Cast Off: They Called Us Dangerous Women. So, We Organized and Proved Them Right

By Lee H. Campbell, Ph.D

"Cast Off" is the true story of Lee Campbell, an undereducated housewife in the mid-70s, who risks exposing her state-sponsored secret, her rehabbed reputation, and everyone she holds dear in her "new life." She is driven to find other mothers like her to invite them to follow her half-baked vision for an organization that is the first of its kind in the world. Breaking one taboo after another, this unique band of mothers invents words and reveals hidden stories. As they help tens of thousands of people, they recruit professionals who "get" that a socially-sacred institution is overdue for a reform that will affect generations to come. Along the way, Lee finds her voice and her spirit, and she exercises smarts she didn't know she had.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991055012

Book preview

Campbell

CHAPTER ONE

SPRING 1976

AGE: 31

CAPE COD

SPRING 1976

CAPE COD

Betty asked, again: Sooo, what would you call it? Betty had returned to her campaign to entice me into starting an organization. She said my startup of this organization would be a way to pay her back for the spectacular gift she had given me months before.

Betty knew I wasn’t yet sold on the idea of starting the organization she wanted. To soften me up, she giggled, making light of it all. Her giggle carried across telephone wires between Boston (her) and Cape Cod (me). Given our marathon chats over the previous two years, those wires had to be fraying. But as long as they held up, so would we. Sufficiently softened, I laughed back at her, playing along.

Betty had turned her guile and guts on me. It was the same winning combo she had used months earlier when she had become my sleuth. At that time, her charm had been aimed at the staff that guarded the birth records in Boston’s Bureau of Vital Statistics.

Though Betty had successfully searched those records for other cases, her mission on my behalf seemed impossible to me. My luck had always been rotten in the realm that was Betty’s specialty. I couldn’t see any reason for that to suddenly change.

But Betty did the impossible! She uncovered my lost son’s new name.

Like a goddess with a cup of fate, Betty then turned her discovery into just the elixir I needed. She gave me a sip — his first name — which was initially all my desert-grade thirst could handle. But as his first name sluiced into the empty space in me that had longed for it, I realized I urgently needed more.

I guzzled down — deep down — everything else my goddess-sleuth had to offer: his last name, address, and more. She also told me his adoptive parents’ names, Peg and Doug. I kept repeating their names to myself as if they were the refrain in a sacred song. Sight unseen, I loved them. They were a vital part of Michael’s life package. Soon each golden nugget that Betty had learned found its rightful home in me.

I hadn’t known how desperately parched parts of me had been. But my ignorance didn’t surprise me. For a long time, even before Betty, I had only felt pain after some outside fact illuminated hurt that had been in me all along.

Yet I did get one lightning bolt of surprise. Out of the blue, happiness exploded. Sheer joy took my breath away and then gave it back. Then took and gave, again and again. It was as if CPR was restoring a comatose spirit who grew more and more ecstatic about resuming a life she had given up for dead.

Colors around me shone brilliantly — my children’s eyes, my husband’s eyes, the kitchen wallpaper, the paint on my car. Sounds were symphonies: the squeal of the tea kettle, the whoosh of the hot air furnace, the ice and the bubbles in the champagne my husband brought home to celebrate.

I was so giddy the recently recovering Roman Catholic in me should have felt guilty. After all, I wasn’t supposed to ever be this happy. I wasn’t ever supposed to know what I now did. But Betty had absolved me of that too.

I took his name to the next step, she had said. I looked it up in the phone book.

I must have gasped because she then told me, The phone book is public information, you know. You have the right to do the same thing.

I thought: I do?

Then: Wow, I do!

It was a strange and wondrous concept I was still trying to get used to months afterward.

Today, 50 years later, I realize a big chunk of my life was divided by Before Betty— before Betty sleuthed for me — and After Betty — after Betty told me all she had learned.

Betty had changed my life the October before our latest phone call. Outside, the seasons had been changing, too. A late afternoon sun was lowering a crisp Cape Cod day and rust-colored leaves and sap-tipped pine needles were drifting outside my country kitchen. But as things were growing chilly outside, my life was warming up.

Before Betty, the identity of my first born son had been under state lock and key. Through a government-supported, well-primed, and amply-staffed process known as closed adoption, my son’s new name had become as walled off from me as if he was in a Witness Protection Program and I was the perp who put him there. Betty believed to the core of her adoptee-self that the state was Wrong and that the Right she had on her side would help her crack the code. She cracked the code.

For starters, Betty told me the information on his original birth certificate had been changed. I was no longer the woman who gave birth to him; his adoptive mother did. He no longer had a father unknown; his adoptive father sired him. It was a sock in the gut to be erased and replaced, even though I had been forewarned to expect this by the adoptees I had met at Betty’s support meetings.

