Attempt to Reunite with Son Brings Frustration

Looking for man born near or on November 25, 1975, in New Jersey, adopted. Your father is searching for you....

So...switched at birth? Switched at adoption? Just f@#!ed by the sealed records system?

Right.

But a great argument for opening up sealed records for adopted people--and their natural/biological parents.

Just as you're planning to do some sit-ups in front of the tube during Good Morning America--up comes the Adoption Story of the Day. A (birth/real/actual/biological, you pick) father, Ron Ryba, can not forget the son he had at sixteen with his high school sweetheart, Kathy Butler, when they were juniors at the Shawnee (N.J.) High School in 1975. The boy was placed for adoption through Catholic Charities of Trenton but Ron, his father can not forget him. He married, and has other children, but still feels the heart tugs for the son who got away. After many years of bugging Catholic Charities, Ryba received a file about his son, detailing his development through the years, even noting his first words. His name was Philip.

"When you have your own children, you bonds, your thoughts...and I go back..and you know there's a piece missing," Ryba told ABC News.

After repeated requests to meet his son, Ryba and the person thought to be his son exchanged letters through Catholic Charities, and a year later the young man was finally ready. They met at a baseball game and talked all the way through it. "The journey I took was a lot of pain," Ryba said. "A lot that I went through, shame as a 16-year-old...so I thought that meeting and seeing this guy who had a great life and loving parents and was a [good thing on] balance. My pain was his joy."

So far, so good, right? Not so fast.

In time the two men grew close, so close that Ryba wanted to add him to his will. At his lawyer's urging, he took a DNA test, apparently along with the first mother.

You know the result right? Otherwise, what's the story? No match with either parent. A complete case of mixed-up files. Both men are broken-hearted. "I thought of Phil," continues Ryba, "and I didn't know what to say to him because he is a great guy and I didn't know what to say to him."

He adds: "Where is my son?"

Ryba claims he went back to Catholic Charities but the Executive Director Francis Dolan told him they can do nothing to help him. "At that moment, Ryba says, "the moral value of what I did was gone." Yes...that is a feeling I can relate to. The moral value of what I did. Despite all the reasons for my relinquishing, I have never been able to let go of the nagging feeling there was no moral value to what I did. It happened. Zero moral gain on my part; much confusion on daughter's part. But that's not the story today.

Director Dolan says he has no idea what happened, that the switch could have happened in the hospital or very early on, that there were at least six boys in the care of Catholic Charities at the time--but because the records are sealed up tight, he cannot do anything for Ryba or Phil (who asked that his last name not be disclosed). Once again, the moral value of the sealed records is less than zero, a negative injustice.

None of those other boys have approached the agency, and without their consent, Dolan said he cannot look in those files (you wanna bet he hasn't?), but added they are ready if anyone calls and says they might be one of those boys and will do what they can to facilitate the right reunion.

As I watched, I kept waiting for the reporter, Yunji De Nies, or someone to give the salient facts--such as: Where exactly did this happen? And what is Phil's birthday, so if a relative or friend of the right man is watching, or the person himself...but nada. I watched the story twice and the only way you know that this is happening at the Trenton Catholic Charities is by reading the word "Trenton" carved in the building as Dolan walks out. Nor did the reporter or GMA host Diane Sawyer give the birth date, which fortunately are in the written story. Made me crazy.

So the birth date of the boy, now grown man, we are looking for:  November 25, 1975. Hospital unknown, but almost certainly in the somewhere in New Jersey. Placed with Catholic Charities. Maybe the mother of another of those boys will read this and find her way to the Catholic Charities...and contact at least that son, and either be reunited or find Ryba's missing son. We will stay tuned.

But not all was lost with the airing of the story. Publicity about the injustice and stupidity and  heartbreak of sealed records is always a good thing. The story did end with a short discussion between Sawyer and De Nies that touched upon the injustice (no, they did not use that word, but it was implied, so they get points for that) of sealed records, but that thought sure was left in the minds of all viewers except say, those legislators in New Jersey and New York who will not support opening up the sealed records. Makes me nuts, yes it does.

