Tim would tell you he went most of his life without giving much thought to his biological parents. In large part, that could have been because his life with the family that adopted him was pretty darn good. It wasn’t until after his mother died in 2002 (his father had passed years before) and we found an envelope with his birth and adoption documents that I first saw genuine curiosity.
Weeks later we spread all the documents out on the kitchen table and studied the information. There were inconsistencies between them, including several variations of his birth name. On most birth documents he was Robert John Rogers. But the adoption documents called him Robert Lawrence. Sometimes his surname was Rogers, but sometimes Rodgers with a “d”. His mother’s name was on his Irish birth certificate, but it was a common name and there was no indication of birthdate or hometown so we suspected she would be hard to trace. His father’s name did not appear on any of the documents.
Maybe most interesting to us at the time was a scrap of paper with typed biographical notations about his parents. We were both struck by the physical description of his father… it read like a description of Tim. I remember chills coming over me as I looked at the contentment that spread across Tim’s face. I could only image how remarkable seeing those details must have been for him. It was the first time in his life he looked like someone…it was the first tangible connection to someone that shared his blood. I believe this was when he began to wonder if these scant clues could lead us to more.
Knowing what I know now, I’d say we were pretty naïve when we started the whole thing. Our immediate thoughts were on tactical stuff… like who to call…how to get this started. We know now that not all searches are successful. And not all successful searches end happily. We never asked ourselves how we’d feel if that happened to us…if after all the effort we never got answers. Or worse yet, if those answers brought an unwelcome reality. You never envision a sad ending when you start something like this. But it certainly happens. Let’s face it, people don’t usually give babies away when life is ideal.
In 2003, Tim reached out to St Patrick’s Guild, the agency in Dublin listed on some of the adoption documents. After a year of snail mail (the nuns didn’t believe in email and found the time difference too inconvenient for phone conversations) he had gained very little additional information. But we did find it encouraging when they promised to attempt to locate his birth mother. Unfortunately, out of date contact information hampered their search and by early 2004 we knew nothing more about her than what we started with. We even went to Ireland ourselves that summer of 2004. Along with the travel books, we packed our limited birth and adoption papers in the hope that we would stumble upon some additional clues to help further our search.
As we toured around the country, we made our way to Castlepollard in Co. Westmeath and the hospital where according to his birth certificate, Tim was born. We were so disappointed to find that it no longer functioned as a hospital; it had become some sort of private institution with no records from the past. And what we thought was an orphanage where Tim may have lived in Dublin for the fifteen months after his birth, was more of an office with a holding facility for children in the final stages of the adoption process. Tim spent his early months in foster care, but we didn’t learn about that until years later. While our trip to Ireland was not a complete disappointment – we had a lovely family vacation – we came back to the States knowing this was going to be much more difficult than we had originally thought.
A few months after our return we received a letter from a nun at the adoption agency saying she had located Tim’s birth mother. We were ecstatic until we continued reading the letter and learned that his birth mother had never shared news of her first born with her husband and didn’t intend to now. The nun said the conversation was hurried because she did not want her husband to overhear. She did pass on a little bit of family medical history which was much appreciated. According to the nun, she went on to wish Tim well but requested that he not attempt further contact. As we read those words, it was almost as if we could feel the door slamming in our face.
As we digested his mother’s reaction in the days that followed, it seemed even more unbelievable. Complete strangers can take a child in, love him unconditionally, provide an amazing life for him, yet the woman who gave him life doesn’t even want a conversation. For Tim, this second rejection, fifty-one years after the first, was completely deflating. It was not at all what we expected, but as I said earlier, we had been naïve about the whole thing. One thing was certain, she had made her intention clear. Given what seemed to be a dead end, we packed away the documents and went on with our life.
While we never really spoke about it, Tim and I both had a little seed of hope in our hearts that she would eventually change her mind. Like I said, we were a little naïve.
