Brenda was born in California, grew up on the east coast and lives in Texas. She’s the child of a military family that has lived all over. When a school project required her to ask her adoptive mother about her family tree at eight years old, she was shown her non-identifying information for the first time. While the offer was open to review her information anytime, Brenda felt like the topic of her adoption was stressful for her mother, so she never asked. After the birth of her first son, Brenda sought her birth parents, definitively identifying her birth father first. He was emotionally ready to welcome her in. Finding her birth mother, she saw the mirror image of her self. Unfortunately, the woman was so traumatized following her pregnancy and the adoption process, she wasn’t as open to Brenda’s return. But the door isn’t completely closed.

Read Full TranscriptBrenda:         She just started crying and she just said, you know it, It took so long to forget and such a short time to bring it all back

Brenda: What did you think in that moment.

Brenda:    Well, I mean I understand. I understand. She had to forget about me to move on. She had to because she just couldn’t live there and beat herself up for the rest of her life.

Intro voices: Who am I? Who am I?..Who am I? Who am I?… Who Am I? Who am I?

Damon: This is who am I really a podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and today you’re going to hear from Brenda who called me from Texas. Brenda was raised as an only child in a military family and her parents always gave her what she needed to have a healthy, happy upbringing. After a school project, she was shown her non-identifying information and her curiosity about her birth mother opened up and her imagination kicked in, but it was her biological father whom she definitively identified first and who was mentally ready to receive her unscarred by the burdens, her biological mother bore after Brenda’s birth. This is Brenda’s journey.

Damon: Brenda was born in California and grew up an only child of a military couple. They moved around a lot, living in different parts of the United States and overseas. At one point her parents intended to adopt a boy, but her father’s military orders transferred him. Before that adoption was completed.

Brenda: I was the only one in the family that was adopted, you know, in the entire, either one of their families. So I didn’t really have anybody to talk to about it. They were always very open about it even though they were a little nervous about talking about that kind of thing. They’re just kinda little uptight about a lot of things. And um, so they had, I remember as a kid, I mean I’ve always known I was adopted and as a kid my mother would give me this little book to read about how special I was because I was adopted. I was selected, I was chosen and um, you know, that was kind of how it was approached. And uh, you know, most of the family, the extended family didn’t really treat me any differently than anybody else. We didn’t because again, with the military life, we didn’t live near anybody in the family either. My parents, they lived, their parents lived in different places and in the United States and we’d go visit occasionally about once a year, but that was about it and so it was just kind of the three of us growing up.

Brenda:  Brenda says she looks different from her family, but over the years people have said she looks like her father, which always made her laugh and oddly Brenda and her mother’s voice is sound almost identical. A bizarre coincidence for Brenda who worked in broadcasting. She speaks reverently of her mother and honestly about her father.

Brenda:  I’ve always gotten along great with her. I mean she really, she was a stay at home mom and even though, you know, we certainly weren’t wealthy by any stretch. I mean we always had kind of what we needed and you know, I was very fortunate, you know, Christmas time and that they would make sure that I got some things that I really wanted, but they didn’t want me to be spoiled because of being an only child. So my mother and I have always been very, very close, I mean very close. My Dad and I had a little bit of a stormy relationship. We just butted heads a lot and I think we just approach things differently, we think differently and we’re both pretty stubborn and so that’s been difficult. That was always difficult growing up. I mean once I got past about five or so things kind of changed with our relationship, you know, we’ve had a lot of difficult times know where we wouldn’t speak with each other and you know, even the living in the same house and we just wouldn’t speak with each other for like a month.

Brenda:    Yeah. Which is really bizarre and you know, you don’t know any different at the time, but getting out of that, I realized that’s not the way that most families are, you know, it was, it was stressful. That part was really stressful and you know, I don’t know. I think deep down I always wanted to make sure that I didn’t cause too many problems because this is totally unreasonable and irrational, but I think in the back of my mind was always, well they could send me back, you know, they could, they could have me go back to foster care or the orphanage or wherever, you know, and you know, so I think it was always kind of one of those things like I don’t want to get too far out of line.

Damon:    So Brenda’s parents try to make her feel comfortable with her adoption, with the books and the messages that she was special because she was chosen, but adoption wasn’t a comfortable topic and she could sense the tension. So she basically never raised the issue. Of course that made it tough as a kid when she had to complete one of those dreaded family tree projects. But it was that project that opened Pandora’s metal box for her.

Brenda:  I think I was in elementary school and I came home with homework one day and you were supposed to trace your family tree. And I remember I went up to my teacher privately, you know, in elementary school and I said, Hey, I’m adopted. And she said, well then just do your parents. And it was like, okay, so yeah, and you know, so it’s like, well that’s not.

