Facing a Secret Learned Late in Life

Her first impulse was to take the old suitcase and its mysterious contents and toss them in the trash. “I felt like, if I ignored it, it would all go away,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

A cache of letters pulled more than a decade ago from a weathered suitcase--which workers found cleaning out an apartment after her mother’s death--was how Carol Ann Callahan Lee learned at the age of 50 that she was adopted.

“I kind of felt like I was hollow--dead inside,” said Lee, a retired medical secretary who turns 63 next month. “I wondered: Who am I, really?”

Lee is one of thousands of American adults middle-age and older believed to be grappling with the painful legacy of adoption practices that prevailed a generation ago. It was a time when secrecy and shame colored views of fertility. Couples who failed to conceive often sought someone else’s baby--frequently infants relinquished at birth by unwed mothers.

The truth about adoption was often so zealously hidden that “a woman would stuff pillows under her clothes, go on a trip with her husband and return with a baby,” said Sharon Kaplan Roszia, a social worker with the Kinship Center of California in Tustin.

Parents not only kept the truth from their family and friends but from their children, never realizing that what seemed like a benign decision made with the best of intentions could precipitate an identity crisis decades later.

Attitudes about adoption generally began to change about two decades ago after child development experts realized how important it was for adopted children to understand their origins as early as possible. But those like Lee, already grown, found themselves in a time warp.

There are no official records kept of the number of adults who learn of their adoptions late in life, but an estimated 5 million Americans born during the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s were adopted.

Like Lee, those who have learned the truth usually do so by accident. And like her, they have been left to wrestle with reestablishing their identities at a time when most adults are settling in for periods of family reflection and personal accomplishment.

Even for children reared in the most nurturing of families, learning this information late in life is jarring. The late-discovery adoptees, as they are known, struggle with strong feelings of confusion and pain, of loss and grief, of trust and betrayal.

According to Roszia, who counsels many late-discovery adoptees, people put together their identities like the “pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” But, she noted, “adoptees do this in the dark. They get a box of puzzle pieces with no picture on the top. So if you grew up believing you put your puzzle pieces together as a true reflection of yourself, what happens when that picture is suddenly taken away?”

What happens, therapists and experts said, is a turbulent process that all adoptees face when they find out they’re adopted no matter what their age. But the time period for adjustment is far more compressed for late discoverers. There is intense denial, grief and searching. There is also a layer of anger and betrayal. Then, hopefully, there is healing.

Some said that the discovery helps explain the inexplicable. “I didn’t look like anyone in my family and I never felt I belonged,” said Sharon Ross, 41, an Atlanta financial services consultant who learned last fall that she was adopted. “But whenever I asked my mother, she would say: ‘You’re a part of this family.’ It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the truth either.”

A Silent Invitation, Unanswered

The telephone call to Carol Lee came 12 years ago. The suitcase had her mother’s name on it, and she sent her husband, Joe, to pick it up. It sat in her living room for more than a week, a silent invitation, unanswered.

One day when her son, Buzzy, and daughter-in-law, Carol, were visiting, they urged her to open it. She snapped the lid off the suitcase and began pulling out the items that lay within: first, memorabilia from her parents’ wedding day--her father’s bow tie, handkerchief and black socks. Then, buried underneath, a packet of handwritten personal letters addressed to her mother.

She opened them up and began to read--and caught her breath. “They were from friends and family members to my mother, expressing grief at the loss of her baby,” Lee said. “Apparently she’d had a baby who’d died, around February or March of 1935; the letters were dated the year I was born. But that baby wasn’t me.”

She kept reading. The tone of the letters changed from sadness to joy. The later notes, from the fall of 1935, were congratulatory, expressions of pleasure to her mother “on getting another baby, which must have been me,” she said. Slowly, she began to realize what must have happened.

There was no way to confront her parents, who were dead. All she could do was remember the past.

She had been reared the daughter of William Edward Callahan, a railroad field chief, and Ann Elizabeth O’Connell Callahan, a homemaker. She had a younger sister--who, ironically, had been adopted at the age of 6 and had known of her adoption, likely because of her older age at arrival.

She grew up in Park Hills, Ky., near Cincinnati and spent her later years in the Washington area, where her parents had moved, and where she met her future husband, whom she married in 1956. They remained here and have three grown children.

There were no obvious clues that she was not born to her parents--in fact, quite the opposite.

“I thought I was Irish, just like my parents, and had no reason to think otherwise,” Lee said. “I thought I had inherited their medical history too,” especially after developing diabetes. “I said: Why not? My father had had it,” and it had even contributed to his death in 1957 at age 59.

Lee wanted to pretend that she had never opened the suitcase, but her daughter-in-law, Carol Lynn Lee, offered to take the papers home and do some additional digging. Reluctantly, and still stunned, Lee agreed.

Her daughter-in-law looked through all of the letters and found references to a filing number for an adoption petition. She called the probate court in Hamilton County, Ohio, using the reference number, and eventually obtained copies of papers filed in 1935 describing the formal adoption of Carol Ann Henry, daughter of Elizabeth Henry, father “unknown.” The papers also legally changed the baby’s name from Carol Ann Henry to Carol Ann Callahan.

