Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found

by Jennifer Lauck

Nancy called this reaction progress.

  She said we were getting to the heart of the matter.

  My angry inner baby was finally showing herself.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NEVER GIVE UP

  THE LAST BLOCK to my search was my own desire to control the outcome of my own story. I felt I had to know all scenarios before launching a search.

  1. My mother was dead.

  2. My mother had been in a terrible accident and lost her memory.

  3. My mother was alive and didn’t want to know me.

  4. My mother was alive and wanted to keep her past a secret.

  5. My mother was alive and had been bullied into secrecy.

  Nancy offered another version. “Very likely she is ashamed and scared.”

  “Well, that is pretty selfish,” I said.

  “Of course she is selfish,” Nancy said. “What teenager isn’t?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “She is likely trapped in the mindset of being seventeen. She is likely totally regressed. It happens. I see it all the time.”

  “But Nancy,” I said, exasperated, “if my mother is someone who did not have the courage to overcome these feelings put in place when she was a teen, how can I bear knowing her?”

  Nancy sighed on the phone—a sound I took to be impatience. I was sure all my questions wore her out but I didn’t care. All my life I had been swayed by the will of another and I wouldn’t be swayed by Nancy.

  “Jennifer, you just need to meet your mother, have a cup of coffee, and talk,” she said. “Meeting your mother is not about her personality. It’s about the biology that connects you.”

  Nancy and I had been talking for months now. Fall had turned into winter and now it was spring. She had already told me these things over and over again but I couldn’t seem to grasp the concepts.

  She tried again—ever patient.

  “It’s as if you have put yourself on hold—from a sense perspective—from the moment you were born, and the only one who can take you off hold is your first mother,” Nancy said. “She does this by being in the same room with you.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but before I could speak, Nancy continued.

  “I know, I know, you are going to say I’m nuts but it’s true. Human bonding is about the senses and you have not had your senses filled up by the mother who gestated you,” she said. “You have been coping, Jennifer, and up to this point, you’ve been doing a remarkable job, but if you find her and spend some time in her presence, you will find your Self begin to take truer shape. You’ll establish a firmer base than you’ve had—you will stop being so defensive and so afraid. You’ll be able to move on. It’s as simple as that.”

  Her words, as they always did, sparked tears. There was something in what she said that felt calming, as if there was a truth in the room. It also felt as if she were speaking to the deepest, most wounded part of myself—that baby that had yet to be fully born—the one I had been protecting since birth. But she was also speaking to the hardened survivor I had become. She was asking my protector to finally, fully step aside.

  I just didn’t know if I could do it. I had been protecting Jennifer for so long.

  Back and forth I went for weeks and even months.

  I was like a wild horse that wanted to sprint in the direction of my mother. I was also a magician who made the horse disappear by asking questions: What if your heart gets broken? What if this woman hurts you again? What if? What if?

  BUT WHEN I finally decide to do something, anything, I give over my body, heart, mind to the job at hand. I become a laser beam of focus.

  And that’s what happened when I finally resolved to search for my first mother. Come what may, it became my job.

  First, I hired an investigator who lived near Portland. Our work was on the Internet—a virtual investigation—and we spoke on the phone.

  With nearly nothing to go on, the investigator pushed me to recover my copy of the Non-Identifying Information Report.

  I told her it had been lost but I was pretty sure I threw it away after Bryan killed himself. I could almost see that old Jennifer wadding the page up and pitching it into the trash.

  Goodbye, Mother. Good riddance, Dad.

  Not to be thwarted, the investigator suggested I write Nevada for a copy. “Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope,” she said. “It’s your legal right to have that information.”

  I wrote the letter.

  The state of Nevada is called a sealed state. This means it is the law to close adoption files. Not even a terminal illness can unlock them.

  How odd that Nevada allows fast divorces and marriages and legalizes prostitution and gambling, but will not open adoption records.

  The registry, established in 1979, remained active. I had called half a dozen times over the years, but stopped checking back before the kids were born.

  When I wrote my letter to Nevada this time around, a response came right away: No non-identifying information exists, sorry.

  I called the state and spoke to a woman named Angel and I thought it was a lucky sign. My name Lauck—luck with an A—was perhaps about to pay off.

  As politely as possible, I suggested that Angel look in my file again. She did. No luck after all.

  Still very polite, I asked if she was sure there was no non-identifying information because the state issued a document years ago and it had to be there. I felt like a mother chastising a child who had mislaid a toy. “It didn’t grow legs and walk away, Angel. Go look again.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Lauck,” Angel pushed back, “nothing is in this file except the name of your first mother.”

  A long, quiet ticking sound took over. My breath was gone.

  “You have the name of my mother in front of you, right now? ”

  “That’s right,” she said, voice bright and even perky, “but I cannot tell you. That would be illegal.”

  It was as if Angel had struck me through the telephone line. I saw bright white light between my eyes.

  “Do you know your mother, Angel?” I finally asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  “I’d like to know my mother too. Can’t you tell me?”

  “No, ma’am, I would lose my job.”

  She didn’t hang up and neither did I. We breathed on the line—two women, two daughters, two human beings.

