Steve was raised in Baltimore, MD in a predominantly Jewish suburban neighborhood. But as he looked around at his friends and other families, he truly questioned his own identity, especially as an adoptee. In an era before electronic record keeping, Steve used his street savvy to buy the information he needed about himself in order to advance his search for his biological family. More crafty thinking led Steve right to his biological mother’s front door. He wanted to meet her, but not necessarily reveal that he was her son. He knocked on her door with a story that should have gotten him sent on his way. Instead she invited him in! Just wait until you hear his crafty approach to introducing himself to his biological mother, and the truth about his European heritage.

The post 010 – How Can I Meet Her Without Telling Her Who I Am? appeared first on Who Am I...Really? Podcast.

Steve (00:04):

My biggest question to my parents who raised me was always, are you sure? Are you 100% sure that I'm Jewish? And I'm looking in the mirror, I'm thinking, I don't look like anybody in this neighborhood. Yeah, I knew I wasn't Jewish and I wanted to know what my background was.

Voices (00:27):

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon (00:38):

This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members? Hey, it's Damon and today you're going to hear Steve's journey. He has family history in Baltimore, Maryland, but his biological roots go back to Chicago, Illinois. Steve says that he was a bit of a juvenile delinquent when he was a teen and quite the opposite of his siblings, one who was a jock, the other who was a scholar, but it turned out those street skills and crafty thinking were just the tools he needed to locate and connect with his biological mother. I can't wait until you hear just how he did it.

Damon (01:18):

Steve, I'm super glad to be connected to you, man. I appreciate you accepting the invitation to chat a little bit. You've got quite an amazing story, but I'd love for you to take me back to your early childhood. Tell me about what it was like in your family as an adoptee, what your structure was like and your family and what your community was like and how you fit into the community as an adoptee.

Steve (01:42):

Perfect. Yeah, I'll start off was saying, you know, my adoptive parents, I'll start off with them, uh, to give you a little idea why they even went the adoption routes, but they, they were a Jewish couple. Uh, they were married in the late forties. They decided to start a family probably somewhere around 1950, 51, and they obviously could not conceive. So, um, they decided to go the adoption route. Okay. Then what makes this whole story interesting is that my parents were Jewish and they wanted to adopt a Jewish baby. So I'm thinking to myself, what are the odds on them finding a bunch of Jewish babies out there in this world? How do you even go about that? That's what they wanted because they wanted to stick with it, you know, their religious tradition and raise a child Jewish and things like that. So I was actually born in Chicago.

Steve (02:36):

My parents were from Baltimore, so that's where the thing gets kind of weird. Uh, what they did was they got an attorney up in Baltimore who knew of a rabbi who knew of a rabbi in Chicago who knew an attorney over there that had access to people that were Jewish and looking to put babies up for adoption into a Jewish family, if you can follow that. So about six years later, around 1977 they get a phone call, there's a baby girl available, which is my older sister. Year and a half later, they get a phone call that there was a baby available in Chicago, fly out to Chicago, and there was me coming home three days later.

Damon (03:20):

So the Jewish community gets together and through connections establishes a network by which to presumably Jewish babies can arrive in a Jewish family in Baltimore.

Steve (03:33):

Environment. Correct.

Damon (03:33):

Gotcha. Okay.

Steve (03:34):

Correct. So fast forward a little bit. A couple years later in 1962 my parents were able to have a biological son, which is pretty normal. They say sometimes parents that cannot conceive then all of a sudden they can. But basically in the 60s growing up in the rambles town area of Baltimore County was like, our environment was like the show leave at the Beaver. It was really, it was just, you know, a brand new suburban area. I grew up in a, in a 100% Jewish neighborhood. There must have been 115 homes in my neighborhood and every single one of them was Jewish.

Damon (04:13):

Mhmm an enclave. The community. Yeah.

Steve (04:17):

Well it was pretty much just like any other family in the neighborhood. I quite frankly, I didn't realize I was adopted until I was the age of six. Um, there's only a couple of things I can really remember, uh, before the year 1964 and that was John F. Kennedy getting shot and the day my mother told me I was adopted.

Damon (04:40):

Huge moments in your life, huh?

Steve (04:42):

Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I tell people that my adoptions no big deal. But that moment when my mother told me I must've been a big deal cause it's still in my brain to this day cause I could remember exactly where I was sitting when my mother told me that news.

Damon (04:56):

Do you remember how you felt? What did it, what did it feel like? Or what did she say? What else do you remember?

Steve (05:01):

Yeah, well I remember sitting down on the steps on my 6th birthday. It might've been like a day or two before I was to start first grade. So I'm thinking maybe my parents thought we might as well tell him today before he goes to school and finds out in school from somebody else because maybe one of the parents in the neighborhood told some kid who knows. So it was a good time to tell me.

Damon (05:23):

Yeah, the community talks. Yeah.

