Gathering Up the Family Ties : Adopted Woman Finds Her Birth Parents and Extends a Circle of Love

Julie Cooper knew that if she heard her newborn cry, she wouldn’t be able to give her up. But when she begged her doctor to take the child away the instant she was born, she never imagined that someday, many years later, she would hear her daughter cry--and hold her and cry with her, ending years of yearning with tears of joy.

Shirley and Ronald Squires, who raised Cooper’s baby, might have dreaded this reunion because it meant they’d have to share their adopted daughter with her birth family.

But everyone in Trudy Sargent’s family gained when her search for her birth parents ended with the discovery of a large circle of birth relatives--a mother and stepfather in Northern California, a father in San Diego, two stepbrothers and a stepsister and their families.

Although it’s common for parents to feel threatened when an adopted child makes an effort to find his or her birth parents, the search does not represent a rejection of the adoptive family, says Connie Hornyak, a licensed clinical social worker with Parenting Resources Inc., a counseling center in Tustin.

“It’s a need to be complete,” she explains.

And the bond formed during years of day-to-day living isn’t threatened when adopted children find their birth parents, notes Dae Leckie, clinical director of Parenting Resources, which specializes in helping people with problems related to adoption.

On the contrary, many grow closer to their adopted parents once they have found their birth parents, says Leckie, whose adopted daughter recently found her birth mother.

“It’s helped her resolve some of her anger, which caused a lot of distance between us, and it has helped her find herself so she hasn’t had to put up so many barriers in terms of our getting close,” Leckie says. “We are much closer now. It helped us do a lot more talking about things she experienced growing up. She’s been able to really open up and talk about how being adopted affected her.”

Trudy Sargent, a 36-year-old Fullerton resident, has experienced the same feeling of openness with her adopted parents since she was reunited with her birth mother and father.

But for many years, Sargent--a strikingly pretty woman with deep brown eyes and very short brown hair--didn’t tell them about her need to find her birth parents. She was afraid they would see her as a traitor if she admitted she felt her life was incomplete..

Sargent grew up in Long Beach, knowing she was adopted but not knowing that her birth mother lived nearby.

Her adoptive home was warm and loving, but she remembers often feeling sad, especially on birthdays when she never received the card she couldn’t help but expect from her birth mother.

“In your mind, you know the reasons for adoption, but deep inside your heart it hurts to be given away, to be disconnected,” she says.

In her teen years, her sadness turned to anger. She felt threatened by the sister who had been born five years after she was adopted, because she seemed to fit in better and looked like the parents Sargent didn’t resemble.

Sargent was outspoken, confrontational and emotional while the rest of her family was much more reserved, and she says the differences between them in looks as well as personalities made her yearn to fill in the missing pieces in her life by finding her birth parents.

Her feeling of being rejected by them made it difficult to feel good about herself--and to accept her adoptive parents’ love.

“There was always a fear that I might be sent back,” she admits.

She felt she had to earn her adoptive parents’ love and approval through achievements and good behavior, yet her confusion about her identity made it difficult to focus. When she graduated from high school, she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.

She hadn’t talked much with her adoptive parents about her need to find her birth parents, but they had seen her struggle and they understood. When Sargent was 19, they told her the name of her birth mother and offered to do whatever they could to help find her.

They also told Sargent what they knew about the circumstances of her adoption, which had been arranged privately through a friend of theirs who knew Sargent’s birth mother.

The birth mother, Julie Cooper, was separated from her husband when she fell in love with Sargent’s father, a career military man, and became pregnant. But, she said in a recent phone interview, she and her estranged husband had three small children, and she felt she had to go back to her marriage for their sake.

Her husband said he would take her back if she would give up the baby and never talk about the child once she returned. She agreed, and went away to have the baby. Before she and Sargent’s father parted, she made him promise never to try to find her or the child.

Cooper cried for months after she gave up her baby, but confided in no one.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” she says.

When Sargent finally tracked her down through the friend who had helped arrange the adoption, Cooper was divorced but was about to be remarried, and neither her fiance nor her grown children knew about the baby she had given up.