  I imagined Angel in her Carson City office, sitting behind a big wooden desk. I saw her as a small woman with straight, dark brown hair. She had a pert nose and a slim, petite body. She dressed in conservative colors, gray, brown, black. Her nails were painted a clear color with little white bands at the top of the nail—French manicure. She had lived an entire life, luxuriating in a sense of self, forming a solid and impenetrable ego and now, she was unable to bend beyond rules written by a handful of old men more than a century ago. She likely thought this was some test, being conducted by a superior, and the excellent way she managed our conversation might lead to a promotion in the future.

  Angel did not know me, nor did she care. I had no relevance to her life. I was a name, in a file, as was my mother.

  LATER THAT SAME day, Spencer and I were in the car and on our way to Target. He juggled a thick wad of bills, saved from birthdays and allowance. The money was alive and he had to set it free. Target was the only store in town that carried the object of his desire—a mega-LEGO tech-tronic laser doohickey.

  I was in no state to shop after my conversation with Angel. I needed to be on the sofa with a glass of wine and a bowl of extra perfect popcorn, my crazy comfort food—air-popped corn, melted butter, flax oil, salt, and a huge handful of Parmesan cheese. I needed to be watching a movie with the kids, letting them snuggle close while I numbed myself against the fact that someone else—a stranger—knew my mother. But there I was, being what I thought was a good mother.

  Spencer chattered about the toy he wanted to get, with a LEGO magazine spread wide over his lap.

  I nodd
ed along with the cadence of his voice and kept my eyes on the six lanes of erratic traffic.

  “What’s going on, Mom?” he asked. “You seem different, kind of sad or something.”

  I made a lane change, checking my blind spot and just smiled.

  “Nope, everything’s fine. Just driving here.”

  Spencer reached over and touched my arm. “Come on, Mom,” he said. “I can tell you are upset.”’

  I stopped at a red light and sighed.

  Spence had a remarkable sensitivity to other people, especially me. Steve said no child should worry about a parent the way Spencer worried about me. “It’s not healthy,” he insisted.

  With Steve’s voice in my head, I adjusted the seatbelt strap and rolled my shoulders back. I tried to be reserved and cautious with Spencer. I certainly didn’t want to screw up my child and I didn’t want to burden him. I told Spencer a bit about the conversation with Angel.

  “She had my mother’s name, right there, and wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Why not? ”

  “It’s the law,” I said.

  “Well, that’s a bullshit law!”

  “Spence!” I said. “You owe me a quarter.”

  “Fine,” he said, digging into his pocket and putting two quarters in the cup holder between us. “It’s a totally bullshit law.”

  “Spencer!”

  “I paid in advance, Mom. I bought that word.”

  I held the steering wheel with both hands, shaking my head and just imagining Steve’s disapproval at the loose way I was raising our boy.

  “Well, fine, it is a bullshit law,” I said, passing him one of his quarters back.

  Spencer grinned. He pocketed the quarter again.

  The light changed and the driver behind me honked. I waved into the mirror and went through the intersection.

  Spencer watched me and I smiled over at him.

  “It just took the wind out of me, you know, like when you get body-checked in Tae Kwan Do? Maybe I’m never going to find my first mother. Maybe I should just quit.”

  Spencer nodded like yes, indeed he did know. Body blows were the worst, in his book. He cleared his throat then and spoke to me directly, with great earnestness.

  “Master Dan says it’s normal to get sad, Mom,” he said, “but he also says to never give up.”

  Master Dan was Spencer’s Tae Kwan Do teacher, a little Nepalese man wired as tight as a snare drum. I could hear his lilting Asian accent, “You, Spencer. You never give up! Okay? Never give up!”

  My boy had turned the tables on me. He was giving me advice with my own example.

  I took up his other quarter and gave it back too.

  “You’re going to need that for your Legomegawhozit,” I said.

  Spencer laughed and took the quarter, shoving it into his front pocket. He looked at his magazine again, making his plans, and I moved my hand over the back of his head—one of his favorite things. I had been touching him that way since the day he was born. He smiled a little secret smile.

  “You’re a great kid,” I said.

  “You’re a great mom,” he said.

  MY INVESTIGATOR HAD me register on something called the online bulletin boards, Internet sights where adoptees and birth parents placed posts.

  “Looking for a young man born around Feb. 8, 1976, his birth name was—. Please, if anyone knows anything please let me know.”

  “MY NAME IS—, I’M SEARCHING FOR MY BIRTH FAMILY I WAS BORN IN LAS VEGAS, NEVADA AT SUNRISE HOSPITAL ON FEBUARY 6, 1968, AT 8:26 AM.”

  “My son, born Feb. 8, 1976, Elko, Nevada. Welfare took him away, please tell him I love him and never stop thinking of him.”

  Reading these online postings was like being at the sight of a great tragedy where people wandered in a daze as they called out the names of missing loved ones. It felt like futility to add my own information. I was sure if my mother didn’t register to find me in her own state, she was not out here surfing obscure Internet sites. But I added my information anyway—just in case.