Steve (05:25):

Exactly. Exactly. So she sat me down and said, I have something to tell you. And I think she said, you know, I love you very much, we love you very much something like that. And I said to myself, oh boy what's going on here? So she said that I just want to let you know that you and your sister were adopted, uh, to our, uh, mothers in Chicago, uh, who were not able to care for their babies cause they were poor pretty much through that spiel out there at us. And I went okay. And then she explained that how, you know, my mother carried me around for nine months and then gave birth and then she, my parents went up to Chicago and got us and then of course she says to me, um, you have any questions about your adoption or if you have any questions in the future, please feel free to ask. So the only thing, I do remember saying this, cause my mom still says to this day, I said, yeah, I do. I have a question. And she says, what's that? I said, and I said, too late for me to go down the street, play wiffle ball?

Damon (06:24):

The mind of a six year old!

Steve (06:26):

Exactly. Adoption meant nothing to me. I didn't even know where babies came from at that age. My dad he came in the front door with my sister and we start talking. She says, Hey, we're adopted. What that means is, we went around the neighbrhood and told everyone we are adopted!

Damon (06:40):

Haha, good news folks!

Steve (06:44):

Hey, it was all like, you know what's, you know, what's the deal here? So it didn't have that much of an effect on us in a negative way. Yeah, that's pretty much how it stayed all through the 60s. We were just doing normal family in Baltimore.

Damon (06:57):

Going back to when you're six years old, you've sat on the front porch with your mom, she's told you that you're adopted. Has your baby brother been born yet? And do you recall at all thinking like, well what does that mean? Like how are we different then? Do you, did you, do you recall at all a point when you thought to yourself, wait a minute, she's telling me that we're different in some way?

Steve (07:19):

Yeah, well he was probably too, okay. Yeah, probably still sitting in a crib. And I do know, I do remember my mom giving birth to my brother, so I knew that he came from my mother. Um, but when my mom told me that I did not, again, like a deer in the headlights kind of a situation. It just really wasn't a big deal to me. I was just so occupied and to my life and in that neighborhood, I mean this was the, this was the baby boom generation. There were kids everywhere running in the street, you know.

Damon (07:55):

And six and seven year old boys aren't known for being particularly introspective or contemplative. So I could see how this wouldn't necessarily hit you with like a ton of bricks.

Steve (08:05):

Exactly. And it really didn't, it really didn't really register to me till I got maybe around the age of eight and nine. It was about that age when I realized that, hey, babies stay in a mother's body for like nine months. And then they have birth and, and it started coming to me, Hey, there's somebody out there that carried me around for nine months who, you know, then all of a sudden the fantasy started coming around and the dream of, you know, who, who is this person? You know? And, and I had those thoughts, but my sister did not have those thoughts. That's what's really bizarre. We grew up in the same house absolute to this day, to this still no interest.

Steve (08:56):

She doesn't even talk about it. Yeah. And all three of us different personalities. You know, my brother was a extremely smart kid in school. Straight A's. Yeah. He had his own friends. My sister had her own friends, very good in school. And then there was me, the athlete, the guy that was average student at best and getting in trouble. Maybe it was because I was the middle child, who knows? But I was a little juvenile delinquent and I caused my mother and father so many headaches. You can't even imagine how bad of a kid I was when I was like 12, 13, 14 and 15. And I'm sure my parents were probably thinking where this kid come from?

Damon (09:36):

Yeah, right, right.

Steve (09:38):

Yeah. Of course, they would never say that to me, but they were the perfect parents when it comes to raising adopted children, just, they were probably, they had all the right answers to everything, you know? But I never, yeah, I mean, you know, look, I'm sure my sister and I, somewhere when we were younger, probably said, hey, you're only punishing us today because we're adopted. You know? I'm sure we threw that at them a couple times.

Damon (10:02):

Yeah. A lot of adoptees do that. I remember doing it to my own mother.

Steve (10:05):

You whip out the adoption card when you're in trouble.

Damon (10:08):

Yeah. Yeah, you weaponize it and then you don't realize until a little bit later when you're older or even after that moment like, Oh boy.

Steve (10:15):

Oh, that's embarrassing. Yeah, exactly. But you know, our parents are the ones that know what they're doing, they know that day is coming. They, they know that's coming and they're prepared for it. And my mother just steadfast, she says, no, no, Steven and you, you, you're in trouble today because you threw a lock through the neighbors window yesterday.

Steve (10:40):

This has nothing to do with how you came into this world. Let's just get this straight. So fast forward a little bit, you've, you've, you're now eight years old and it's kinda hitting you. There's somebody out there that did the same thing that my mom has done for their son, the baby that she carried in her belly. What, what kinds of things did you think about, about this other person?

Steve (11:01):

I would obviously dream of what and who my mother was, you know, I would fantasize. Uh, well she's Marilyn Monroe orJane Mansfield.

Damon (