Family Search : Adult Adoptees Seek Roots

The drive from her Anaheim home to Santee in San Diego County was only two hours, but Robin Gryvnak, 26, had been dreaming about this moment for years.

She had fussed all week over what she would say to him, what she should wear to impress him, even how to arrange her hair so she would look more like him.

“I wanted everything to be just right. It had to be perfect, right down to every detail,” she had said nervously the night before.

But this Saturday morning four weeks ago as she drove into the Santee neighborhood, parked by the white-framed house with the neat front lawn, and saw Richard Campbell on the front lawn, grinning and waving--she simply melted.

She walked toward him shyly and awkwardly, suddenly like a little girl, clutching the mementos she had brought just for him--a bouquet of daisies and a balloon that bannered the words, “It’s a Girl!”

Then Robin Gryvnak fell into Campbell’s embrace. An adopted child who found her long-unknown birth father. A personal journey that now seemed headed for a happy ending.

There was a time when reunions of adopted persons and their birth parents were a true novelty, a rarely publicized lost-and-found phenomenon in America.

But not anymore. In the past decade, these tearful happenings have become increasingly familiar. The parties in these long-abandoned relationships not only are more eager to reunite, but also more willing to tell their irresistibly dramatic and sentimental stories to the media.

All such tales are full of sure-fire plot elements--first, secrecy and shame; then, rediscovery and elation. Some relate such extraordinary ordeals and bizarre twists that they border on the melodramatic.

And this is no passing fad. The American Adoption Congress, an umbrella organization for search-support groups and reunion registries, believes there are now at least 250,000 “active searchers” nationwide. While most still are adult adoptees, the numbers of birth parents and those searchers under 30 are markedly increasing.

But search advocates said the traditional stigmatic secrecy over adoptions remains massive, despite the growing acceptance of the full “open adoption” concept--where birth parents are identified and remain in open contact with the child and the adoptive parents.

California, like most states, keeps original birth certificates and other key adoption-related records sealed, opened generally only by court order, which is rarely given, activists said.

And many defenders of traditional “closed” adoptions still denounce searchers as militant malcontents who break the original pact of confidentiality, engage in extralegal search tactics and cruelly harass those who are contacted.

“Ridiculous!” countered Florence Fisher, founder of the national Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Assn. “That ‘malcontent’ accusation is just one more myth.”

Fisher and other advocates conceded the potential does exist for “extreme traumatic reactions” from the persons contacted. But, they noted, searchers themselves could also face shocking discoveries, such as finding people who are criminals or drug addicts.

“Of course, we worry about both these possibilities, but they happen very rarely,” said Cindy Shacklett, Orange County coordinator for the national Concerned United Birthparents search-support organization.

Shacklett led a small group of protesters May 1 at the Orange County Courthouse as part of a nationwide “Open My Records Day.” In California, the advocates are backing an Assembly bill, now in committee, that would make the most vital adoption-case records--such as original birth certificates--available without court order to adult adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents.

People search for different reasons, advocates said: For adoptees, it is to find their full identity; for birth parents, to heal emotional wounds from giving up their children; and for all of them, to exercise a new form of civil rights.

“People don’t go searching for a ‘Mommy’ or a ‘Daddy’ at age 18 or 40,” Fisher said. “They’re looking for other answers.”

Sheridan O’Brien, now 39, was raised lovingly by her adoptive parents, her adoption status openly acknowledged.

After all, she was told, “adopted children were chosen, were picked out, are very special. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

But “when you’re older, you begin to feel there’s something askew--the flip side of those usual explanations,” recalled O’Brien, a graphic designer who lives in Laguna Hills and belongs to the Orange County branch of Concerned United Birthparents, whose members include adoptees.

“I began to feel a sense of void about my whole identity. It’s feeling lost and that certain pieces of our puzzle are still missing.”

Her adoptive parents, she said, never went into depth about her adoption.

“They never said it was a forbidden topic, but you could sense it was too hurtful to bring up. And you don’t, because you love them,” O’Brien said.

But by the mid-1970s--after she had married and her own daughter, Jennifer, was born--O’Brien began searching on her own sporadically. Her adoptive parents knew her full birth name and had told O’Brien. So she often spent whole evenings, pouring over phone books of areas throughout California and other states, looking for people with that unusual last name.

Still, the random calls--and her own attempts to obtain identifying information from public records--proved to be a dead end. In 1988, however, after turning her search over to a professional consultant, O’Brien located the birth mother--now 67, divorced, living in Los Angeles County.

O’Brien placed the first call in February, 1989.

“Oh, I was shaking, and I wasn’t sure I could even speak,” she said. “Sure, you’re worried about absolute rejection. Sure, you wonder how upsetting this might be to the other person.”

“But (support groups and consultants) tell you to take it easy, to be up front and tell them you’re not out to intrude in their lives, but only want to meet, learn about their lives and tell of yours.”

The call went well, she said.

“She was polite,” O’Brien said. “She never acknowledged the birth date or the adoption. But she did say we might meet, but not right away--she wasn’t feeling well.”

The explanation devastated O’Brien. “She said she had cancer; she was undergoing chemotherapy.”

Two months later, just before Mother’s Day, 1989, they met.

“I saw this woman, very ill, but who looked so much like me. It stuns you, no matter how prepared you think you are. I hugged her. I cried a lot. We sat on the couch, touching each other--our faces, our hands, comparing similarities.”

“She swore me to secrecy,” O’Brien said. “Her two daughters (from a later marriage) didn’t know about me. She asked me not to tell them or contact them--until after her death.”

At the funeral 10 months later, O’Brien walked up to the half-sisters, offered her condolences but introduced herself only as “a close friend of the family.” Later, when all the others had left, she returned alone to the grave site and--for the first time that day--allowed herself to cry.

