By: Corin Hirsch / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Sometimes we learn the deepest truths in the most ordinary moments. One afternoon, when I was six years old, I saw a character giving birth in a military tent on the sitcom M*A*S*H. I immediately ran from the living room to the kitchen, with a very important question for my mother. “Was I born in a tent like that?” I said, hoping to learn my origin story.

Suddenly, my mother left the room, crying. When she returned, she sat me down and told me a truth that I had somehow always felt. “Uncle brought you home from the hospital, to Mom and Dad,” she said. “You are adopted, which means we chose you.”

I was relieved to learn this truth, but since it upset my mother, I decided never to mention it again. However, my thirst for details never waned. My parents had the same skin color as me, but I didn’t look much like them. I was clumsy, thin, and tall, and a bookworm; they weren’t. Despite their love and acceptance, I always felt like an outsider in that family, and I couldn’t figure out why.

In the decades before Google-it, I was not equipped with the tools to find information about my biological parents, especially since I was still a minor and adoption records were closed in every state in the U.S. However, shortly after I turned 18, I called the hospital where I was born to request my records. At first, the clerk on the phone was cordial, but she seemed confused when she didn’t know my last name at birth. After I told her I was adopted, the phone froze.

My documents arrived in the mail a few weeks later, filled with thick black lines. The clerk had covered up every trace of personal information: my biological mother’s name, date of birth, address, and details of her hospital stay. These redacted documents reinforced my sense of erasure. I shoved them into a drawer and tried to move on.

Years later, as a journalist with the ability to uncover information about almost anyone and anything, I continued to face obstacles whenever I tried to learn more about my biological mother. Then, when I was 35, I used part of my tax refund to hire a private investigator to find her contact information. He quickly found her: she was a marine lawyer living in Connecticut. Excited and dreaming of a happy mother-daughter reunion, I immediately sent her a letter, subtly suggesting that I was her child and asking for information about her medical history and ethnicity.

But my dream turned out to be just that: a fantasy. My biological mother responded, but not in the way I had hoped. As a typical lawyer, she neither confirmed nor denied that I was the baby she had left that day in late July, but she did let it be implied through her words. “I don’t want to go back to that experience,” she wrote, adding that knowledge of my existence could be “extremely damaging” to her.

Her email shocked me. Of course she would want to see me, to see who I had become, right? I plucked up the courage to ask her for a picture, maybe even lunch (we lived about three hours apart). But she insisted that I never contact her again.

I didn't know it then, but second-degree rejection by a biological parent—when an attempt to reconnect with the birth family fails—is rare and considered a traumatic event for which some adoptees seek psychiatric help. I coped with the initial shock with long phone calls with friends and, perhaps, a little too much red wine. However, I didn't have much time to reflect—I was preparing for a master's degree, and that week I had to attend a seminar with my professor at her apartment in New York.

During an afternoon tea break, the professor's partner, a judge, was chatting with us at their kitchen counter. In a direct, no-nonsense style of communication, forged in New York courtrooms, she asked me about my life. I recounted the events of the past few days and told her that I was finding it nearly impossible to concentrate.

She listened attentively. Then, as I imagined she might do in court, she began with quick, direct questions. “When were you born?” she asked. In the early 1970s, I said. “And was your mother Catholic?” “Yes,” I replied, “from an Irish Catholic family. One of seven children, I think.”

"And maybe she was young, maybe"?

“Yes - 19 years old, I think.”

She paused. “I know, I’m almost the same age as your biological mother,” she said. “It may be hard for you to understand, especially now, but back then it was very difficult for an Irish Catholic girl to get pregnant out of wedlock.”

The tea stuck in my throat. Was she really protecting my biological mother? My mother who was rejecting me again out of shame, cruelty, or both? “I didn’t know that,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t excuse her behavior. She’s in her fifties now, for God’s sake.”

Without changing her stance, the judge explained how pregnant Catholic girls were often sent away to hide their pregnancies and preserve the family's honor. How the stigma could be unbearable. She reminded me that abortion was illegal at the time and that the decision Roe v. Wade precedent (which legalized abortion in the US) had not yet been given - it would happen a few months later.

As we put the cups in the sink, she urged me to try to see the situation from another perspective, if only for my own peace of mind. “What’s done is done,” she said. “You’re alive and you have your whole life ahead of you.” Now that I knew the truth, the only way forward was through her.

For weeks, I clung to my sense of injustice. Perhaps I was connected to that early, unexplained wound I had carried since childhood. Like many adoptees, I always felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, but I didn’t know why. Now I had proof. But if trauma and shame are passed down from generation to generation, how can we break this cycle?

In the months and years that followed, I realized that that judge had thrown me a lifeline. What she said that afternoon planted the seeds of compassion for a woman I could have easily hated. Those words softened the ferocity of pain that might otherwise have turned to eternal bitterness, and ignited a deep sensitivity that I have used on many occasions since.

Her words also became a balm when I was rejected again by a biological uncle, after we were connected through a DNA test. And, they gave me confidence when I searched for and finally found my biological father's family - who welcomed me with open arms and without any hesitation. Above all, the judge's words that distant day in the kitchen helped me let go of the need for perfect answers - and create space for conclusions that are not perfect. /Telegraph/

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