Word: motheral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Patricia Szymczak was 36 years old when she decided to pursue a quest she had contemplated since childhood: finding her mother. Adopted in infancy, Szymczak, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, attacked the task as if on deadline. She knew the woman's name and hometown from a 1953 Illinois adoption decree, obtained when she turned 18 from her adoptive mother. Szymczak called the local post office, found a retired mailman and got him talking about the family -- her family. She contacted old neighbors, who led her to friends. Some had seen the woman, who now lived out of state...
...before tremulously placing the call, Szymczak journeyed to the tiny public library in her mother's hometown 300 miles from Chicago. "My fantasy," she explains, "was to open a high school yearbook and see a woman who looked like me." On page 15 of the 1952 yearbook, Szymczak's fantasy came true. The smile was the same one Szymczak saw in the mirror; the graduation quote: "I'm just the girl you're looking for." The long search ended with a three-hour call from a pay phone. By the end of the conversation, it was after midnight...
...sometimes the outcome is very bad. Some search for decades to no avail; others learn that their child has been abused, that their mother committed suicide or that they are the product of incest. Even a happy reunion can produce "an overwhelming feeling of anger and confusion, and rearrange everything in one's life," says Linda Brown, co-author of a forthcoming book on the subject, Birthbond...
Searches can take unexpected turns. San Antonio public school counselor Claude Thormalen, 49, not only found his mother but learned from her that he had an older half sister Nancy, who had also been given up for adoption. To his amazement, Nancy turned out to be a high school acquaintance. Gayle Beckstead, 55, who now works as a search consultant in Simi Valley, Calif., learned of a sister -- who hadn't been put up for adoption. When they met, Gayle found a depressed high school dropout who had given up four out-of- wedlock children. The sister regarded the middle...
...even for those willing to part with their babies, there is adoption's dark history to overcome. Until very recently, every party to the transaction bore the scars of its language: "promiscuous," "barren," "illegitimate." When adoption professionals called a woman the natural mother, it left adoptive parents in a semantic dilemma. Were they unnatural parents? The techno-jargony "birth mother" was the more neutral alternative. All the secrecy reinforced the shame: as recently as the 1970s, some delivery-room nurses covered the mirrors and draped towels in front of a woman giving up her child, or even blindfolded...