Holding It Together
By Karen Grayson
When I was born, my birth father, Stephen, picked up his heartache and drove two hours each day to see me in the nursery. He knew that after my placement he would likely never see me again, and instead of avoiding it or burying his feelings, he fought through traffic and judgmental nurses, who felt he had no right to be there, just to be near me one last time.
Every year of our 20-year separation he celebrated my birthday, not in lonely isolation, but with his family and employees. Coffee, cake, and donuts. He openly shared that he had two daughters, both lost to him through closed adoption, the architecture of which erased him completely. Relinquishment forms did not require his signature. His name was not listed on the birth certificate. However, he didn’t allow difficult feelings to separate us further. He held all of it together—shame and love, guilt and fatherly pride. Year after year, he challenged the adoption narrative by telling the story of our separation. Every cake revealed the cruel machinery that severed our ties and kept the new identities of his beloved daughters sealed and out of reach.
Stephen actively searched for me. When I turned 19, I called Catholic Charities for updated medical information, and his letter was there waiting for me. He wrote, “I have been with you every day since your birth, though physically only until you were five days old,” and shared his deep wish to reunite. He had no power and no rights; the ability to open my file rested solely with my birth mother. He wrote nonetheless.
He was a husband and father of two young sons, and owned a business, but he still found time to write thoughtful letters and mail them to me after our reunion. He wanted to know me and wanted me to know him. He wanted to meet all of my friends, and to introduce me to everyone in his life.
He loved my parents for loving me so well.
He did not withhold his love, even when he felt overwhelmed, disappointed, and distressed. He was affectionate and regularly said, “I love you” in person and in letters. He marveled at me and frequently said, “You are magnificent.”
He welcomed me into his family. He saw my presence as something that would enrich his family’s life, not disrupt it or detract from it.
He understood that I was starved for information about my heritage, so he showed me photographs of relatives and he told me my ancestors’ stories of survival, longevity, and artistry. My great-great-grandmother was a woodcarver in Norway. My great-grandfather and his younger brother were put on a ship and sent to live with relatives after their mother’s untimely death. Both grandparents served during WWII.
He cherished every trait, ability, tendency, and habit that we had in common, like intellect and memory, and a love of swimming, reading, drawing, and the ocean.
Our reunion was featured on the front page of the South Shore News: “Back to the Future: Years after surrendering her for adoption, a birth father is reunited with his daughter.” Recalling my relinquishment, he told Donna Erikson, the reporter, “Everything I have done for the past 20 years has been colored by this. If you don’t deal with it, it can be a destructive force against you. After all the wondering and unsettled feelings, the missing pieces of my life are coming together. I do not only feel that I’ve found my daughter—I really have found myself.”
Our reunion was exciting. He was kind, smart, and funny. I liked him and was grateful to know him. However, the time we spent together produced a confusing mix of emotions; his reaction to me had an intensity that often left me needing some time and space.
Nearly a year into our relationship, I asked for that space. In response, he wrote:
No matter which course in life you choose to follow, I will support you … even if you choose to never see me again. Whatever choices you do make, I would like you to make with no regrets. Having regrets clouds and taints everything you will ever do. I speak from experience. If you need time, there’s plenty. I want you to know that I will always be here for you, your family, and your friends, anytime and for any reason; I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
I know he wanted to live up to these words, but a broken heart has no patience. When I slowed things down, he quickened his pace, and this divergence only intensified. No amount of time or attention was enough for him. He chased, and I retreated. His fixation took a toll on our families, but our discomfort was of no consequence to him. I reassured him that I would reach out when I was ready, but he kept on. Phone calls. Letters. Flowers. Unannounced visits on campus, in my dorm, at my job, and at my home. Push. Push. Push. No boundary held. He persisted until I didn’t feel safe anywhere. I dropped out of college, quit my job, and moved home. His wife overheard him giving interviews about our reconnection on local radio shows after I had withdrawn from our relationship. Good Morning America called to discuss the upcoming segment about our reunion, of which I had no prior knowledge. Obsession was too dark for a morning show.
Sixteen months into this downward spiral, his wife asked him for a divorce. Shortly after, he reluctantly moved out. His whereabouts, unknown. A missing person’s report was filed after a relative received a concerning letter and feared that he was suicidal. Stephen ended his life a few days later across from my house on Evergreen Street. He had just turned 44 years old.
Adoption creates impossible situations, the likes of which language struggles to represent. After some years passed it was easier to challenge the “all’s-well-that-ends-well” framework that deemed our reunion an epic failure. In an attempt to reclaim our humanity and complexity, I learned to hold all of the contradictions, his loving and unloving ways.
At 19, I misread him. He seemed assertive, confident, and even domineering, but never vulnerable. Before his death, I hadn’t known about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, a WWII veteran who experienced the horrors of war and came home with untreated PTSD and a self-medicating ritual when the work day was done. I hadn’t known that he slept in an uninsulated attic near the coast during the cold New England winters or that he was told he wouldn’t amount to anything and couldn’t provide for a wife and a child. In my non-identifying information, he shared only that his relationship with his father was “better when he wasn’t drinking,” and that his relationship with his mother was “distant.”
His sister told me that he never got over losing his girls. Our father-daughter connections had been obliterated by a social fracking that not only erased our identities and histories but also caused deep fractures within him that our reunion couldn’t mend. Grief, trauma, and pain had eroded the “missing pieces of [his] life” into unrecognizable bits that no longer fit into a coherent whole.
Whenever I reread the “Back to the Future” article, his description of our reunion always moves me. “It was as if I had always known her.” He experienced a visceral, embodied connection, like I feel with my kids, but the bond he felt was never legitimized. The adoption apparatus can not acknowledge these connections and disavows the consequences. Even his obituary listed only two sons. After all that, he was severed from his daughters again.
Looking back I realized that we were never the protagonists of our story. We were surrounded by people who believed our reunion was frivolous, gratuitous, and self-indulgent, and they quickly aligned in solidarity with one another, a coalition organized around reinstating the pre-reunion status quo. They’d say, “He doesn’t even know you,” or, “It’s not like he is your real dad,” as if he had no business loving me, or that his love was suspicious or odd. With all eyes watching, how could we navigate the strange precarity of this experience? We would have benefited from a support group, a teach-in, or a workshop on developing reunion literacy. The dominant discourse rinsed the meaning out of our connections as fast as we forged them.
My file remains sealed, but thankfully some of my relatives have found me through 23andMe. Stephen’s niece reached out to me first and soon I was also connected with her sister and my aunt. At 54, these loving connections encouraged me to find my sister who was relinquished as an infant eight months after I was born. Together we are creating a different trajectory for our family as we co-write new chapters of our family story.
