A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body

by Lauren Weedman

  “No,” I lied. “I was curious if you had a file somewhere with information that maybe you hadn’t—”

  “And how did you get into the black student union, Lauren? Don’t you have to be black?” my Dad asked.

  I wasn’t technically in the union, I had just attended a few of their events.

  At the end of the night my mom knocked once on my bedroom door and threw it open before I could say “come in” or “go away.” (Not only did my door have no locks, it barely closed all the way.)

  “You want to know what you are, Lauren?!?” She had a huge grin on her face like she’d lost her mind.

  “Do you want to know?” the scary lady asked again.

  I nodded my head silently, stunned by her freaky energy. I was sure she was going to shove a black-and-white photo in my face, one depicting my real family fighting over a can of beans. (“The one holding the can is your daddy, and the little girl holding the spoon, why that’s your mama!”)

  But instead, she threw her empty hands into the air. “You are what we are!” she said. She was so pleased with her answer that she repeated it. “That’s exactly what you are!”

  Before I had a chance to ask what we were (besides white and Midwestern) she closed the door and was gone.

  The next morning when I went down for breakfast I discovered that the fridge had been adorned with a Dear Abby column. The heading was “Don’t Search for Me.” It was a letter from a birth mother begging her birth daughter to not try to come look for her. “You’ll just bring up all the pain from the time when I had to give you away,” wrote Leave Me Alone in Alabama. “There is a reason why I gave you away. Please respect that.”

  Mom had clearly been saving this letter to argue her case when the time came. As I joined Elizabeth at the breakfast table I decided I would try to be happy with the family I had.

  “I can’t eat my breakfast while you eat yours,” I announced to my sister. “You love your milk too much. It’s gross. It’s milky.”

  “Well, you’re fat,” Elizabeth countered. “So stop borrowing my clothes and stretching them all out.”

  We sat in silence for a while until Elizabeth shuffled to the sink in her slippers to rinse out her bowl. Before she left the kitchen she said in an odd, singsongy voice that was not hers, “I consider you my real sister and I always have, okay?”

  It sounded so inauthentic I wouldn’t have been surprised if my mom had been standing around the corner holding up a giant cue card and pointing to the words. (“I CONSIDER YOU MY REAL SISTER ...”)

  Senior year of high school Jill and I were smoking pot in her basement, getting ready to watch each other lip-synch to songs set on the wrong speed. She loaded her Yentl record (33⅓ rpm) and tried to lip-synch to it at 45 rpm. I was having the time of my life until she brought up my real mom again.

  “Call the place where they adopted you and ask them,” she suggested. “Maybe all you have to do is ask!” She was yelling over Barbra Streisand’s chipmunked voice singing “Papa, Can You Hear Me?”

  My mother had always told the story of how she chose to adopt like this: “Well, I was volunteering at the Children’s Bureau because a bunch of ladies I knew from the swim club enjoyed it there—it was a nice, social place—and when I found out they did adoptions I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll take one.’”

  When I revealed to Jill that my agency was called the Children’s Bureau, she ran upstairs to get the phone book. She found the listing almost immediately and dialed the number. “I’ll say I’m you,” she offered helpfully. And she did.

  The person on the phone told her that they couldn’t release any information, but that there was an adoption support group for state-adopted adoptees that met in a local library every Tuesday night.

  The next Tuesday night I was there in the adoptee circle with my mom sitting right next to me. She was the only adoptive mother in the group. The rest of the circle was made up of guilt-ridden birth mothers and eighteen-year-old adopted girls who had already had two kids of their own just so they could “have somebody who looked like me.” (I counted this as the best reason to have a baby, right behind “to have something to cuddle with.”)

  When my mom had announced she was coming with me, I thought, “Great! Now all I need is some rope and a good strong tree.” I had no idea why she suddenly wanted to come along. She clearly wasn’t into my finding my birth mother, and we never did anything together besides negotiate the terms of my punishments.