Lee looked at the birth certificate she had always had. It was clearly at odds with this new information. It was the standard certificate of live birth, from the Ohio Department of Health’s division of vital statistics. It said that she was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati at 8 a.m. on July 26, 1935, to Ann Elizabeth O’Connell Callahan, 34, wife of William Edward Callahan, 41, and delivered by Dr. Carroll deCourcy, who signed it.

But the document did not have a seal. It had to be a fake, even though a doctor had signed it. “This was the kind of the thing that doctors did in those days to help keep the secret,” Lee said.

The trail stopped there, with only her birth mother’s name. But her thoughts do not.

“I think she must have had this child maybe in the hills of Kentucky, at home,” she said, referring to herself in the third person. “Or she might have been a street girl in Cincinnati, and had an illegitimate baby. Who knows? Maybe she didn’t want her family to know she’d had a baby. Maybe they never even knew.

“There is no record of her that we could find anywhere. Just her name. Elizabeth Henry. That’s all I know. And I don’t even know if that’s her real name.”

Lee said that she grew so despondent that she briefly considered suicide. She sought solace by joining a women’s group in nearby Rockville, Md. “It hurt me so much, and made me angry that my parents wouldn’t have told me,” she added. “Did they think I would have loved them any less?”

She recalled that every year on Oct. 6, her mother would give her a little gift--without explanation. “I never understood why,” Lee said. Later she learned that Oct. 6, 1935, was the day she arrived at her adoptive home.

Feelings of Betrayal Are Not Uncommon

Lee’s feelings of anger and betrayal toward her parents are not uncommon. “I very often hear: ‘You knew I wasn’t your child. Why didn’t you tell me? You knew, and you lied to me all those years,’ ” said Joseph Crumbley, a clinical social worker in Philadelphia who specializes in adoption issues.

These are particularly difficult emotions to resolve when parents have died, Crumbley said, noting: “Adoptees can’t put the anger where it belongs.”

The parents, Crowley said, often defend themselves by saying that they wanted their adopted children to fit in and feel normal. More rarely, they admit that they didn’t want “the competition” or to share their children “with a ghost.”

Sharon Ross remembers having had an emotionally abusive relationship with her late father, which she believes led to her lifelong struggles with food and alcohol addiction. She was relieved to learn that she was not, in fact, her father’s biological child.

“I know who I’m not, which is good,” she said. “But I don’t know who I am.”

The day after learning the news from one of her cousins, she felt the need to confront her 78-old-mother, who was living in Florida.

“I said, ‘I was talking to Sandy last night and she said something very interesting and I need to know if it’s true or not,’ and you could hear the silence,” Ross recalled. Finally, she recalled, her mother said: “It’s true. Your father made me. He threatened me, saying: ‘If you tell her, she will no longer love you and will walk out of your life. It’s been more than 40 years. You’ve always been my daughter.’ ”

Ross is curious about her true origins but has not done anything about it. “There is a fear factor,” she said. “What if it’s worse? There’s a part of me yearning to do it but I have to be prepared for what I find out. There are too many emotional things I need to settle first.”

Others have jumped right in.

G. William Troxler, 51, president of Capitol College, an engineering school in Laurel, Md., has spent the last five years--ever since learning he was adopted--combing records. He wants the information for himself and for his own son.

“I feel I have a right to know who brought me into this world,” Troxler said. “I’ve never heard of anything positive that comes from ignorance. I have to find out who I came from.”

Another late-discovery adoptee, a 46-year-old hospital social worker from Dublin, Ohio, learned a year ago that she was adopted at birth. It took her only three months to locate her birth mother and discover that her biological father was dead.

“I am sorry my parents had not been honest with me from the beginning,” said the woman who asked to be identified only as Deborah.

“I know they really believed they were ‘protecting’ me but this is my birthright. My mother was worried about what would happen after I located my birth mother, how this would affect our relationship. And, because I am her only child, this was a big fear.”

Her relationship with her mother was strained for several months, she said, “but things are wonderful between us now as she realizes that I will always consider her my mother.”

While she still bemoans lost opportunities to have known close relatives at an early age, she is grateful that she has been able to locate two half-brothers and an uncle who gave her some family photos.

“Now,” she said, “I really do feel more complete as I know where I came from.”

Many late discovery adoptees ultimately come to understand that their sense of self-worth is built upon the lives they already have created for themselves. But it takes time.

“The discovery they have made does not negate who they are,” Crumbley said. “The stronger your attachments are, the better you are able to cope, even if you are angry. The more accomplished an individual you are, the better you cope. I say to them: ‘Look at what you’ve done. Look at what you have. No one can take that away from you.’ ”

“Finding out about your adoption is the beginning of a long journey, a journey through grief,” Roszia said. “It’s almost like they’re dying and then refashioning their own births.”

For Carol Lee, the Journey Has Ended

The journey has ended for Carol Lee. Enough time has passed. She said that she is at peace.

“I’m fine about it now,” she said. “It took a long time, and it was difficult. The love and support of my husband and children is what made the difference for me. My children told me over and over again: ‘You’re still who you are. You’re still my mother. You’re still a great mom.’ ”

Her walls are lined with photographs of her three children and six grandchildren. She keeps the photos of her parents and herself as a baby upstairs in albums.

“My grandchildren are the future,” Lee said. “The past is over and there’s nothing more I can do about it. I never look behind me anymore. I only try to look ahead.”