Brenda:   Yeah, yeah. So it was really awkward and I still remember going home and I talked to my mother and I said, hey, you know, this is the assignment. And she brought out this metal box that I’d never seen before and open it up and inside where my adoption papers and it did have one type written sheet of non ID information. And in that it gave. And I saw for the first time my background in terms of my ethnic background and I found out that my mother was an immigrant to the United States. And uh, I had no idea.

Damon:   I was glad Brenda came around to her biological mother being an immigrant because she alluded to looking different from her parents. She says her mother is tall and thin, fair skinned with reddish brown hair. Her father is shorter and she just doesn’t look like them.

Brenda:  I have almost black eyes, you know, I have dark hair and all that. And so I just didn’t look like that.

Damon:   What did you think you ethnicity might be?

Brenda:   Well, I just didn’t know back then. I didn’t know. I mean, you know, you’re a kid, you don’t really, unless that’s part of your culture. I mean, you know, I was in an urban area at that time and so, you know, it was like, well people are, you know, African American or they’re Puerto Rican or their native America, you will really, really neat mix of different types of people. And so, you know, we had somebody from Portugal and and so those kinds of things. But I didn’t think about myself being like that and to find out that, you know, my mother had come to the United States from another country was like wow. And it was even a country I really didn’t know too much about.

Damon:    Seeing the physical description of her biological parents and other non identifying information was really interesting because it painted a picture of traits about her biological mother, like athleticism and being good at crafts. She also learned that

Brenda:   when she had me, she was a junior in high school and that when she came to the United States, she didn’t speak the language in. So even though she was older, you know, they didn’t do bilingual education back then, so she had to go back to elementary school, you know, and sit is a big kid with little kids to learn the language and it was kind of humiliating for her.

Damon:     Brenda, read about her birth parents, family structures on both sides. She learned their birth years and that her biological father was in the armed forces.

Brenda:  So then your imagination starts really taking off as a kid and you know, Gosh, who could my parents be? And that’s, that’s where it gets kind of interesting because you know, you start looking for familiarity in the face of strangers and you look at people and think do… do they look like me? Could that be my family? You know, and you just don’t know. And that’s the hard part.

Damon:   Yeah, that’s right. So who did you think they could be?

Brenda:   Oh, you know, when you’re a kid, I mean I used to think, oh my dad’s going to be Johnny Carson.

Brenda:  (laughter)

Brenda:   you know, and my mom is probably like, Cher.

Damon:   It’s not uncommon for adoptees to imagine that their parents are famous people. It’s no spoiler for me to tell you Brenda’s parents were not in Hollywood. So, Brenda has seen this paper with the identified information at about eight years old. Her mother said she could look at the papers anytime she wanted to, but she didn’t want to make her mother nervous or stress her out, so she never brought it up again. Over the years, people sometimes asked Brenda if she wanted to search for her birth family and she always said no, but then marriage and the birth of her son changed everything. I asked her how she felt when her boy was born.

Brenda:  When I first had him, the first thing I thought of was when they put him in my arms, I said, wow, this is the first time I’ve ever seen so better. That looks like me. And it was so cool because I looked and I’m like, wow, he’s got my eyes and Wow. It was the most wonderful thing in my life, and then I thought, you know, people who aren’t adopted, they’re so privileged. I mean, they have that every day. They know where they got their nose, they know where they got their eyes and I had none of that and I was just done with it. I was like, I need to know this and you know, as old as you are, you know, when you have to go to a new doctor, there’s always that dreaded family medical history. And I got to really resent it because every time I’d go in and, you know, I would just have to put a line through it, not known and there would always be some, you know, young office staffer, or nurse or something. They come in and go, oh, you didn’t fill the sand. I’ve been a, you know, and I’d say, well I’m adopted and it’s like, you know, 30, 40 years old and I’m having to tell some 20 year old that I’m adopted, you know. And plus I want to know what my, my medical history is. I want to know what I have to worry about or what I need to get screened. I don’t want to either go, hey, I don’t know, so I’m not going to do anything or assume that everything is in my family. I just didn’t want to do that.

Brenda:  Yeah, that’s right. I hadn’t really thought about that.

Damon: You know, people often express that they want to know what things to watch out for, but I would imagine that there is a component of the population who has the like a hypochondria of I probably got everything right and I’m sure it’s very worrisome not to know what your potential risks are.

Brenda:     Well, I mean for me it wasn’t even like a contract situation, but it was, you know, kind of like, well do I need to be screened for everything because I don’t know. I don’t know if I have breast cancer in my family. I don’t know if I have this or that and you know, you kind of have to make a decision because as you get older, certain the certain milestones and they go, hey, if you have the senior family, you need to start getting checked. Do you do it or do you just go nah? That’s probably, it’s probably not there or I don’t want to know

Brenda:  it’s true. You just don’t know what to be tested for and a person certainly doesn’t want to submit to every test under the sun. We want to know what we’re at risk for in our family’s history to know what tests we should have done and at what age to do so. By this time Brenda was working part time and she had access to a computer back then, so she found a few adoption search groups online. One piece of advice was to write to the state of California where she was adopted and she did.

