If You Could See Me Now. Michael Mewshaw
had grown up with a single mother who had to pinch pennies to provide for her two children.
"I always felt women gave up kids for financial reasons," Mrs.Woodson said. "They couldn't afford to bring them up alone. But to realize that with Amy's mom there was no good reason to put her up for adoption, that surprised me."
I pointed out that Amy's birth mother had been under family and social pressures, but Mrs. Woodson insisted, "That's not what I call a good reason.This woman needed therapy. Her image was too important to her."
I urged her to tell me more about what Amy had been like as a child.
"Oh, she was a joy to raise," Mrs.Woodson said,"and such a beautiful girl. Even when she was five or six, people stopped and stared at her. When she was still in a stroller, people absolutely fawned over her."
Mrs.Woodson laughed and admitted that while the adoption agency made every effort to match children with parents similar to them, they couldn't control chromosomes. "Amy doesn't look anything like me. I'm small-boned, petite, about 5'4", and I guess you'd say I'm zaftig. Beside me Amy always felt like a giant, but she was just tall and looked like a model.
"Even as a little girl, she was always interested in clothes. It must have been something inborn. She certainly didn't get it from me."
Mrs. Woodson recalled that Amy's adoptive grandmother had made her a dress for her second birthday. It was of green velvet, a color suitable for the Christmas season, and it had a white fur collar and a picture of a cat stitched on the pocket. Amy loved the outfit. But as a surprise her grandmother had also made a doll with brown hair like Amy's and a replica of the green velvet dress, accurate right down to the fur collar and the cat on the pocket. She presented it in a shoe box, and the instant Amy lifted the lid, she burst into tears and threw it on the floor.
It amused Mrs. Woodson to think that Amy had reacted like a clothes-conscious woman who gets jealous when someone shows up in the same dress. But it seemed to me more likely that it had scared Amy to see a miniature of herself in a box.
As Mrs.Woodson described Amy's adolescence, she emphasized her down-to-earth qualities. "She always had a lot of common sense. She was a decent student. Mostly Bs, some Cs. She wasn't really interested in going off to college, and I couldn't have afforded to pay for it. Her father didn't help much financially, and he didn't feel girls needed college. She did a couple of semesters at Pasadena Community College and worked at night at Monahan's Pub.That was a big pickup place in town, and at eighteen Amy wasn't even old enough to serve drinks. But she handled it well and was very level-headed."
It struck me that, except for her level-headedness and her lackadaisical attitude toward school, Amy's childhood resembled mine far more than it did her birth mother's. Divorced parents, money trouble, parttime jobs and lingering confusion about personal identity.
According to her adoptive mother, Amy became interested in her birth parents, particularly her biological mother, as she advanced into her teens."'I just want to know what she looks like,' " Mrs.Woodson recalled her saying."I told her that was normal and that I would have felt the same. Many adoptive parents feel threatened when their kids start searching for their roots. I didn't."
Mrs. Woodson encouraged both of her children to feel free to express curiosity about their birth parents. The three of them joined the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association and once went to an ALMA national convention in Las Vegas where a parent and child who had been reunited spoke of their positive experience. From local ALMA meetings, however, they gained a more realistic perspective and realized that, as Mrs.Woodson put it, "not all stories turn out prettily. But most are happy, and the birth parents say they always wondered and worried what happened to their children."
Whether reunions went poorly or well, Mrs. Woodson held the belief that adopted children have a basic right to know their origins. "The idea that third parties—doctors, lawyers, birth parents, adoption agencies—can contract away that right is appalling to me."
Still, as had been her abiding practice with Amy, she didn't push her to seek a reunion."I didn't feel it was up to me to take control of the situation." She suggested that Amy might contact the Children's Home Society for information and left it up to her.
As our conversation drifted toward areas of deepest interest to me, I found it difficult not to hurry Mrs.Woodson along. But I let her tell the tale at her own pace, interrupting only to clarify a point or unkink the chronology.
Amy, she said, had started off her search with an advantage that few adopted children enjoy.When the Woodsons went to the courthouse to complete the adoption, there was some confusion, and as lawyers and CHS representatives and the nervous parents passed papers back and forth, an extraordinary violation of standard practice took place. Amy's original birth certificate popped up in Mrs.Woodson's hands, and for an instant, before a flustered CHS employee retrieved it, she got a glimpse of a strange name: Elaine Godot Mewsahu.
"Right away, I thought of Beckett," Mrs.Woodson told me. "It hit me that the Godot part had to be an inside joke, as in Waiting for Godot. But I thought Mewsahu might be the birth mom's last name."
I'm accustomed to people mangling my surname. This was by no means the most extreme misspelling. But it shocked me that it had wound up on Amy's birth certificate.
Assuming that Amy might someday need the name, Mrs. Woodson had scribbled it down and waited. The wait lasted almost twenty-two years. At last, on July 14, 1986, Amy submitted a notarized Waiver of Rights to Confidentiality to the Children's Home Society. Otherwise known as a Consent to Contact statement, this form signaled that she welcomed contact with her birth parents. If they ever submitted the same documentation, the Children's Home Society was legally free to arrange a reunion.At the same time,Amy applied for access to the "nonidentifying information" in her file.
There matters remained for several years.The CHS received no inquiries and no Consent to Contact statement from her birth parents, and Amy, regardless of how much she speculated about the past, did nothing in the present to move her search along. Mrs. Woodson, however, had read the "nonidentifying information" closely and noticed the reference to the birth mother's being a runner-up in the Miss Maryland contest. In the early 1990s, while on a business trip to Baltimore, Mrs. Woodson leafed through the telephone directory. Although she found no listings under Mewsahu, she spotted several under a tantalizingly similar name—Mewshaw—and concluded that there must have been a misprint on the original birth certificate or that in her flustered state of mind, she had copied the name wrong.Though she didn't know it, she was still thirty miles off the mark. I come from a different batch of Mewshaws who hail from the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
On her return to California, Mrs.Woodson gave the new spelling of the name to Amy and once again let her deal with it as she pleased.This time, when Amy procrastinated, one of her girlfriends seized the initiative. Pretending to be a sociology student, she called the California Lutheran Hospital and claimed she had a graduate school project that required her to pick a date at random—December 24, 1964—and track the lives of everybody born at the hospital on that day.
"Hospitals aren't supposed to reveal that information," Mrs.Woodson said. "But sometimes they do. Maybe they guess it's a child search ing for her parents and take mercy. Anyway, Amy's friend learned there were a handful of babies born on Dec. 24, 1964, and just one of them was a girl—Elaine Godot Mewshaw."
At this point, Amy was galvanized to hire a private detective. She never met the man. Their conversations took place by telephone. As Mrs.Woodson and Amy both recalled it, the man was a friend or relative of Amy's first husband. In short order, he produced the name, address and telephone number of my half-sister.
Neither Amy nor her adoptive mother grasped how tenuous the link had been. As I took pains to point out to them, not a single detail from the "nonidentifying information" bears any resemblance to Karen's personal data. Blond and blue-eyed, 5'2" and four years younger than the birth mother, Karen had never participated in the Miss Maryland pageant, never lived in California and didn't have parents or a sibling who matched those described in the CHS file.What's more, since Karen and I hadn't had the same last name, and since for the past twenty-odd years she had lived under her husband's name, it was a mystery how the investigator