Chapter 2: Scrapbooks

My father kept a lot of family scrapbooks. Several volumes of these red-bound photo books lined his shelves.  My sister and I had a full book for each year of our early lives.

I don't know how many times I looked at these books growing up. Probably not many. They would come out every once in a while so that my dad could embarrass me when a girlfriend came over, or maybe at the occasional family gathering. But, self-absorbed as I can sometimes be, I never had much of a desire to pore over my own baby pictures.

After Dad passed away in January of 2014, I boxed up and took home a lot of his memorabilia. My sister Kerry took a lot too. And it wasn't until months later that I happened across them again.

I was missing Dad pretty badly one night, and it was comforting me to look through these books, to think about how much time and love he put into making them, how much he must have enjoyed looking back through them as I grew older.

But on this night, for some reason, I opened the cover of “Kevin, Volume 1,” and for the first time in my life I saw the oddness of the very first page:

November 17, 1972

Home

Not so strange, perhaps, except that I was born on April 26.

It was all so clear.  How had I never seen it?

This moment was the spark that led to where I am today.  I didn't even know that the Ohio law had changed, but the next day I did a simple Google search for Ohio Adoption, and there it was.  A notarized one-page form and a $20 check was all I would need.  Two weeks later, the letter came.

I took my own picture to remember the moment.

Since writing and telling people that I am a late discovery adoptee (Yes, we have a name!), I have received a great deal of support. It's helped. It really has. I have also connected, both locally and online, with many other adoptees who are sharing their stories of how they feel and how their searches and reunions are going. That has helped too... knowing that I am not alone in this, knowing there are others who feel the way I do.

The support has been crucial, because in writing this blog, I find that I continually come up against a barrier of guilt, fear and shame. Despite the outpouring of encouragement I've gotten to keep writing, I still struggle with an irrational fear that, by “going public” with this story, something bad is going to happen to me. That somehow, by letting the secret out, I will be punished.

As a 43 year-old adult man, I still feel like a kid who's afraid he's in trouble.

And that's one reason why it's become so important for me to keep writing this, to push through that fear with support from my friends, from my fellow adoptees, and from my favorite and most loved fellow adoptee of them all: my sister Kerry.

It's this feeling, this belief that I am somehow doing something wrong by letting the secret out, that lies at the heart of how, for my whole life,  I could have looked at that first page of my scrapbook and never asked the most obvious of questions: Why does page one begin seven months after I was born? Between April and November, where had I been?

The truth, as I have said earlier, is that, on some level, I always did know.  But it always seemed easier, safer, and less frightening to ignore what I knew, to push it out of my mind for the sake of keeping the family illusion intact.  Perhaps I sensed that this illusion was the glue holding something very fragile together.  What if I caused it to break?

My first real memory of hearing the word “adopted”  was around age 6 or 7. I had made a friend from down the street, and for an entire summer we were inseparable.  One day, we were goofing around when he suddenly declared, out of the blue: “My mother told me you're adopted,”   I remember we were playing a game where we stacked pillows and blankets at the bottom of the attic stairs and seeing who could jump from the highest stair (not a game I recommend for your kids). The question came as I was climbing up, and it stopped me dead.

“I'm what? No I'm not!”

I don't know if it was his tone or just the fact of being so blindsided, but it felt like something I instinctively had to deny. “I'm not adopted!” I asserted.

“Yes you are! My mom told me”

The next day I asked my mother what “adopted” meant, as the word was a mystery to me.   Her reply was incredulous and angry: “Where did you hear that?! Who said that?”

And so I had learned in this way that "adopted" was a naughty word that I should not repeat. Though she kept questioning me, I went silent. I certainly wasn't about to rat out my best friend, and I didn't bring it up again.  Not until I asked her many years later into my 30's.

It's telling that my mother's reaction was the same so many years later: No flat-out denial. But no affirmation either. And both times, I went away with no answers, only a feeling that I had done something wrong by asking, that I had hurt and frightened her.

My sister lives in Atlanta, where my mother also now resides in an assisted living Alzheimer's care facility. Having recently gotten her own birth certificate, Kerry did what I had no interest in going through a third time... she confronted our mother and told her that we now know who our birth mothers are. Perhaps the dementia had relieved her of the memory of having to cover it up, but her reaction, to my sister's astonishment, was a happy one: “Oh good! You should try and meet her!”

