Read an Excerpt

Reunited

An Investigative Genealogist Unlocks Some of Life's Greatest Family Mysteries

St. Martin's Press

A Searcher Is Born

It was a conversation I'd been waiting to have my whole life. For my thirtieth birthday, my husband, Mike, hired a private investigator, and in five days this man did what I hadn't been able to do in fourteen years. He found my birth mother. I finally had a name, a number, and an address for this elusive woman. There was no doubt.

When Mike called me from work with the contact details, he made me promise not to call until he got home. He should have known better. "Yeah, yeah, sure, babe, don't worry. I promise I'll wait," I told him, my fingers itching to start dialing as soon as I got him off the phone. My heart was racing. Meanwhile, my mother-in-law was hovering. She knew what I was up to and she had a bad feeling.

"Why don't you look happy for me?" I asked her.

"Because I'm worried; I don't want to see you get hurt."

"It'll be fine. If she's anything like me, she'll be thrilled to get this call."

I picked up the phone and dialed, but the person who answered — presumably my half brother — told me she was at the supermarket. I tried again later and got my half sister, who told me she was still out. I was on tenterhooks. I couldn't get over the fact that I had a brother and sister, and I'd just talked to them for the first time, although they had no idea who I was.

I waited for another interminable hour. Finally, on my third try, my birth mother answered the phone. We'll call her Priscilla.

"Yeah? Who is this?"

"Hello, Priscilla. My name is Pamela Slaton. I was born on February 23, 1964, under the name of Wade, then given up for adoption. I recently found out that I am your daughter."

"No, you're not. And you should never have called me!"

"Yes, I am. I have documented proof that you are my birth mother. It's true."

"Oh no, I'm not!"

"Oh yes, you are!"

"No! I am NOT!"

This back-and-forth continued for a while. Priscilla was tough. She grew up in the Bronx and had that thick accent of the streets. But I grew up in Queens and could be just as tough. Not that I felt strong. It was really just my defense mechanism kicking in. The last thing I expected was to be denied by my own flesh and blood, and I was stunned. So I resorted to being a wiseass.

"Listen, Priscilla, we can do this now, over the phone, or I can get in my car and be on your doorstep in three hours. Which would you prefer?"

"You just stay away from me, you hear? Okay, yeah, I may be your biological mother, but I never cared about you or gave you a second thought in all these years. I don't know what you want from me."

"You know what, Priscilla? It's cool. It's fine. Just tell me who my father is and I'll go away."

"You want to know who your father is? Sure, I'll tell you who your father is. Your father was my father. I hope you enjoy knowing that."

Then she slammed down the phone, and my whole world turned upside down. I never saw it coming. I'd been so sure Priscilla would be overjoyed to hear from me. Instead, I felt like I'd had my teeth kicked out. The room was spinning and I literally saw black and white dots, as if the cable had gone out on an old TV set in my head. The woman I'd been searching for and dreamed of meeting ever since I could remember had flung this horrifying information at me as if it were a poison dart, and her aim was dead-on. It pierced right through my chest.

The next day, I was scheduled to have gallbladder surgery. Like an idiot, I went through with it. The doctors expected me to be out of recovery in an hour, but it took seven hours. They couldn't lower my heart rate. Every time I came to, I'd remember the conversation from the night before and get slammed with an anxiety attack. A nurse came out of the waiting room and told my husband she was concerned that my vital signs still weren't stable. She asked him if I'd been traumatized in any way recently, and he told her what had happened.

"Well, that would do it," she said.

Obviously, I survived. But now I understand what people mean when they say you can literally die of a broken heart. I almost did.

CHILDHOOD FANTASY

I was about three years old when I first thought about searching for my birth mother. Becoming a searcher for adoptees and their birth relatives is something I was born to do. My aunt has told me she remembers that I said, "I am going to find that woman." I kept saying it over and over. She asked me, "What woman?" Then it dawned on her who I meant.

I never discussed this with my parents. Even as a child, I instinctively knew it would hurt them. My desire to find my birth mother was in no way intended to be a slight against my mother and father. No blood relation could ever replace the people who loved me and raised me. I was brought into a loving middle-class home in the suburbs. My dad was a funeral director and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. I had an older brother, who was also adopted. If anything, we were made to feel even more special that we had been "chosen." Because of the positive way my parents framed it for me, I was actually proud of the fact I was adopted. My poor mom was mortified when, as a toddler, I'd blurt out this fact of my existence to any random person who came within earshot. I was adopted and proud of it.