So...if you happen to know a 34-year-old adopted man born near or on November 25, 1975, tell him that someone might be looking for him and to contact the Trenton Catholic Charities. A father is waiting. Here's the link to the video clip: Attempt to Reunite with Son Given Up for Adoption Brings Frustration. 

Well, you ask, where was the mother in this story? Her name was given--Kathy Butler--so supposedly she allowed that, but there was no mention of her searching or not, or what kind of reunion she had with her son, or did not have. She did agree to the DNA test however, so she is not completely MIA. This was a complete turnabout from the usual birth mother-searching-father-doesn't-care-much story that is more common, and while it was refreshing to see a father who wanted to find his offspring, I did feel that the missing mother was somehow like the ones I read about on FaceBook, where so often someone posts about having a rejecting mother, or a found natural family  that does not treat him or her well. However, she did allow her name to be used, so at least she's not in the closet. Maybe she just didn't want her 15 minutes of fame.

If you live in a sealed records state--there are 42 of them--write your state legislators today and demand that in the name of justice, the records be opened. How long do we have to wait? Depends on how many of us--adoptees and birth/first parents--act up.--lorraine

A Birth Father Refuses to Meet His Daughter

While we are talking about men's reactions to learning about a first child who had been surrendered to adoption, here is a section of the memoir I'm writing that relates to my daughter, Jane, and her biological father, Brian. This section picks up after Birthmark has been published, and I have found Jane. The year is 1983; Jane was seventeen. Jane lived in Wisconsin; her adoptive mother was a nurse, her father an insurance adjuster. At the time of this part of the story, Brian was a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, where I live.

Copyright 2009 Lorraine Dusky

Chapter 11 No-Show Dad

If the point of Birthmark had been to shine a light on the truth of adoption and the injustice of sealed birth records, as well as to show that mothers did not forget, then further publicity of our “happy ending” was a good thing. With Jane’s and her parents’ agreement, I initiated reunion stories in the media when she came back to Sag Harbor the following summer for an extended stay—most of the summer! Imagine my elation! Imagine my joy! Evan, my husband's son, was also spending the summer between college semesters with us. In two years, I’d gone from a single woman singing the blues to a wife and mother, two times over.

Sure, it happens to a lot of women, but to me? Not something I would have allowed myself to imagine. How much the changes in my life affected me was evident apparently in the lines of my face. A couple of months after I’d been reunited with Jane, someone a friend of a friend asked her if I’d had a face lift or “something done.” He said I looked “different, younger.” I was forty at the time.

Jane and I did a TV show in Boston, interviews with the local weeklies, and Long Island’s daily, Newsday, where Brian worked, sent a columnist. Her story [1] filled nearly half a page, with a picture with the two of us sitting on our back porch with our arms wrapped around each other. Ann [Jane's adoptive mother] is quoted, noting that while Jane had been curious about her biological mother, friends were against our meeting. “You never know how strong the ties are.” she said. “But we did it for Jane’s sake…. Here was this glamorous girl from New York. ‘It had to be that, didn’t it’ I thought then. I wasn't thrilled about the whole thing. I really did feel threatened.” She added that her husband was more suspicious about what I wanted, “but it was easier for him because it was a mother who came into the picture….But no, it worked out nicely.”

The writer noted that Jane was only uncomfortable with one question: What is Lorraine to you? “It’s hard to describe to other people what she is to me,” Jane answered.

Oddly enough, the writer did not ask about her father, and we offered no information. Did she know who it was? Did she even knew him? The information mill among newspaper people operates pretty well, as you might imagine; but maybe she hadn’t heard any of the gossip from Rochester, because after all, I left there in a cloud seventeen years earlier. If Jane hoped a story in Brian’s own newspaper would melt his heart, she kept it to herself, and I did not mention it. I hoped he would call. Unless he was at that moment away in detox, he had to have seen the story.

However, her father was mentioned a few weeks later, in a New York Times story, [2] that noted that he lived on Long Island, but so far had refused to meet her. The story included another mother [Alison Ward and her daughter, Holly] who had reunited with her teenage daughter. The four of us are all smiles in the accompanying photograph. “Jane, who had planned to start searching for her natural mother when she turned eighteen, views the situation this way: ‘I just feel I have two women who really care about me,’” the story read. No sweat, she seemed to be saying.