  The next idea was to write to the Reno High Alumni Association. Very likely, according to my investigator, my mother had been a student there. She said girls didn’t usually have babies in towns like Reno. Most often they were sent away to places like San Francisco or Los Angeles.

  I found the Reno High Alumni Association online and wrote to every registered member. I attached a photo of myself.

  Several graduates wrote back. Names like Donna, Lanette, Lenda, Linda, Ruby, and Alice passed through my email account. They all wrote the same thing: So many girls were pregnant during those years. It was all so hush-hush. It was better to be a murderer than to be pregnant.

  I was given several names and with the help of the investigator, I found each woman.

  When I called these women, my hands shook and my heart caught a beat. I was potentially about to meet my mother. I had to remind myself that I had been a reporter who once interviewed murderers, beauty queens, and even presidential candidates. If I did all that, I could ask a stranger if she was my mother.

  Not one of the women turned out to be the one.

  All of them were very gracious, apologetic, and even hopeful. One woman, who gave up her son when she was sixteen, offered to be my mother. “You seem so nice,” she said. I asked why she hadn’t searched for him yet, and she became very quiet. “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she said. “I don’t want to upset his life.”

  FOUR MONTHS PASSED with no success when Aunt Georgia, a longlost relative from the past who lived in Carson City, told me—in an offhand conversation about my search—that I needed to contact Catholic Community Services.

  She insisted this organization had my non-identifying information.

  Georgia, the wife of Janet’s brother, Uncle Charles, had long been a true angel in my life. She had been the reason Bryan and I were saved from L.A. and Deb, but over the years—especially after my divorce from Steve—we had lost touch.

  And I felt guilty telling her about the search for my birth mother. I didn’t want to insult Janet’s memory or her relatives by suggesting I might need more than the memory of a dead woman. I knew Aunt Georgia came from the old school of people who said things like: “Adoption means nothing. You were loved and that’s all that matters.”

  While Aunt Georgia didn’t understand my need to search and couldn’t raise the empathy to encourage me forward, she did make a point of telling me to look in the right place. “I’m telling you it was Catholic Charities that managed your adoption. Not the state.”

  A FEW DAYS later, an email came in from Catholic Community Services of Northern Nevada.

  The email began: “Dear Jennifer, Thank you for writing and yes, indeed, your adoption was facilitated by our organization ...”

  I sat back in my chair, my hand over my mouth.

  It was an ordinary day—another fall day—the leaves on the red oak were turning yellow again.

  Aunt Georgia had been right.

  The email went on to say a file was in their office and that I needed to send a certified letter to request a copy of the Non-Identifying Information Report.

  I typed a message back to the organization. I wrote that a certified letter would go out immediately.

  TWENTY-THREE

  FOUND

  MY MOTHER HAS BEEN FOUND. She lives in Reno, Nevada. Her name is Catherine.

  Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.

  How did I know?

  Within one hour of receiving the Non-Identifying Information Report from Catholic Community Services, my investigator unearths Catherine’s birth records, marriage records, and even a couple divorces. She lives in Reno and has been there—a few miles from St. Mary’s Hospital—nearly all of her life.

  Knowing she is out there and has been there all this time becomes such a blow, I have to bend over to catch my breath.

  Knowing she has been found also sets me into a shaking fit of urgency as if I will burst from my skin. I must get to her.


  In order not to explode or pull myself apart, I concentrate all my energy into a calm, unemotional focus that is a bit frightening to observe from the outside. It’s like being in a newsroom, listening to police scanners and picking out the tragedies that will lead the evening report—Murder? Drug bust? Massive pileup on the interstate? As a reporter, I didn’t let myself feel the sorrow that came with such tragic events and I do not let myself feel anything now.

  Calculating. That’s what I become. I am streamlined calculation.

  I determine that my first contact with Catherine will not happen near my children or Rogelio. Complete silence is what I require to maintain focus and to hold steady.

  As I drive through town, navigating through traffic, I must ask myself, Why I am hardening in this way? What am I afraid of?

  I cross the Willamette River via the steel bridge and sunlight shines on the surface of the water. A few kayaks are out, drawing ripples on the surface of the river.

  The answer to my question is obvious. I am terrified she will reject me, yet again.

  I pull into the parking lot of my office, pop the trunk, and unload the back of the car. The world goes on around me—birds singing, wind blowing, sun shining—and I carry all my equipment up the stairs and juggle out the keys that open the front door.

  Crazy spaghetti western movie music plays in my head—that whistling dusty tune—and I feel like Clint Eastwood with a dirty five o’clock shadow and spurs on my boots. All I need is a ragged wool poncho and a couple guns in my holsters.

  As I go inside, I know I am preparing myself for a showdown with the mother who never searched. I am getting ready to hear the truth, even if it includes, “Go away. I don’t want to remember.”

  MY OFFICE IS a lot like a favorite living room might be—a dream space with overstuffed furniture covered in velvets and silks. Fresh flowers are on a low pewter table and pillows are scattered around. My desk, from France, is hand painted and overhead is a chandelier of draping crystals and sweeping brass.

  Josephine calls my office the Princess Palace. To her eyes, it’s a fairy wonderland for a little girl who still believes in magic.