Two years ago, I stood with my brother Evan, then 36, 16 months older than me, in a parking lot in upstate New York, several hours away from our respective homes. Our older brother, Eric, who had recently turned 40, was on the other side of the lot talking animatedly with a stranger, an older man wearing giant aviator sunglasses and a military-style jacket, his long, shaggy hair streaked with red dye.
“What do you think they’re talking about?” I asked Evan.
“No idea,” he responded. “Which apartment do you think is hers?”
We scanned the surrounding two-story apartment complex for a sign of the woman who gave birth to us.
I always knew I was adopted. I paid little mind to the idea of my birth mother and didn’t consciously feel that being adopted was of major significance. I grew up the only child of parents with whom I was exceptionally close. Everyone knew my mother was my best friend, it was a thing. Strangers remarked on how much we resembled each other, despite the fact that when examined closely, none of our features are alike. But, as mother and child, we fit. When other kids asked who my “real parents” were, I’d explain that my real parents are my parents, the ones raising me, full stop. I’d won the adoptive-parents jackpot, and while I knew there was another dimension that existed inside of me, I felt protective of our family unit.
Still, sometimes, I’d wistfully gaze out the window and wonder about the people I came from, if they grieved me day in and out. I’d thank them quietly for giving me life and giving me to the right family, letting them know they need not worry, I was loved unconditionally. Despite my close bond with my parents, I felt of another time and place, and derived inordinate joy whenever I found someone who liked any of the same things I did. I often wondered if I had a sibling: where they were, who they were with, what they liked and dreamed of.
My brothers and I had each left our spouses and children at home for a weekend at an Airbnb decorated with several variations of “Live, Laugh, Love” signs, to act like idiots together after a lifetime of separation and attempt to get a glimpse of our biological mother in person. We were in her Finger Lakes town. We hadn’t hatched a concrete plan — how to find her, if we would tell her who we were, how to avoid rattling her — which was fitting, given that she never had plans for any of us. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her late 20s and refused medication. Her life since had been shaped by paranoia, auditory hallucinations, and, I’ve learned, denial of our existence.
Prior to this investigatory weekend trip, I’d spent a lot of time wondering if seeing the three of her children together would elicit a spark of recognition in her. I’d seen old photos and it was clear we looked alike — same thick, blond hair and large, downturned blue eyes. We’d been told by family members that she’d gush over any and all young boys she encountered on the street or in stores, which those around her figured was due to the fact she gave up her own sons; maybe she’d be drawn to one of my brothers or both. According to family and childhood friends, she liked talking to anyone with ears, so maybe she’d just strike up a conversation with all three of us at once.
But I knew that even when her stomach had swelled to the size of a watermelon, she refused to believe she was pregnant. Though we were more difficult to deny once we emerged from her body, she declined to hold or look at me or Eric. Maybe it was too painful knowing she’d have to give us away, or maybe the medication she was administered during her third-trimester hospitalizations bludgeoned her ability to emote.
With Evan, we knew that in July 1985, she arrived on Cape Cod — where she’d spent summers since she was a girl — nine months pregnant, sleeping on a friend’s boat, denying she was carrying a child. In a state of psychosis, she gave birth to her second son and named him after her then-husband, William, who she claimed was his father despite the fact that he had a vasectomy. (His adoptive parents changed his name to Evan.) After giving birth, she vacillated between wanting to keep Evan and remarking on his beauty to showing zero awareness of him or her surroundings. She discharged herself without notifying the hospital staff, leaving Evan behind. He was transferred to a foster mother until his adoptive parents gave him a permanent home four months after his birth.
When I became a mother, it became difficult to minimize the fact that I was given up at birth. When I held my son for the first time, nursed him, felt his skin, kissed his head, I understood the magnitude of what it was to carry a child and give it away. I pictured myself alone in a bassinet for two days, pityingly looked after by hospital staff before my parents came to take me home.
I’d always suffered from anxiety, and as the postpartum months unfolded, it became debilitating. In the past, I hadn’t considered its potential cause, whether it might be some combination of biology and being abandoned at birth. When my son was 2, I was venting to my parents about my neuroses when my mother asked if I wanted to know about my biological mother. Sure, I said, and so my parents shared her full name and that she was 39 years old when she gave birth to me — which took me by surprise. I’d envisioned her as a teenager my entire life. Two years later, in early 2020, just before COVID-19 brought an end-of-days feeling to New York City, I visited my father while he was recovering from surgery uptown. My mother was there, too, and once again we discussed my anxiety. She asked if I’d been wondering more about my biological mother.
