087 – A Journey To Find Out Where I Came From

When he was a kid, Bill saw clues here and there that he was adopted, but no one ever actually said it. It wasn’t until he called an uncle he’d never met before that the truth was revealed, turning Bill’s world upside down. Reunion with his birth mother was an emotional event with a woman who was told never to speak of his existence again. Bill talks about how he felt toward the father he grew up who took the secret of his adoption to his grave, and how redemptive it’s been to be accepted by his birth parents and his new siblings on both sides.

Read Full Transcript

Damon: 00:00 Hey there. I just wanted to take a sec to let you know that in between producing the show, chasing my son Seth around and generally living life, I took time to write a book about my own adoption journey. It’s called Who Am I Really? Of course. If you’d like to preorder a copy, go to WhoAmIReallypodcast.com and click shop where you will be redirected to the publishers bookstore. I hope to make it to your reading list. Okay, here’s this week’s show.

Bill: 00:30 I just realized that what was so upsetting was all the stuff I had missed. I missed 54 years with these people. I missed 54 years with my parents. I missed 54 years with my aunts and uncles and my sisters that I’ll never get back and that was really, really weighing on me and I just, I got to a point where I learned that I have to just accept that and I got to try to get past it.

Voices: 01:05 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon: 01:16 This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Bill. He called me from Virginia Beach, Virginia. When he was a kid, Bill saw clues here and there that he was adopted, but no one ever actually said it. It wasn’t until he called an uncle he’d never met before that the truth was revealed, turning Bill’s world upside down. He talks about how he felt toward the father he grew up with after learning the news and how redemptive it’s been to be accepted by his birth parents and his new siblings. This is Bill’s journey. Bill tells his adoption story in parts. I gathered, It was because he’s had to accumulate the facts over his lifetime. The first part of his story he calls, what I knew, where he describes exactly that, the things that he knew were the facts of his life. For example, he was born in January of 1963 his birth place was a Methodist hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. His father’s name was Bill. His first wife’s name was Audrey.

Bill: 02:27 I knew that sometime when I was two years old, Audrey passed away in June of 65 and I know that, uh, my father remarried my mother who raised me and uh, November of 67 that I knew, I knew that I grew up with a mother who wasn’t my real mother. I knew she was my step, but I grew up with that stereotypical Walt Whitman, uh, suburban family. There was nothing that we couldn’t do. Daryl and uh, his wife Jean went on to have four children, two boys and two girls. So I grew up as the oldest of five. Typical Irish Catholic family in Nebraska, the siblings, we were very, very close, but we fought like cats and dogs just like kids do. They were never any knock down drag outs. They were just those, you know, he took my toy, that type of stuff.

Damon: 03:25 sibling rivalry stuff.

Bill: 03:27 Yeah. Yeah. Now if someone outside of the family, picked on one of us, well then it was on because we would all take care of each other. But we’ve, you know, we fought like cats and dogs.

Damon: 03:39 Bill said he did all of the typical stuff boys did back then. He was a scout. He went camping and hunting, hiking and stomping through the creeks. Bill attended Catholic schools through high school when he was 16, the family relocated to California, but back when he was around 11 years old, he got his first piece of hard evidence about his adoption.

Bill: 04:02 I never had any clues that I looked at as clues at the time that I was different than the others. I knew that she was my stepmother, but I, I just didn’t. It didn’t matter. She was my mother. A couple of times, I remember asking my father to tell me more about my mom’s side of the family, Audrey’s side of the family, because we are an Irish Catholic family, but we didn’t have cousins. Um, my father, my father had a older brother, but he was, he was mentally handicapped and never married. And My mother Jean had a, had a brother, but he was the stereotypical California lifelong bachelor. So when all my friends would go visit cousins and stuff over the summer and Christmas, we didn’t do that. So I remember asking him about my mom, Audrey’s family, because I knew about his family, but I didn’t know anything about hers.

Bill: 04:58 And the answer I got on two separate occasions was, it’s not something that I like to talk about because you know, I loved her and she died from cancer and I, it’s just not something that I could talk, I can talk about. And as, as a kid I just kind of said okay. And I didn’t push it. There was another time, uh, I was, uh, using the parish directory to call a friend of mine to...