When Kerry pressed her to explain why she kept it a secret our whole lives, my mother could only reply: “I wasn't allowed to say anything.”

Oddly enough, I get it. I felt the same way.

To say that the secret was all our father's fault is far too simple and misses the bigger picture. Yes, he had imposed the silence on our family. But he was doing what he believed he was supposed to do, what the adoption agencies at the time said to do. I see that now. 

In Ohio, until this past March, 400,000 birth certificates were sealed away from adoptees, because of a closed adoption system that believed we were better off not knowing. That we should have a "clean break" with the past and simply live as if our adoptive parents were our biological parents.   It was a misguided idea at best and one that purported to serve the interests of everyone except the adoptees themselves. It was a system that imposed secrecy on families. And with secrecy usually comes shame.

Shame teaches you to question and to doubt yourself, to doubt what you know to be real.

Until that birth certificate arrived, a part of me still doubted the truth that I was adopted.  A part of me still thought I was crazy and wrong for suspecting.  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still thought there was a good chance I'd  be proven a fool for believing something so absurd.

Adopted? Where did you hear that word?

It kills me that so many adoptees today still cannot hold in their hands what is rightfully theirs to see. At this telling, Ohio is only the 11th state to unseal their records.  More states are on the way... The momentum toward truth and openness is moving forward.  But not fast enough. Too many adoptees are still in limbo, denied access to their own histories.

Even now, with the law having changed,  I hit walls of secrecy when trying to get information from my adoption agency.  Just this week, I spent time on the phone with a wonderful woman, an adoptee herself. She wanted very badly to help and she gave me as much as she could.  But though she was looking right at my file as we spoke on the phone, she could not tell me my birth father's name.  His was not included on my certificate. 

Like my mother, she wasn't allowed to say anything. 

The anger I felt in those first days after learning the truth, that sense of hurt and betrayal, has abated.  It was wrong of my father to lie to me.  It hurt deeply.   But in the interests of healing and moving forward,  I am trying my best now to see why this otherwise good man would keep such a secret from me, even far into my adulthood.  Was he afraid that if I knew, he would lose me as his son? That I would somehow disown him?

One friend suggested to me that, knowing my dad, he must have believed in the power of belief itself.  Perhaps if he believed strongly enough, and willed it hard enough, he thought he could make the past disappear.  If he held tightly enough to the belief that I was his biological son, then that wish in itself, would make it so. 

Which brings me back to the scrapbooks.  There is so much joy and celebration in those early pictures. It's touching to see, but also overwhelming. Fourteen years is a long time to wait for a child, and I can only imagine the relief and expectation for the future that was placed on me when I came home.  I can see it in their faces.  

I am struck by this photo most of all, and the label affirming who we are, as if the words were needed to make it true.

You can see the adoration in their faces, the bewilderment in my own.   They always referred to me as the perfect little baby, one who almost never cried. I have to say, it was a pretty tall order to fill.


I know there are those who will tell me that being adopted "shouldn't matter." Though I have never once heard or read this sentiment from a fellow adoptee, it comes up as a thing people say to be helpful.  After all, you might argue, I was chosen. I was wanted. I was given opportunities that I may never have had otherwise.  I was loved.   So why should I insist on digging up all this stuff, when none of it should matter?

The answer is that it does matter.  Plain and simple.  It matters to me. It matters to a great many of us.

I can be grateful for my life, and still want to know the truth.  I can feel happy for who I am and what I was given, and still be honest about feeling sadness, anger, and grief.  These things can exist together. It's not an either/or proposition.   

I can also still cherish those scrapbooks Dad made. I don't have to disavow the life I had in the Gladish family in search of a new one.  I can still flip through those books when I want to remember him and how much he loved me. 

But I am also starting a new scrapbook. This one is for me.  Page one has a copy of my original birth certificate. Page two contains my adoption record.  Later pages, now still blank, will include the story of where I came from and who I meet on this journey.  I already have a good start.  Perhaps there will be letters.  Perhaps there will be pictures... pictures of people who look like me. Wouldn't that be something?

I don't know yet how the scrapbook will look when it's done, or even how many pages will be filled,  but for the first time in my life, searching for the truth and asking for answers is not something I need to deny out of shame.  It's scary, for sure, but it's an adventure too, and one that is long past due.  

The new scrapbook can even live side by side with the ones Dad made. 

I'll make room for them both.