She pulled out her iPhone and brought up a Facebook account for my biological uncle’s widow, my aunt. Her name had been listed in the online obituaries for my biological grandmother and uncle. My mother had come across those obituaries when she Googled my biological mother’s name, which, unbeknownst to me, she’d been doing every so often for years in an attempt to gather answers about where I came from. She knew I’d inevitably ask questions and wanted to be prepared. So there, in the hospital room with my mother and father, I messaged my biological mother’s sister-in-law.
It took her two months to respond. My husband, son, and I had moved into my parents’ suburban home to ride out the pandemic. We were living in my childhood bedroom, and I had just gone on anxiety medication for the first time, my body still making sense of its new chemistry, when my aunt divulged details that I’d never known: My biological mother, who could go from being disarmingly charming to yelling accusations at strangers — “You’re in the CIA,” “You’re a whore” — had paranoid schizophrenia for which she refused treatment, my aunt told me. I had two older siblings who had also been given up by the same mother, and my oldest sibling, Eric, had revealed himself and met our late grandmother before she passed. We’d still have to hunt down the middle sibling — “I don’t have info on that one,” my aunt said matter-of-factly.
I crumbled in my childhood bedroom, my parents wiping my tears. It became clear that my biological mother never grieved for me at all, that my parents rescued me in a state of emergency. Her family and friends regarded her illness as tragic, and the three children she gave away as the ultimate manifestation of this tragedy.
Still, I wanted more. Once I learned a little, I had to know everything; the need for details was manic, unrelenting. My mother and I launched an amateur investigation unit into the strangers from whom I emerged. A cousin, who I met on 23andMe, told me her father housed my biological mother at his place in Palm Springs in the ’80s, where she was hanging out with pro golfers. Realistically, they might have been instructors, but my mother and I nonetheless proceeded to scan countless Google images of cup winners from the era for signs of my biological father, their swoops of brown hair and square jaws and crow’s-feet all seemingly blending into one face.
In part, I was distracting myself from the anticipation of meeting Eric. I was waiting for my aunt to connect us, as she’d promised. Six days passed and there was still no word from her. I feared she told him about me and he didn’t want to meet me. With my parents’ and husband’s encouragement, I flicked her a text to check in; it had slipped her mind somehow.
Soon, my new brother and I were on the line. Our upbringings were very different, but elements of our personalities were the same: class clowns, late bloomers in romantic relationships. Both feeling slightly out of place in the world. When our families got together two months later, our kids became cousins, our spouses became fast friends. It was surreal and bittersweet.
A year and a half later, we tracked down Evan, a seemingly needle-in-the-haystack feat. We were initially reluctant to pursue him, hoping he’d pop up on one of the DNA databases, trying to respect what we assumed were his wishes to remain unaware of his genetic history. But we grew impatient, so I contacted a private investigator in Massachusetts, where he was born. The PI generously connected me to a woman who worked at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families, and everything unfolded from there.
In the months that followed, my brothers and I spoke on a daily, sometimes hourly basis over group text, phone calls, and Instagram DM. We discussed mundane things, our day-to-day goings-on, as well as the heavier, haunting memories from our respective pasts. By telling my brothers the things that have gnawed at me — a falling-out with a friend, a past failure at work, a long-ago embarrassing moment — I was relieved of much of the pain that accumulated within me. There was never enough time together, no amount of storytelling or photo exchanging that could make up for the lost years. While I was excited and captivated by our drawn-out game of catch-up, I also experienced grief from not having them during my formative moments. I struggled to make sense of the highs and lows of my new reality.
Now, my siblings and I were together, standing at the entrance to our biological mother’s apartment complex, trying to appear as though our presence was nothing out of the ordinary. It turned out that the man who Eric had befriended in the parking lot knew her. They were friends; she relied on him to drive her to get cheap beer and other provisions. He was fascinated by her seemingly glamorous background and deciphering what was real and what she’d conjured in her mind. And she was now about to make her way down the path into the parking lot, he said, so we should stay put.
“Holy crap, Casey,” Evan whispered urgently, “she looks just like you. Just like you.” I looked over at the woman we came from, a petite figure dressed in shin-high rubber boots over jeans and a navy-blue ski cap. I was amazed at how delicate she was. Her face was angled toward the ground, and we observed her as she actively avoided crossing our path. She passed the staircase, zooming right by us.
“Excuse me,” Eric called.
“Yes?” she answered in a bright, clear voice.
“Excuse me, can you tell me of a good place to eat around here?”
“Just there, down the road,” she said, confident and self-assured, speaking in a youthful tone that didn’t match her 74 years. “There are all the restaurants, places to eat.”