Brenda: It took about a month turnaround time, but I got a letter from a social worker from the state and she basically gave me the same information that I had before. But then I’d also read and I requested that if they have any photos or anything else that would belong to me, if I could get that. And she sent to me for pictures. They were old black and white pictures of me when I was in foster care as a baby. And because, you know, I, I didn’t have anything from early on and that was the first thing I’d ever seen and it was like, wow. And then my, I started to ask my folks a little bit if they had any more information, so they made copies of everything that they had to give to me and they had said, well, if you ever want to search will help you. But it still was that stress I could tell there. So I just kind of did it on my own and I found a name that had been blocked out but I could still see what it was. And that was the report from the foster care and kind of like what I had been fed and all of that. And the thing I will tell you that was remarkable to me because of, you know, read a little bit, you know, about primal screams and all of this. But one thing that was described was that when I went, you know, kind of right after the hospital, they took me into foster care and they said that I cried almost nonstop for a week. And then I stopped and I, um, you know, I’ve read since then that, you know, babies cry because they want their mother and they finally figure out their mothers never going to come. And it was like, wow, that was, that was big.

Damon:    It was hard to read that description of herself back then. And Brenda admitted it’s still hard today to think of herself as an infant crying out for her mother for a week. But the name that was partially revealed on the social workers, copy of her papers was a solid clue. She connected with a private investigator in California, paid her a nominal fee for what she could afford at the time. And in return, Brenda received her birth, mother’s surname, her birth father’s two initials and surname, and learned that she wasn’t given a name. She was simply baby girl and a last name. The father’s last name is very common. And the mother’s last name just wasn’t returning any results. As Brenda searched, life continued. And Brenda had another baby herself. In the summer of 2016, she submitted her sample to ancestry DNA, which immediately returned multiple first cousin matches.

Brenda: It was crazy. So I looked at that and the last name was the same as the last name I had been given for my birth father. So. Wow. Yeah. So, and I, at that point, I didn’t want anybody to help me. I had to figure this out. Myself and there were about two nights in the summer and I happened to be off and I pretty much spent the whole night figuring this out and I had like sticky notes with people’s names because I had to go back to like great grandparents and then trace where everybody went after that and who could have been the right age at the right place to be my birth father. And, and as you know, an ancestry, they don’t list living people. But what I was able to do was I finally got to find a grave and I found the sister had died of my birth father and it listed him as a possible relative. So I did some research on him. Sure enough, he had been in the military. He would’ve been born in the year that, um, that was listed on my non id information. And, but the thing is that it throw me off years ago, I’d actually came across his name years at 20 years ago, but the searcher that had helped me, the private investigator had given me the wrong initials and the wrong county.

Damon:     Is that right? Just off by a little bit.

Brenda: Yup. Just off that a little bit because I’d actually, I remembered seeing his name years ago. Once I had that, I’ve, I went to classmates.com, went to the old because I knew they were in high school, so I went to this city where they were, but he was from and I looked up the high school there and sure enough I found his picture and then I thought, well if they were high school sweethearts, she probably went to the same one. And I found her. Really? And it was about 3:30 in the morning. I looked at that and I found him the face of my father as a teenager. And I looked upon the face of my mother for the first time.

Damon:    What was that like for you?

Brenda:  I got a cold chill. I mean it was because I look a lot like her and interestingly now I look a lot like him, but I don’t think I did as much in high school, but her, I look at, I mean I looked at her and then just like, there she is and I just got this cold chill, and kind of started shaking. It was just, it was just the most bizarre thing

Damon:   with her biological mother’s full name. Brenda was able to find a port of entry pass online with the woman’s name on it. It showed the date. Her birth mother entered the country, the name of the ship she arrived on and what port she entered the United States through. It listed the family members who came with her, including her parents and younger brothers. Brenda continued to search for more information online where she found the woman’s married name and both parents facebook pages for the first time she saw the adult faces of both people. Seeing his picture. Brenda didn’t see much of herself,

Brenda:   ….but when I looked at her profile picture, it was like, oh my God, that’s me. I just knew it.

Damon: Brenda was completely blown away and emotional to finally see an adult resembling herself and it took her a few days to gather her composure.

Brenda:  It took me a couple of days and I finally decided to call because I was more sure of my birth father. So I had a little script, you know, and everything and I called him and also he’s interested in genealogy and I’d found him. He would help people with genealogy too, which was really cool.. And so I called him, he had an answering machine. I was like, ah. So it’s like, I finally got my myself psyched up, but I’ve got to call this guy out of the blue, you know, I’m not going to do a letter, I’m just going to call and do it. And then he didn’t answer. So I left a message and I just said, hey, you know, I’m wondering if you could...