  When it was my turn to introduce myself and say why I was there, I felt incredibly awkward having the mom I was trying to trade in sitting right next to me. The custom was for we adoptees to announce our birthday first, then pause a moment in case one of the searching birth mothers shouted, “Bingo!” and claimed us.

  “March 5, 1969,” I said. There were no takers (for which, looking around the room, I thanked god), so I continued. “I’m just here because I’m adopted and it sounded kind of interesting.” But before I could finish my introduction my mom jumped in with her own.

  “I’m Sharon Weedman and I’m Lauren’s mom,” she said, smiling. “Her adoptive mother.” She paused there for applause and she actually got it. We were the first adoptive mother/daughter team they’d had in a long time, apparently. The rest of the hour was spent with everyone gushing all over the rare and intense loving bond that my mother and I obviously shared.

  My mother was the belle of the ball. She reached out and clasped hands with teary birth mothers, assuring them that somewhere their babies were being loved.

  I sat still and quiet. I was saving all my words for the car ride home. I’d let her have her little moment in the sun—she could take over my support group for one night. But that would be it. From here on out I wanted to go alone.

  “I’m dropping you at home and then I’m going back out,” my mom informed me as soon as we got in the car. The shock blew my prepared speech right out of my head.

  “What? Where are you going?”

  “Jim—the guy with the moustache who was adopted in Arkansas—told me there’s an underground search group that meets at Pizza Hut on 71st.”

  Before I could ask any questions she pushed me out of the car and sped off to Pizza Hut.

  The next day I was minding my own business, watching twelve consecutive hours of television, when my mom walked into the family room dressed like a crazy wig lady. She was wearing a blonde wig, huge owl sunglasses, and a raincoat. The mere sight of her made me want to cry.

  “What are you doing, Mom?” I asked, fighting back my panic. “Whatever you’re doing—please stop. Please.”

  “I’m undercover!” she announced, thrusting one of her little arms up into the air in a triumphant gesture.

  “No!” I screamed. I didn’t understand exactly what she was doing, but all I could think was, NOOO!

  “Yes!” she shouted back.

  When I pleaded with her to please stop and to get some kind of professional help she threw back her head and cackled. Before I could shoot her with a tranquilizer dart, she was gone.

  I called my dad and told him to keep a lookout for her on his way home from work—she was probably on the side of the road collecting Coke cans as evidence and dusting stop signs for fingerprints.

  When Mom returned that evening, she explained where she had gone and why her being undercover was so important. She was breaking the law, she said, so she had to be careful. My little ballet-teaching, working-in-a-jewelry-store, lamb patty-cooking mother was out breaking the law, dressed up like Groucho Marx.

  Earlier in the day, she’d gone to Terre Haute High School and asked to look through all the yearbooks from 1967 through 1969. It turned out that when I was first handed over, the adoption agency had given my mom a few basic details, which she’d scribbled down on a little piece of paper. She knew I had been born in Terre Haute, Indiana, to a fifteen-year-old boy and sixteen-year-old girl. But that was all she had to go on—that and the agency’s assurance that the teen parents both came from fa
milies just full of doctors and nurses. Apparently that was the only profession the volunteer handling our adoption could think of that sounded impressive. (“Doctors and nurses—the whole lot of them. Lots of awards and thick heads of hair.”)

  My newly insane mother also revealed that while viewing the yearbooks she’d torn out page after page to take home and study.

  “What’s next?” I asked my mom. “Murder, kidnapping?”

  She took her sunglasses off. “You wanted to find out about your real mother, didn’t you? Well, I’m going to help you,” she said, tightening the belt of her trench coat.

  When I was in sixth grade my parents had planned a child-free vacation in the Bahamas. The cruise ship was scheduled to head straight through the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, so before they set sail my mother sat my sister and me down to go over her will.