Don't misunderstand me. It's always been very clear in my mind that the Monaci family, who raised me, is my real family. I was brought up by the most incredible, loving, wonderful parents. None of us was tied by blood, but that didn't matter. Love, loyalty, and honesty were our bond, and it was much bigger than sharing someone's DNA.

My mom married my father, Ron, at nineteen. My dad suffered many illnesses during their marriage. They could not have biological children because, as a young child, my father had suffered a devastating injury that forced him to undergo repeated exposure to radiation. All those X-rays made him sterile. Dad actually had undiagnosed lupus and spent most of his life suffering from the many side effects of this disease. When I was five years old, a blood clot almost took his life, and I remember a feeling of overwhelming terror at the thought of losing this great man. As if seeing my father suffer from one health crisis after another was not enough, my brother, Ronnie, was diagnosed with bone cancer at the tender age of nineteen. My mother was a soldier at my brother's side as she struggled to do whatever possible to nurture him back to health. We supported each other through the greatest of hardships, and we survived them together.

I learned from my parents the true meaning of family as we sat down to a dinner that my mom had on the table by 5:00 P.M. sharp every evening. It was our chance to talk about our day and just check in with the people who cared about us the most. I felt secure and safe. My parents were best friends who helped each other through every obstacle in their lives. My brother and I were raised in a God-fearing family and were sent to private school for our early education. We went to church every Sunday and arrived home to await the arrival of our grandparents (my dad's parents), who were Italian and brought with them all of my favorite foods — meatballs, manicotti, cannoli. I gain weight just thinking about it! Our extended family dined together every Sunday. Our grandmother smothered us with kisses (we called her "the Octopus"), and our grandfather, who chain-smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes, squeezed our noses with his tobacco-stained fingers. These were good, hardworking people who taught me the meaning of the word integrity and gave me all the unconditional love I could ever have asked for. It was a great foundation.

But this yearning to find the woman who gave me life was so fundamental that I couldn't switch it off. I think this is true for most adoptees. Think of all those millions of people who are fascinated with their family ancestry, and then multiply that obsession by a factor of a thousand. It's something primal. There's so much that our immediate blood relatives can tell us about ourselves. This need to connect is especially intense when it comes to our birth mothers. It's an organic bond that's always there. You were in this person's womb. No matter what happens, you are her flesh and blood, and it will always feel like a piece of you is missing without her acknowledgment.

That feeling stays close to the surface your whole life. In school, I always wanted to be a writer, and when I was fifteen, I wrote a haiku that went something like this:

THE RING

It sat glistening at the bottom of the ocean Forever lost Cast away uncaringly As he cast away her

Of course, it was about my birth parents, or how I'd imagined them to be. You create so many scenarios in your head about what happened and the circumstances that led to your being given up for adoption. Until you know the real answers, it never stops.

THE FIRST STEP

At sixteen, my best friend took me into Manhattan to visit the agency that had handled my adoption, Spence-Chapin. She bought me a teddy bear at Lord & Taylor, we had lunch, and then we went to the place where it all began. I was turned away almost immediately and told to come back when I was eighteen. But I stayed in the lobby for a few minutes to take it all in — the furniture, the shabby wallpaper, everything. There was something almost mystical about that spot, because I knew it was the last place I'd been with my birth mother, and the first location where I met my parents. Of course, I had been just a baby at the time, but I tried so hard to remember what it had been like. Being in those offices just fueled my desire to learn even more, and the minute I turned eighteen, I was back again.

The agency finally gave me what's called "non-identifying information." I learned that my birth mother was young, only sixteen, when she surrendered me for adoption. The agency described her as five eight, with almost model-like good looks. She had blond hair and blue eyes, she was well spoken, and she was clearly in love with the man presumed to be my father. He was described as handsome, twenty years old, very tall — six five — with dark blond hair and green eyes, and of Italian descent. The agency told me my mother had considered herself a foster child because she wasn't raised by her own parents and was separated from her brother and her sister, but she didn't know why. She was young and unable to raise a child on her own, but she seemed reluctant to give me up. The agency severed her legal ties to me only after she failed to show up for two appointments with one of the agency's social workers.