One part of the falsified birth certificate was a relief. If there hadn’t been a new birth certificate, it would have signaled he had never been adopted, that he had never made it out of foster care. If he had remained in foster care, I would have jumped at the chance to get him back. But I wouldn’t have wished the instability of the foster care system on his earlier years. Since I didn’t have the privilege of raising him, I hoped his permanent parents were doing a good job.

That was when Betty told me the first name those parents had given him.

When this boy was mine twelve years before, I had given him the first name Ronald, making him a namesake for my father in a vain attempt to get his help to keep my son. My son’s middle name had been Thomas, another name given in vain. But in the maternity ward of Boston Lying In — where all residents of my home for unwed mothers, Florence Crittenton-Hastings House (Flo Crit) — eventually ended up, I had looked deeply into the innocent face of my cherub and, in a new mother’s state of grace, I had forgiven my long-time boyfriend, Tom, for his denial of paternity. With hope for a miracle, I passed along Tom’s name to our son.³

Now, a legally named Ronald Thomas was, by court order, a renamed Michael Robert. Are you psychic Betty had asked before she revealed Michael.

Betty knew I had nicknamed him Michael in the hospital, and had called him Michael in my heart ever since, for he definitely had not looked like a Ronald or a Thomas to me. Instead, he had looked like a Michael, which later seemed strange to me since at the time I hadn’t known any Michaels well enough to be able draw that image as clearly as I did.

Though his foster mother didn’t know my heart, she must have seen Michael in him, too, for that’s what she called him when I visited him in her home. My social worker had grudgingly arranged my four visits with Michael. Maybe they were her concession, for they occurred during the same three months I spent unsuccessfully trying to find the right words to learn from her some way to care for Michael by myself. Pestering was how she would put it.

After Betty gave me his new last name, a familiar French Canadian name beginning with the letter T, I made another connection. His initials were now MRT, the initials of the name — Michael Ronald Thomas — I had always known him by.

Thanks to Betty, I now viscerally understood what Kahlil Gibran meant when he wrote in The Prophet, The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. When my colorful pal, Joanne, a hippie holdover from the ‘60s, had first given me Gibran’s book of poetry, I thought that line was, well, sweet and poignant. But Betty’s gift provided real meaning for the words. To know Michael’s name was to feel as if an unlimited supply of aloe juice poured and poured into a wound in me that was the size of the Grand Canyon.

Discovering this meaning also made me appreciate Joanne in a new way. She had understood the lines first and then waited patiently for me to get them too.

Before Betty, I could not have joined Joanne’s club of deep thinkers. During the ten years my loss was under anesthesia, I was shallow. I didn’t begin to really think my own thoughts until a ten year dam cracked and released an ever-rising torrent of memories about Michael. ³

Before Betty, I had only taken baby steps away from my social worker’s advice —Forget and move on. Those baby steps weren’t a walk in the park Before Betty. And, in truth, some steps weren’t all that easy After Betty either.

My indoctrination during 1962 and 1963 was so complete that, if I act irrationally even today, 50 years later, I have learned to call a time-out to see if there is any parallel between my current situation and that time.

Here’s one example: I felt guilty and inconsolable after I gave my dog a prescribed heartworm medicine that sent her to ER for a long weekend . . . until I heard myself wail to my husband that I had only given her the medicine because I was told it was the right thing to do.

The big difference After Betty was that I was so happy, my joy overflowed into the realm of courage. I now didn’t feel totally incapacitated when I thought about taking unfamiliar steps; I could at least consider strange prospects. And Betty had indeed a very strange project for me.

Sooo, Betty pressed once more, what would you call it?

"It? You mean what would I call an organization for parents like me? I’d rather repay you for being my super-sleuth by giving you some money, Betty, although where I’ll get it, I have no idea."

I don’t want your money, Lee. You know that.

I did know that but I needed to buy time. I knew exactly where Betty intended to go with that question. She had turned a prior phone call into a bid for me to become, as she put it, a pioneer in adoption reform.

There aren’t any organizations anywhere in the world, as far as I know, for mothers like you.

Yikes! I had exclaimed. You know what happens to pioneers? They die on the journey. I can’t just gallop into the Wild West, you know. I’m so far back in the closet I’m part of the woodwork.

She had only laughed. But I knew, even in my exalted state of bliss, that being a domestic queen — and I was pretty good on the home front — was no preparation for the leadership she had in mind.

Patiently, though, Betty recapped one of the concerns I had the first time she made her bid. I had been afraid the other mothers that Betty and I both knew — Joanne, Mary Anne, Susan — were somehow different than the vast number of other mothers who were out there somewhere.

I had ticked off the differences to Betty. We cared. They didn’t. Having forgotten and moved on, they were living the right way. There was something wrong with us that made us unable to stick with the plan. So, we would end up as an organization with only four flawed women. We would climb onto the new side shoots of our family trees, and the adoption establishment would be only too happy to chop them off.