  “Now, girls,” she said, “there’s a clause in my will that says if something happens to me that it’s okay with you two—if you agree—that I come back and visit you as a ghost.”

  She was completely serious. I think. Or else it was an elaborate joke that she constructed just to mortify me. I could never be sure. But as I watched her make such a big production of her undercover search—running out of the house for late-night meetings at the Pizza Hut with the assistant PI she’d picked up at the support group—it made me wonder if she was actually doing the search or if this was another ruse intended to get a reaction out of me. After all, pulling this one over would’ve guaranteed hours of family entertainment.

  A week after she had ripped the pages out of the yearbooks, I discovered my mother calling every blonde who had graduated from Terre Haute High School in 1968. She was wearing her undercover outfit even though she was on the phone. She was reading from a script on her lap like a bad actor:

  “Oh, hello, my name is Ruth Robison. I’m from the Terre Haute Alumni Association, and we’re calling all of our alumni to see how they enjoyed their education with us. Did you enjoy your education? Good. Now I have a quick question. Do you remember any of your female classmates being absent from school six to nine months, due to an illness or a pregnancy?”

  That was the point at which they’d usually hang up on her.

  “This has nothing to do with me, Mom,” I said, as she dialed the next name on her list.

  “Oh, hello, my name is Ruth Robison,” she said into the receiver.

  The search, which coincided suspiciously with the debut of Murder, She Wrote, continued through my entire senior year of high school and into my first year of college.

  It ebbed and flowed. At one point Mom was certain she’d found her, and that she was Asian. During dinner, everyone kept staring at me—looking for it. By dessert, we all agreed there was something vaguely Asian about me. My eyes did slant down a bit at the edges. But what about my black booty, the group wondered. How could Asian heritage explain that? And what about my Irish pores?

  The search was briefly interrupted by my grandmother’s death. When I tried to point out the poignancy to my mother—“Here you are, searching for my mother and you’ve lost your own mother”—she accused me of being overly sentimental and sent me to the bowling alley across the street from the funeral home to pick up mixed drinks for everybody.

  Later, my mother’s search extended to appearances on the local TV news.

  “My daughter just wants to see a picture of her birth parents,” she pleaded to the cameras. “Please. Again, the birth date is March 5, 1969.”

  It was as if I’d gone missing, even though I was seated next to her, looking irritated.

  Finally I asked my mother not to tell me all the details about the search. It was too much. My heart couldn’t take all the “great leads” that turned out to be false hopes.

  “Don’t tell me it’s her until you know it’s her,” I begged my mom. “And I mean you know it’s her.”

  Two years later, I was working as a hostess at a bar and grill famous for its high-backed booths. I had graduated from high school and gone to college, but after a bad year I had returned to Indianapolis in an attempt to figure out what to do next.

  One night the phone at the hostess stand rang. “Arthur’s Bar and Grill, can I help you?” I answered, trying not to sound as bored as I was.

  It was my mom, who never called me at work. I wasn’t even aware she knew where I worked.

  “LAUREN, THE EAGLE HAS LANDED!” she yelled. “HE’S LANDED! I GOT HER! COME HOME RIGHT NOW! I GOT HER!” She was talking so loudly that the party of five waiting to be seated asked me who “her” was.

  I told them it was a fishing thing and asked to leave work early.

  When I opened the front door to my parents’ house the first thing I heard was my mother screaming, “WE GOT HER!!”

  As she told me what had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I stood over the sink shoving handful after handful of stale microwave popcorn in my face. I didn’t bother to shut my mouth or swallow—I just chewed furiously and took in her story.

  Continuing her life of crime, my mom had bribed Jim, the Pizza Hut committee member, who conveniently worked in a hospital, to go into the state records and see what he could find. He had typed my name into the computer and my birth mother’s name had come right up. He called my mother immediately and gave her the name: Diane McQuillen.