This made me all the more determined to find her. It was no longer about me. I felt sad for my birth mother and I wanted to know that she was okay, and to let her know that I was fine and I'd had a good life. But over the years, I kept getting stonewalled. I'd pick up scraps of information here and there, think the trail was getting hot, then hit a dead end. Few states have embraced open adoptions, which were unheard of at the time I was born. People in a position to tell me what I needed to know were legally bound not to. All they could do was offer a few murky clues. I finally found out that my birth name was Wade, something my adoptive mother later told me she had known all along, because it was on my adoption papers. (She wasn't exactly supportive of my search. I guess she was afraid I'd get hurt, or that she'd lose me.)

Most adoptees who search go through this stop-and-start process. You pick it up, you put it down, and then you pick it up again. Life and the need to earn a living tend to get in the way. The search can take an emotional toll, and it's all too easy to get obsessive about it, but you can't live like that.

In the interim, I had married my childhood sweetheart, Mike, moved to Nassau County, on Long Island, begun a career in real estate, and started a family. It wasn't until after my father died and my second little guy was born that we had the breakthrough on Priscilla's name and location (and my world came to a crashing halt).

FROM FANTASY TO REALITY

The months following my initial contact with my birth mother were hell. I'd never experienced anxiety before, but that year I went through all the symptoms — insomnia, jitters, depression — on a regular basis. I felt insecure, and I withdrew from my friends and family. One time, I even had a panic attack at the supermarket. The thought that I could be the product of incest made me feel dirty. The idea that a human being could do that to his own child, and that I shared his DNA, shook me to my core. Not to mention my fear for the health of my children. What were the medical complications from incest? I didn't know what this meant.

This spurred me on to search even harder. I decided to fight for my identity and regain a sense of who I was. I knew I had some half brothers and sisters to find, as well as a birth father. When we got home from the hospital after my surgery, one of the first things I did was load our babies into the back of the car and get Mike to drive me to the town where Priscilla had lived her whole life. I remember distinctly that Bon Jovi was blasting on the car stereo, which my husband cranked up to distract me from the pain. My stomach was stapled up from the surgery two days before, but no one could convince me to stay home and rest. When we got to this town, I went immediately to the local library, so that I could look at my half siblings' pictures in their high school yearbooks. I wasn't ready to reach out to them. I couldn't take another rejection. I just needed to see them and know that they existed.

FROM BACK TO FRONT

But first, I had some healing to do. What I didn't know at the time I found Priscilla was that you need to prepare yourself. People join support groups, read books, and spend years researching what can happen before they make that phone call. But I've always had a tendency to dive in headfirst. I did everything backward. I joined every adoption organization I could find only after I'd found Priscilla. I needed to find other adoptees who understood what I was going through. I couldn't stand to be alone in this a minute longer.

I made a ton of new friends. Aside from my brother, Ronnie, who'd had no desire to search when we were growing up, I knew no other adoptees. Suddenly, I was relating to people on a level I never had been able to before. This opened up a whole new world for me. I became instant pals with some women who'd also been searching. We started socializing and had girls' weekends away in the Hamptons. I was like their social director. They shared their stories with me, and I shared mine with them, and although there were some other disaster stories, no one was able to top what had happened to me.

During this time, I met a woman who threw me a lifeline — I'll call her Lydia. Lydia cofounded a group that ran meetings in various homes and public places. The organization had a 1-800 number and took calls from all over the United States from adoptees and birth parents looking for one another. I found this group within a couple of months of my reunion fiasco and started going to its meetings as well. A mutual friend from the adoption groups introduced me to Lydia, and the friendship was instant.

Lydia was older and wiser than I was in matters of adoption searches, and she immediately took me under her wing. I called her relentlessly to pick her brains about the process of finding birth relatives. We spent hours on the phone. I was looking for my own family and still honing my search skills, and Lydia was generous in opening up her bag of tricks to me. Besides pointing me to useful resources for information, one of the most valuable lessons she taught me was to trust my gut.

As we got to know each other, I opened up more about my disastrous contact with my birth mother. It wasn't something I necessarily wore on my sleeve — I tend to come across as this outgoing, ballsy woman, but inside I felt fragile. I told Lydia I wanted to find my father, because I needed to know if what Priscilla had said was a lie. Lydia was adamant: "That's total BS, what she told you. There is just no way!"

---

Excerpted from Reunited by Pamela Slaton, Samantha Marshall. Copyright © 2012 Pamela Slaton. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---