Ann was quoted in the piece, remarking that she “always wondered if [our meeting] would interfere with my relationship with Jane, but finding Lorraine has freed Jane and given her much more self-confidence. And, if anything, Jane and I are as close, if not closer, than ever.”

A spokesman for the National Council for Adoption—the opposition—was also quoted in the story, stating that the search movement could be the source of a great “potential for human sorrow” on the part of the birth mothers. “These women may have had their child through rape or incest, and a meeting could be very harmful to them.”[3] He estimated that only one to two percent of adoptees and birth parents want to meet; Florence Fisher of ALMA disputed that, and put the figure at 80 percent. Elizabeth Cole from the Child Welfare League noted that records are open in Britain and Israel and that her colleagues there “had not found the practice to be harmful.” She predicted that adoptees will eventually get their original birth records in this country. That was in 1983.

The piece ended with a zinger: “In 1979 Julie Welsh, a 33-year-old medical secretary from Fair Lawn, N.J., traced the son she had given up for adoption 12 years earlier to a family who lived only 30 minutes away. One day she summoned the courage to knock on their door. She learned that the boy’s adoptive mother had died when he was 5 and the father had married a woman who did not like him, so he was sent to a private school in New Hampshire.

“‘If you want him back you can have him back,’ Mrs. Welsh was told. She did, so the following weekend she and her husband drove up to get the boy, Jeff, who had not been allowed to come home for holidays or vacations. The Welshes, who have two other children, have legally adopted Jeff, whose first words when his mother encountered him were: ‘I’m so glad you came and found me!’”

Brian had to have seen at least one of the pieces. But he did not call. Nor had he responded to the picture and note I’d written earlier, sent to him at the office. There was no reason in making another call, only to be turned down again, but Jane had other ideas. She would get him on the phone herself—he would not turn her down if she called, right? Probably right? I admired her moxie—she was only seventeen, and she’d been the adopted kid who had seizures and wore a hockey helmet to school for four years. But what if, even then, he said, No, I won’t meet you and hung up? Was she up to this outcome? How much more pain did she have to endure? But I did not interfere; this was her call. She’s a gutsy kid, I told myself—she’s my daughter, all right.

So, from the upstairs phone in the hallway—the same one where I’d taken her name down two years before—I dialed his direct number at Newsday and handed her the receiver. Please stay, she whispered as the phone rang, I might need you. Brian answered.

But she was also his daughter, she was also a teenager afraid of rejection, and now her courage failed her. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” I could hear his voice faintly coming through the line but Jane could not make herself speak. Her eyes were shiny globes of infinite sorrow. Go ahead, say something, I urged with a nod of the head, Say something. Say Hello. Say anything.

She could not find her voice. Maybe I should have grabbed the phone out of his hands and yelled at him to be a man and just say hello to his daughter, but he’d been so clear—even irritated the last time I’d called—about not being ready, just “not now,” and maybe my intervention now might just make him angry, and that might be worse than this impasse. That might set back everything, if she were ever to meet him. Maybe.

Brian hung up after twenty seconds or so.

Jane looked me, sad and terrified and disappointed all at once, a look that broke my heart. She ran down the steps and out of the house. No, she did not want me to come. She did not want to talk about the aborted phone call, or him or anything when she got back, and what really, could there be to say? We never spoke of that phone call again.

Of course now I was really angry with Brian. This was someone who had spoken of “honor” and “character” when we had been together. He turned out to be a straw man. He didn’t even have the backbone to meet his daughter.

---

[1] Marilyn Goldstein, “ Forging A Family Bond After 17 Years, Long Island Diary, Newsday, July 21, 1983.

[2] Judy Klemesrud, “Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up,” New York Times, Aug. 29,1983.

[3] While that seems to be the great bugaboo about open records to uninformed people or those opposed to open records, there are no indications, no statistics from states with open records that these women object to meeting their children in any greater number than women who were not the victims of rape or incest. Of course last week, we had a story from New Jersey about a woman who was suing the state when she a child contacted her. For such women, I have little understanding, as the child is wholly innocent in such a circumstance.