there was a strange call from Florida. Susan. She said to tell you that she's 100 per cent sure that the agency found the right person. What does that mean?"

A week later Susan writes me a letter telling me to "rest assured that this Harold Presley is the right one." I phone Rhoda, who I now think of as Aunt Rhoda. It feels like putting the last piece of a puzzle in place. Two weeks later, a package arrives. It is filled with handwritten notations from Rhoda. After sifting through the belongings, my strongest sense is of a mother who lost her young son.

Jessie McClendon Presley, my birth grandmother, was a woman who saved things. In the box ,are the remnants of my birth father's life. A military photo album, a passport, a driver's license, a pile of honorable discharges, the telegram she received announcing his death, and two letters from Army officers expressing condolences. There are yellowed report cards, signed greeting cards, and an immunization record. Military stripes and medals. A pile of letters tied with a ribbon.

Though there is nothing religious about the artifacts, there is a presence among the belongings that feels somehow reverent, the way it feels to stand in a cemetery. I find it interesting that my birth grandmother saved everything so carefully, although, as far as she knew, Harold had no child to receive his possessions. It was like she knew I was coming.

More photos arrived. Thick envelopes filled with family pictures. I felt deeply touched that many of the photos, like the artifacts in the first box, had obviously been carefully saved for years.

From the beginning, I felt a delicate trust in the relationship between my family and the Presleys. It was like we were standing on two sides of a chasm, each tentatively extending a hand to see if we could build a connection, a bridge. After possibly a hundred photos arrived, it was like they spilled over my capacity to keep their existence secret. I gathered my husband and children together to tell them about the Presleys. My voice shook, and I didn't hide my tears from my kids the way I usually try to.

I remember their fascination, holding the photos up to the light as if they could somehow see the connection. "Cool," was a word my sons used repeatedly.

That same week, the day before Mother's Day, I got a phone call. "This is Susan S. I'm here in Salt Lake," my birth mother says, as casually as if she lives a block away. We stumblingly agree to meet at Marie Callenders restaurant down the street. She and her husband are standing in the doorway of the restaurant, smiling, when I arrive. As soon as she saw me, she ran up and hugged me and would not let go. It was a primal moment. There was an electric, physical sensation that seemed to bind us together. We laughed, talked and shared pictures. At one point, she picked up my hand and gazed at it. Her husband and I cried together, and he told me he'd surprised her by bringing her through Utah on a trip they were taking. He hid the family photos in his suitcase and didn't tell her she would see me until the night before. "I thought of it as a Mother's Day present for both of you, ".

Still more photos arrived from the South. There were recent snapshots of smiling family gatherings.

Phone calls along with the photos. Gentle, welcoming Southern accents. Aunts telling me my birth father and I could have been friends. One woman said, "I'm sorry for all that you've been through." I answered. "Thank you. But I haven't been through anything. I've had a wonderful life."

I would tell them again and again both how happy my life had been and how much their acceptance meant. I've read somewhere that no matter how perfect an adoption is, there are still abandonment issues to deal with. And acceptance from a birth family is wonderfully healing, although it doesn't change the past. "Your parents did a great job with you, and we love them for that," they told me again and again. "Give them a hug for us."

In August, 1997, we went to visit. The day I left for Arkansas to meet the Presleys, I mailed my publisher a draft of my book, "Together Again: True Stories of Birth Parents and Adopted Children Reunited." It seemed miraculous that while I was writing stories about other family's adoption reunions, my own reunion was also taking place.

I walked up to the family farm house, which is red brick with white gingerbread trim. My birth father's widowed sister, Lenell, lives there now. There was a long expanse of grass to walk across to reach the front steps. Halfway there, Phyllis, a cousin I had talked to on the phone, met me with a tight hug. More Presleys stood on the steps waiting to hug me and my family. Then there was another long line of people inside the front room - 54 of them in all.

During the rest of that week - and during another similar week the next summer - we spent long days talking, eating and getting to know each other. I felt like I'd known all of these people from somewhere - yet they added a new perspective to my life. They knew things about me that I didn't know. "You are sweating on your face - like Mama and Nona," Aunt Rhoda said to me one day.

While not everyone favors adoption reunions, I think that, in many cases, nothing else demonstrates the success of adoption more. And there is nothing like discovering your own story.

A man I know has a picture of his mom and birthmom hugging each other. He told me, "It's probably the most important photo I have--of the woman who gave me life, and the woman who kept my life going." Birth families and adoptive families often share love for the same people. The bridge built by reunions can often strengthen both families and create calm and soothing unity. Salt Lake City adoption researcher Sharlene Lightfoot explains the motivation and hope of those separated by adoption in three short sentences. "They really just want to say, "Hello again. I'm here and I'd love to know you. I want to tell you that things turned out okay."

* * *

Carolyn Campbell is a recently reunited adoptee who has written a book about adoption reunions entitled "Together Again: True Stories of Birth Parents and Adopted Children Reunited." She lives with her family in Utah.

(This feature appeared in the Winter 99/00 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

Copyright 1999 Carolyn Campbell
All Rights Reserved