Having now read all the other posts, I’m reminded of two things.
This: I have a rather high pitched pre-teen voice, which embarrasses the hell out of me to this day. (I’m 60.) Until I was about 20 my voice was almost exactly my mother’s. I sometimes would answer the phone and string her friends along for a minute or so before my ruse was blown by what I was saying. I suppose this would have cute or warm and fuzzy, except that I’m male.
And this, which still makes me teary-eyed 20 years after the fact.
My Dad was adopted at birth, by a single working woman. When he was about 18, his Mother told him as much as she knew about his bio-mom, including her name. Bio-Mom had been an unwed teenager whose father forced her to give up the baby. This would have been in 1925.
Dad’s Mom died just a few years later. As time passed he began to get curious about his bio-mother, and he was in his 30’s when he began to look for her. Adoption agencies and such records were lost or otherwise unavailable to him, but he knew what general part of the country she had came from and he would search public records for her name. Never got any hits. Every ten years or so he’d get the bug again and renew the search, always coming up with nothing.
When he was 65, Dad called one night to tell me the news. Having decided to give it one last half-hearted try, he’d finally found her. It turned out that no birth certificate had ever been on file for her, and she didn’t appear in any of the usual data banks until her death certificate was generated. He’d missed her by seven years. But further digging quickly gave him the name of her one surviving brother, who was now in his 80’s.
After agonizing for several weeks, and terribly frightened of who knew what the response might be, Dad made the long-distance call. His uncle answered the phone, listened to Dad nervously introduce himself and then ask if he remembered his younger sister having had a child 65 years before. Uncle said yes, was quiet for a moment, and then said “Am I talking to that child?” After more tentatively friendly sharing of information, Uncle asked Dad if he’d send them a photograph while he talked with his wife about it. Dad sent them a picture of himself at about age 35.
Their return letter arrived a week or two later, and Dad called us together to see what was in that letter. A glossy 4x6 photo of a woman in her thirties, and when we saw it my wife, sisters and I gasped and sat back with our mouths hanging open. It looked like a soft-focus portrait of Dad in makeup and a wig. She couldn’t have resembled him more closely, right down to the characteristic smile that was always on his face. It was an “Oh. My. God.” moment.
Handwritten on the back of the picture: “Welcome to your family.” Dad’s Uncle and immediate family accepted him with open arms, and despite having missed his mother by seven heartbreaking years, Dad, whose life with my mother had not been pleasant, was the happiest I’d ever seen him for the rest of his life. I’ll never forget what those wonderful people did for him.
I guess I could have simply said my Dad looked like his mother, but I felt like telling the story. There really are some good people in this world.
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