She has since phoned the half-sisters, who are both in their mid-30s.

“It’s been like instant empathy, like we’ve known each other all our lives,” O’Brien said.

Their first formal gathering will be this Memorial Day--at their mother’s grave.

But O’Brien’s memories of her birth mother are poignantly mixed.

“I saw her many times. But, no, I can’t say it was perfect. There were strained moments. I couldn’t get real close to her. She stayed distant, and I realize now she was a very private person.”

Yet, O’Brien added, “I had this feeling that she was glad to see me and to know that I was doing all right and had a wonderful daughter of my own. And that, yes, overall, everything was OK.”

The last visit took place in the hospital two months ago.

“I saw her alone and hugged her, like I always did,” O’Brien said. “She couldn’t speak. But she moved her hand toward mine, and I held hers--as tightly, and as long, as I could.”

Her mother died the next day.

Trish McAleer, now 40, remembers the feelings of guilt, secrecy and isolation when she gave birth to her daughter out of wedlock 22 years ago.

But eight years ago, McAleer, who is married and has no other children, decided to take matters into her own hands.

The San Clemente resident became a dedicated activist in the search movement, inspired by a Phil Donahue talk show about the reuniting of birth parents and adoptees, and driven by her own need to find her daughter.

And six years ago, after “piecing together bits of information” from public records and sympathetic relatives, she located her daughter, who was born in Ohio and still lives there.

After the daughter turned 18 in 1986, McAleer took the plunge. She went back to Ohio and attended the daughter’s commencement--but staying incognito and accompanied only by a trusted relative.

“I had to see her, even if from afar,” McAleer said. “I had to be there. I cried the whole time.”

The next evening, while still in town, McAleer decided to take the next obvious step. She phoned the daughter’s home.

Luckily, said McAleer, the daughter answered and was alone. “She was guarded and startled, but she took it very well. She seemed positive about talking again and exchanging letters and pictures.”

But the next day, McAleer said, the mood had changed abruptly. “She told me we shouldn’t meet and that if we did, it would hurt her parents.”

Nevertheless, when McAleer returned to San Clemente, she mailed off a packet of photographs with an explanatory letter to the adoptive parents.

“I told them,” McAleer said, “I wasn’t out to disrupt things, but only to make contact--and, if it works out, become friends.”

The packet came back, the photographs and letter still in it, and with this tersely formal note from the daughter:

Patricia: I want no further contact with you. If I wanted contact with you, I would have done so years ago.

The most theatrical twist in this story came 18 months later when McAleer--in Ohio to visit relatives--decided to seize the moment.

Urged by relatives who knew where the daughter worked, McAleer went straight to the store, intending to make face-to-face contact. But the daughter wasn’t there. “They told me she was in a car accident, that she was in the hospital with serious injuries.”

Once again, she took the plunge. That evening at the hospital, after the adoptive parents had left and the daughter was alone, McAleer--feeling both terrified and driven by this one chance--entered the room and introduced herself.

According to McAleer, the daughter reacted at first with anger, then curiosity and “we eventually had a nice talk.” But basically, said McAleer, the daughter shut the door on her, indicating the adoptive parents strongly opposed any kind of contact.

That was 2 1/2 years ago. McAleer has not seen--or heard from--the daughter since.

“I have no regrets about what I did. I would do it again, a thousand times over, because you get only so many chances, if at all,” said McAleer, a Concerned United Birthparents national official and now a search consultant herself.

“What people like me have done may be audacious, perhaps. Certainly, persistent. But harassment? That’s absurd! Since I last saw her, I have sent her little cards on birthdays and holidays. Nothing more.”

“I think of her constantly,” she added. “And all I want her to know is that I care, that I am here, and that my door is always open to her.”

Trish McAleer is still sending the cards. Still wishing. Still waiting.

For Robin Gryvnak of Anaheim, who met her birth father in the Santee reunion, the wait is finally over.

Last fall, through a consultant with the Fullerton-based Severed Strings search program, she found her birth mother, now 42 and still living in San Diego County. They have met only once and their relationship is “a slowly evolving but difficult one,” Robin said.

And that embracing reception last April 28 from the family of Richard Campbell, the birth father, has touched her deeply--”just like a real family,” she said.

Indeed, Campbell is now the very image of the solid family man. He and his wife, Roberta, have two sons, Rick, 24, and Shawn, 22. And Campbell, who saw Army combat duty in Vietnam in 1966, is a longtime employee--an electrician--with a regional utility company.

“I thought it (Robin’s first call April 22) might be some kind of hoax,” said the 47-year-old Campbell, who admits he was “something of a hell-raiser” at the time he knew Robin’s birth mother. “I never knew about the baby. I never saw or heard about (Robin’s birth mother) all these years. But I’m convinced I’m Robin’s father.”

And now, said Campbell, pointing to a snapshot of Robin and her children, Joshua, 4 1/2, and Amanda, 3, “we find ourselves suddenly with both a daughter and grandkids!”

At their April 28 meeting in Santee, an obviously elated Robin presented Campbell, a railroad model buff, with a miniature classic Rio Grande caboose car--and this note:

To you, this may be the end of a train.

To me, it’s a symbol of the end of a long search.

--Love, Robin.

Mary Gryvnak, one of her staunchest supporters throughout the six-year search.

Last Oct. 16, the day after Robin met her birth mother, she sent Mary a huge bunch of roses. “I knew she would be feeling kind of hurt, and I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted to tell her something from the heart.”

So with the roses came a tiny card--one that made the 53-year-old Mary Gryvnak, as she recalled later, “cry every time I read it.”

To my one and only MOM!!!!!

--Love, always, Robin.