A Lifetime Lie

For some reason, I'm thinking this morning about my birthmother. I was adopted at birth—left the hospital at age six days with my adoptive mother and a family friend. My birthmother was unmarried and 38 years old.

I found her when I was 33. A search agency in Dallas was helping me and called me with her phone number. Without hesitating, without a second thought, I picked up the phone and called her. She answered. I asked, "Is this Gertrude X Y?" She said, "Yes." I said, "My name is Janet Clark. I've been doing some research into my genealogy and the records indicate you are my birthmother." There was a long (pregnant, if you will) pause, after which she replied, "I can't talk to you right now." Not, "Boy, have you got a wrong number." Not, "You couldn't be more mistaken." Just, "I can't talk to you right now."

Further research on my part revealed she had married a year or two after my birth and had never told her husband that she had been pregnant or had a child. She had been living with this lie—or lack of truth—for 30+ years.

I pride myself on my openness and lack of guile. I simply cannot understand how someone could live like that, live with hiding something—such a big something—for so much time. For all one's married life.

Gertrude and I exchanged correspondence one time, about six months later. It turns out she was one of Daddy's patients (small world, huh?) and she told him she would accept a letter from me if I sent it to him and he brought it to her when she was in the hospital for surgery a couple of weeks later. I poured my heart out to her in a typewritten letter, a full page with ½" margins. She wrote back to me in the margins of my letter.

She said she had blocked me and my father out of her mind. Huh? How do you do that? How do you block such a life-defining event out of your mind? She asked that I never contact her again, which I didn't.

About five years ago I did some intensive Googling and determined she had died two months before John died. I project that she died with a full heart and a heavy head from all those blocks in her mind.

At least that's how I would have died with that lifetime lie.