  My mother researched McQuillens who lived in the area where I was born and discovered the only current listing was an Emily and David McQuillen. When she felt it was getting too hot (“too close to the flame”), she handed the information to her assistant PI, Jim, whom she’d been working closely with over the years and trusted.

  Jim called the McQuillens, posing as an insurance man who needed to contact Diane. Sure enough, Emily and David were Diane’s parents. Suspecting that the nervous man on the other end of the phone was not who he said he was, they offered to call their daughter on his behalf and give his number to her. Emily hung up and immediately called Diane, who now lived in Denver.

  “She’s back,” Emily said to Diane. “The baby has come back.”

  At this point I was feeling incredibly relieved that nobody had threatened to shoot anybody for “meddling in their personal business.” And it was happening. After so many dead ends, the answers were just flowing and flowing. And if things kept going like this, I knew I’d soon be talking to my birth mother, and that was something I’d never allowed myself to imagine. So for the moment I just tried to wait and see what was next.

  My mom continued her story: Diane, who was at work when she got the call, snuck to a pay phone and called Jim back.

  “This is Diane,” she said. “My parents told me you were looking for me?”

  “Yes,” Jim said. “Does the date March 5, 1969, mean anything to you, Diane?”

  It did. It was the day her parents re-mortgaged their farm. It was also the day she had a baby. Diane was my mother.

  After making the initial contact, Jim had set up a time for my mother and me to call Diane: that same night. My mother was sharpening pencils and prepping questions from her research notebooks—as if she was sure Diane was going to jump on board, thrilled to be found and be reminded of her sordid past.

  “Did you ever think that maybe I was a product of some incest/rape situation that maybe she doesn’t want to be reminded of?” I asked my mom.

  “Well, the inbred thing has crossed our minds quite a bit,” Mom said. “But I doubt she’d be so eager to talk to us if there was some big trauma.”

  I thought she was being so naive. I suspected that Diane agreed to arrange the call so she could tell us to once and for all leave her alone. “There is a reason why I gave her up—please respect that reason,” she’d explain. Then she’d refer us to her letter published in Dear Abby.

  I changed my mind. I didn’t want to make the call. “What if we can’t understand her?” I asked my mom. I remembered the yellowed column stuck on the fridge: Signed, Leave Me Alone in Alabama.

  “I’m pretty sure she spea
ks English,” my mom said. She already had the receiver in her hand and was getting ready to dial.

  “No, I mean, because she’s missing half her teeth and has a mouth full of chewing tobacco ...”

  Mom finished dialing and put the phone to her ear. My dad was in the next room, watching a repeat of The Rockford Files. But sensing something big was happening in the house, he switched it off and just sat in his chair looking toward the kitchen. I held on to the counter so I didn’t start shaking.

  My mom was beaming, until someone on the other end of the line answered. Then her face fell and I could see how scared she was.

  In the smallest voice I’d ever heard her use, she said, “Hello? Diane? Hello. My name is Sharon Weedman and I’m calling about Lauren. I’m her mom. I mean, you’re her mom!”

  I could hear Diane’s laugh coming through the phone, and that was it. My mom started laughing too, and continued with what she now saw as a hilarious joke: “No! You’re her mother!”

  The “No, you are!”s went back and forth for a while before my mom got serious and picked up her pencil. She wanted to get some solid facts for the book she was working on, called I Searched ... I Found!

  Mom’s excitement was so sweet and intense that I worried she’d thank Diane for the information and hang up. She told Diane that in the book she would refer to her as my “BM” (birth mother).

  “BM! Right! You’re her BM! Ha ha ha!” she giggled into the phone. “Oh, Lauren’s giving me a dirty look. She doesn’t like the term ‘bowel movement’ so I usually say ‘BM,’ which she hates even more. Now, Diane, do you like to eat? Because Lauren sure does. We just can’t get her out of the kitchen. In fact she’s in the kitchen right now! Yes. She’s standing right in front of me.”