Loretta Young's 'adopted' daughter wasn't adopted at all

Loretta Young and Judy Lewis

So imagine if you were "adopted" by your "birth" mother and raised as an "adopted child." Your mother later marries, and has two "of her own." You take her husband's name, but you are still the "adopted child" in the family. When you ask your mother "as adopted children do. They say, 'Where are my.... Who's my mother? Who's my father" And she would answer very easily by saying, 'I couldn't love you anymore than if you were my own child.' Which of course didn't answer the question, but it said, 'Don't ask the question.'" *

After you are all grown up, just as you are about to marry, you tell your fiance that you do not understand your confusing relationship with your mother [actress Loretta Young] and that you do not know who your real father is. "I can't marry you," the grown-up 'adopted child" says to her fiance. "I don't know anything about myself.

And he says: "It's common knowledge, Judy. Your father is Clark Gable."

Should I tell my (adopted) child she's adopted?

Same-size Lorraine and real daughter Jane

You would think that the old and tired question of whether to tell your ''adopted" child she or he was adopted would have gone the way of Fifties Poodle skirts and Sixties love beads. But you would be wrong.

Over at Salon the guy who writes the advice column "Since You Asked" finds himself responding to an I-own-this-remarkable-kid-adoptive-mother who basically asks if her daughter ever need to be told the truth of her origins, and oh,. how she is wrestling with this question. (This issue of truth in identity must be in the air because yesterday's column idea--about daddies--seemed to come to me out of the blue.)

Are you friggen' kidding me? In this day and age?

Why not wait until some truth-telling cousin spills the beans? Or your best friend's daughter who is friends with your  daughter, and who has heard her adoption spoken of at home, blurts out the

Man Offers $1K for information leading to his family

You are almost sixty years old, your mother is going into a nursing home, and in cleaning out her home your 26-year-old daughter finds papers that show your name was changed when you were an infant.

You are adopted. You were not "Larry Dell" when you were born.

This after four decades of adoption reform, adoption in the news, adopted people searching? And your "mother" never told you the truth of your origins? To continue the fiction that she told herself, she lived the lie and kept you in the dark. What do you do now?

If you are Larry Dell of Brooklyn you advertise wherever you can and offer $1,000 to anyone who can give you information leading to can help him locate a blood relative.

Dell was born Louis Roth on Aug. 18, 1948, at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, according to the New York State Department of Health Adoption Information Registry. (Not sure how he got that information, but good for him.) He was his family's fifth child, and both of his birth parents--a truck driver and a homemaker--were 39 at the time he was born. His adoptive aunt believes his birth family lived in Bushwick or East New York, but she's not sure, said Dell, who can be contacted at larrydell@daddyoutpost.com. (Let him know where you heard about this if you contact him, please.)

This story, Adopted Brooklyn man offers $1K for help finding his family, in the New York Daily News today (3/14/10), really pisses me off. Pisses me off that this kind of hoodwinking still goes on. That people hide the truth from the person it matters the most to. That this is even possible today.

Once, when I was writing my memoir Birthmark, I was having lunch with a business contact and somehow we got around to adoption. He was an adoptive father and I poured out my story to him for reasons unknown. He said nothing, but later, as we were saying goodbye outside the restaurant, he turned to me and told me that a few years earlier, the mother of his (now adult) daughter had contacted them and had hoped to meet the girl. Did they tell her? No, he said, they did not tell her because although she knew she was adopted, she never talked about it. Or mentioned wanting to know her mother.

I wanted to punch the bastard. 

If you are adopted and are reading this and you have never talked to your adoptive parents about your feelings about adoption and knowing the truth of your origins, do so today. If you are a first/birth mother and have buried your sorrow and never talked to your father, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts about wanting to know what happened because that part of your life is never talked about, do so today. When a searcher calls and gets your brother/sister/uncle, he is going to say: She doesn't want to know. She's never talked about it.

And the reunion you secretly long for may die right there. I hear from searchers that it's most often the males in a family who turn down an active search, and they may hold the only key to a birth/first mother's whereabouts. If not today--when? --lorraine