She panicked when the call from Sargent came. “I just wasn’t ready,” she says.

She told her daughter she loved her and never forgot her, but didn’t give Sargent her new phone number or address. Soon after, she moved to Northern California with her new husband. Though she kept Sargent’s phone number and address in her wallet, she never called or wrote.

Sargent was devastated. “It was like being rejected a second time,” she says.

It would be 12 years before she would talk to her mother again.

Meanwhile, her search for stability took her through two unhappy marriages. Even giving birth to her son, Ryan, didn’t fill the emptiness she felt after finding her mother and then losing her again.

“I couldn’t get firmly planted,” she says. “I looked outside myself to build my self-esteem in relationships that weren’t very successful. I wasn’t centered and I wasn’t happy on the inside.”

Her life began to turn around about five years ago when she married Gary Sargent, an engineer at Rockwell International Corp., where she also works as an engineering planner. He agreed to help her fulfill her dream of adopting a child. But soon after they began that process, Sargent realized she needed to resolve her conflicts about her own adoption first.

Once again, she began to search for her birth family. She soon found one of her stepbrothers, who had no idea she existed and hung up on her when she called. Her adoptive parents urged her to call him back, and she found him receptive after he’d absorbed the shock.

Sargent soon met her two stepbrothers and her stepsister, who in turn arranged a meeting with her mother in Northern California.

This time, Cooper was ready.

When she came down the front steps, Sargent recalls, “it was like meeting my other half.”

They hugged and sobbed in each other’s arms for a very long time, then spent three days getting to know each other and sharing family photographs.

Cooper spoke for both of them when she said: “A big hole in my heart was finally filled.”

Not long after that, Sargent tracked down her birth father, who had married but had not had any other children. “Oh, my God,” he said when he heard her voice. Two weeks later, she visited him in San Diego. All the pieces were in place.

Last March, Sargent brought her birth mother and father together at her Fullerton home for a reunion that also included her adoptive parents, who now live in Oklahoma. It was a very emotional day that proved healing for everyone, she says.

Now she talks to her birth mother and father regularly by phone and sees them as often as possible. And she feels a great sense of relief that makes it possible to build a closer relationship with her adoptive parents and the sister with whom she was raised.

Shirley Squires admitted in a telephone interview that “I was afraid Trudy’s other mother would come first. But it’s turned out beautifully. We all have enough love to share her. And she’s more at ease with herself now.”

Reflecting on her growing closeness with her adoptive parents, Sargent says: “I tested them a lot and maybe punished them for some of my pain. I challenged them to make OK a wound they couldn’t fix. But now I can say, ‘I really love you, and I need you to feel connected in this world.’ ”

Two years after she was reunited with her birth parents, another dream came true for Trudy Sargent: She brought home her own adopted daughter, Danielle, who was 9 days old.

About the same time, Sargent was treated for breast cancer and found out that she would not be able to have any more children. But she had decided to adopt long before she was faced with infertility, because she wanted to help an adopted child deal with the inner conflicts she knows so well.

She also wanted to be able to give her own adopted child the information that was kept from her, so she arranged Danielle’s adoption without any secrecy.

Danielle’s middle name is Tracy--the name of her birth mother, an unmarried teen-ager who is part of the 2-year-old’s extended family. There is no shared parenting, Sargent stresses, but Danielle’s birth mother will be like an aunt to her as she grows up. And Sargent plans to keep in touch with Danielle’s father, who is not a part of her life now.

When Sargent brought Danielle home, she was startled to find herself grieving over the birth mother’s loss, reliving the pain her own mother felt when they were separated.

“There’s a loss for everybody--even the parents adopting a child, because they have to grieve the loss of a natural-born child,” she says.

But she’s not grieving any more. Her own sense of loss has been balanced by the joy of being loved by two moms and two dads--and having more extended family than she ever dreamed of when she was a child longing to know who her real mom and dad were and why they had given her away.