“Oh, okay, uh,” Eric said, attempting to keep her talking. “So there’s like a —”
“Right there, down the road,” she said, waving her long, elegant hand. And then her face turned toward ours and I saw myself. Rounded eyebrows and big square teeth. I couldn’t make out all the specifics of her features, but in that moment I had a glimmer of understanding of what it must be like to grow up with a family member who looks like you, and to take it for granted; to not obsess over details of familial resemblance but simply recognize your own essence in the face, body, and presence of another person, without effort or thought.
“And they serve breakfast?” Eric asked.
Slightly agitated by our ignorance and persistence, but unfailingly polite, she responded: “There’s a place called Bobby’s, on the corner.” She had immaculate diction, a transatlantic accent. We watched her figure fade into the distance, back into her building. Her voice sounded so much like mine in pitch and tone. We looked at one another and exchanged shocked smiles. Even though she’d more or less avoided us, we felt relief: She was alive and vibrant, a body with purpose in the world, not decrepit as I’d envisioned.
“Funny, she never does that. She always stops to say hello, talks and talks. You could blow your brains out with how much she talks,” her friend said.
This stranger served as a portal into our biological mother in the present day. A woman with a complicated brain who lived very simply. No attachments except to her routines and habits. She slathered her face in Vaseline to ensure it remained relatively supple. The Vaseline lady, that’s what they call her around town, her friend told us. She neglected to check her mail and answered the door for strangers in an oversize T-shirt, no bra. She tried to flirt with rich old men with summer homes on the lake. She talked about all the old boyfriends, about getting laid, he explained.
In a lot of ways, she was the same girl as she was in her 20s, when whispers of her psychosis began. Her voice and mannerisms and diminutive stature all felt like that of a girl. There were many things she did, like having us, that should’ve changed her but didn’t. She carried on, clinging to select elements of her past while remaining unable to accept others.
Through conversations with our aunt, Eric’s relationship with our late biological grandmother, and now, through her friend, our mother’s life was coming into sharper focus. There’d been a beach house on the Cape, yearlong travels through Europe, boyfriends who owned galleries, a well-heeled liberal-arts college. Then there were the years on the road, living out of her car while traversing the country, collecting men along the way. Now, there was her small two-bedroom apartment that she kept sparkling clean, waxing the floors day in and day out, shoving every last article of clothing into her closets. Doing her same toning exercises from the Jane Fonda days, lifting her legs with pointed toes. There is no TV because of what she calls “The Wires.” The Wires are how the FBI and the Mafia tap into your activities. The small iPhone computers are intriguing, but she knows better than to trust them. All she has is a landline phone that she leaves unplugged, except for when she needs to make an outgoing call. She’d prefer to catch up on the day’s news at Wegmans and enlist her friend from the parking lot to help her take care of her affairs, driving her to the flea market or supermarket or wherever she needs to go.
“You know, I think she’d be open to meeting you three,” he said.
“You really think so?” I said. “She seems to want nothing to do with us.”
“She always has people coming by,” he said. “You should tell her who you are.”
Nothing about our biological mother’s behavior indicated that she wanted to meet us. And, leading up to this trip, I didn’t think that we’d actually be exposing ourselves, letting her know we’re the ones she gave away. There was no need to stir the pot, to create chaos when she already had enough clamor in her mind. It would be selfish and potentially dangerous. What if she had an outburst that required police intervention? I was already grateful enough that my brothers and I could begin to emerge from the grief of not having grown up together and could now create a new life. I had my parents who welcomed this new reality, patient and accepting and sharing in my excitement. I saw the woman who brought me into the world and now understood that I didn’t fall from the sky like an alien. Wasn’t I pushing my luck by chasing her?
Nonetheless, we were soon making our way up her staircase. We arrived at a landing at the top of the first stairwell, right outside her door. I knew this was ill-conceived, but I couldn’t resist the momentum. We were here and needed to commit.
I pressed my back against the opposite wall, as far away from her door as possible. Evan joined me in seeking distance but pulled out his phone and began discreetly recording, so we could remember the sound of her voice.
Eric knocked on the door. “No, no thank you,” she responded quickly. She sounded so young.
“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re just —”
“You should never knock on a stranger’s door,” she said, reprimanding us like she would her own children.
“You’re … ” I made sure to say her name, let her know I knew it.
“Go away!” she shouted. “Just go away.”
We took a beat before scampering down the steps as fast as we could, bolting out the front door. We’d been gifted with an answer, go away, the words confirming what I already knew: that our lives had taken the exact trajectories they were supposed to.
In my gut, I know she knew who we were. I wanted her to know we were raised well — that, despite our current actions, we weren’t disrespectful. Just curious.
So we respected her command. For now.
