010 – How Can I Meet Her Without Telling Her Who I Am?

Steve was raised in Baltimore, MD in a predominantly Jewish suburban neighborhood. But as he looked around at his friends and other families, he truly questioned his own identity, especially as an adoptee. In an era before electronic record keeping, Steve used his street savvy to buy the information he needed about himself in order to advance his search for his biological family. More crafty thinking led Steve right to his biological mother’s front door. He wanted to meet her, but not necessarily reveal that he was her son. He knocked on her door with a story that should have gotten him sent on his way. Instead she invited him in! Just wait until you hear his crafty approach to introducing himself to his biological mother, and the truth about his European heritage.

The post 010 – How Can I Meet Her Without Telling Her Who I Am? appeared first on Who Am I...Really? Podcast.

Steve (00:04):

My biggest question to my parents who raised me was always, are you sure? Are you 100% sure that I'm Jewish? And I'm looking in the mirror, I'm thinking, I don't look like anybody in this neighborhood. Yeah, I knew I wasn't Jewish and I wanted to know what my background was.

Voices (00:27):

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon (00:38):

This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members? Hey, it's Damon and today you're going to hear Steve's journey. He has family history in Baltimore, Maryland, but his biological roots go back to Chicago, Illinois. Steve says that he was a bit of a juvenile delinquent when he was a teen and quite the opposite of his siblings, one who was a jock, the other who was a scholar, but it turned out those street skills and crafty thinking were just the tools he needed to locate and connect with his biological mother. I can't wait until you hear just how he did it.

Damon (01:18):

Steve, I'm super glad to be connected to you, man. I appreciate you accepting the invitation to chat a little bit. You've got quite an amazing story, but I'd love for you to take me back to your early childhood. Tell me about what it was like in your family as an adoptee, what your structure was like and your family and what your community was like and how you fit into the community as an adoptee.

Steve (01:42):

Perfect. Yeah, I'll start off was saying, you know, my adoptive parents, I'll start off with them, uh, to give you a little idea why they even went the adoption routes, but they, they were a Jewish couple. Uh, they were married in the late forties. They decided to start a family probably somewhere around 1950, 51, and they obviously could not conceive. So, um, they decided to go the adoption route. Okay. Then what makes this whole story interesting is that my parents were Jewish and they wanted to adopt a Jewish baby. So I'm thinking to myself, what are the odds on them finding a bunch of Jewish babies out there in this world? How do you even go about that? That's what they wanted because they wanted to stick with it, you know, their religious tradition and raise a child Jewish and things like that. So I was actually born in Chicago.

Steve (02:36):

My parents were from Baltimore, so that's where the thing gets kind of weird. Uh, what they did was they got an attorney up in Baltimore who knew of a rabbi who knew of a rabbi in Chicago who knew an attorney over there that had access to people that were Jewish and looking to put babies up for adoption into a Jewish family, if you can follow that. So about six years later, around 1977 they get a phone call, there's a baby girl available, which is my older sister. Year and a half later, they get a phone call that there was a baby available in Chicago, fly out to Chicago, and there was me coming home three days later.

Damon (03:20):

So the Jewish community gets together and through connections establishes a network by which to presumably Jewish babies can arrive in a Jewish family in Baltimore.

Steve (03:33):

Environment. Correct.

Damon (03:33):

Gotcha. Okay.

Steve (03:34):

Correct. So fast forward a little bit. A couple years later in 1962 my parents were able to have a biological son, which is pretty normal. They say sometimes parents that cannot conceive then all of a sudden they can. But basically in the 60s growing up in the rambles town area of Baltimore County was like, our environment was like the show leave at the Beaver. It was really, it was just, you know, a brand new suburban area. I grew up in a, in a 100% Jewish neighborhood. There must have been 115 homes in my neighborhood and every single one of them was Jewish.

Damon (04:13):

Mhmm an enclave. The community. Yeah.

Steve (04:17):

Well it was pretty much just like any other family in the neighborhood. I quite frankly, I didn't realize I was adopted until I was the age of six. Um, there's only a couple of things I can really remember, uh, before the year 1964 and that was John F. Kennedy getting shot and the day my mother told me I was adopted.

Damon (04:40):

Huge moments in your life, huh?

Steve (04:42):

Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I tell people that my adoptions no big deal. But that moment when my mother told me I must've been a big deal cause it's still in my brain to this day cause I could remember exactly where I was sitting when my mother told me that news.

Damon (04:56):

Do you remember how you felt? What did it, what did it feel like? Or what did she say? What else do you remember?

Steve (05:01):

Yeah, well I remember sitting down on the steps on my 6th birthday. It might've been like a day or two before I was to start first grade. So I'm thinking maybe my parents thought we might as well tell him today before he goes to school and finds out in school from somebody else because maybe one of the parents in the neighborhood told some kid who knows. So it was a good time to tell me.

Damon (05:23):

Yeah, the community talks. Yeah.

Steve (