But Betty knew that my concern was being resolved, so she reminded me:You did write to the editors of the ‘Confidential Chat,’ right?

I allowed I had. The Confidential Chat was a regular insert in the Boston Globe where readers — mostly women —invented names under which they could anonymously swap recipes and pose questions about relationships to other readers. I had written to the editor of those pages, asking if they would forward replies to a letter I proposed to write, if the authors of those replies gave their permission. When the editors agreed, I wrote a letter under the name Biological Mom. I asked if there were any other mothers like me out there who had been unable to follow the prescription to forget and move on.

The first letter had come from my wild and now great friend, Joanne. When she wrote she lived in Orleans, the next town over, I was both excited and terrified. I remember worrying: What if she is trashy? My life was focused on being respectable. But finding someone nearby I could talk with motivated me to take the chance. ³

When I first met Joanne, I knew it would be our last. She was my worst nightmare. She didn’t look at all respectable. Long greasy hair. Huge. Stuffed in a food-stained muumuu. Sporting dark underarm and leg hair. But thank good-ness Joanne had other ideas. She kept phoning me and soon she had me hooked with her irreverent but sharply insightful humor. Being with Joanne was like befriending someone in a foreign country, only she was more interesting and fun. I had so misjudged that book by its cover.

I had begun to share other Chat replies with Joanne and together we noticed some recurring themes: I never forgot. I’ve looked for her wherever I go. I forgot but it’s coming back and I’m a mess. I wasn’t allowed to see her. I wasn’t told whether I had a boy or a girl. "If you hold a meeting I want to go, I need to go." They sounded like Joanne and me, like Mary Anne and Susan. We really weren’t alone.

I was now a penpal with every mother who replied to my Chat letter. And the editors were still forwarding more.

Each letter tore me up in one way but put me back together in a way that made me more complete. I was reaching beyond myself to something bigger, more purposeful. This sense of following a higher purpose was similar to the sense that drove me three years before, in 1973, to begin to write a 500-page Journal ³ — only to retype the whole of it again the next year. Those Journals had been a way for me to purge the Michael memories that wouldn’t otherwise leave me alone. But where the Journals had been a solitary exorcism, letters with these new women offered solidarity. With them, I could be myself, whoever that was.

And what was the harm? What was the worst self I could find? If I discovered I was a nut, I now knew I wasn’t the only nut. There were apparently many other mothers with feelings similar to mine. Even if we were, in the end, only a small group, maybe we could figure out what had happened to us back then and what was happening to us now.

It was a good thing I derived energy from the letters I received because keeping up my end of the correspondence took a lot of time away from my already busy life.

I was working as a full-time secretary to the elementary school principal. I was devotedly mothering two young children whom I was able to keep and raise — Scott, then 9, and Todd, 6. I was also a wife committed to my husband, David. As a small town banker, image was everything to David, yet he had secretly shouldered like Atlas the weight of my Scarlett Letter. But the past couple of years had stretched the limits of his endurance, and I had had to increasingly summon my own energy to keep him buoyed up. On top of that, only two of my friends knew I was the secret mother of a third child. With the other friends in our active social circle, I still lived a double life.

Even so, some of those friends suspected something was up. I was so stuffed with helium and hope that I glowed. They wondered if I was pregnant. It was ironic, I thought, for in a way I did feel pregnant. Yet not in a way those friends could have guessed. Being able to aim my love for Michael — now a specifically-named child who lived in a specific northwesterly direction from me — made me feel as if I was newly pregnant . . . with a child I had already delivered.

It was if some Michael-cells had crossed the placenta during my pregnancy with him. They had migrated to a new permanent home in me. Then they had laid low while hostile social forces carried out their takeover. But now — now that the cells had received the signal that the rest of Michael lived on — they had resumed their expectant state. ⁴

I noticed I was fiddling with the cord to the yellow Trimline phone that hung on the wall above my kitchen desk. I imagined Betty doing the same with the cord of the black rotary phone that I knew, after many support meetings at her house, she kept on an end table in her living room.

I owed Betty an answer.

I retraced our chat: What would I call this organization, you ask?

Yep, that’s what I’m askin’. Stop evading. It’s just, you know, a question. That was Betty, disarmingly innocent. And admirably crafty.

First, I need one term for us. And, no, I joked, whore and slut will not do. When Betty didn’t laugh, I knew she wouldn’t entertain any more lame distractions. I tried again.

"You know that we are called everything under the sun, Betty: natural mothers, first mothers, original mothers, birth mothers. I keep changing the term myself. In ‘Confidential Chat,’ I even called myself ‘Biological Mom.’ Ugh. I would pull out my tongue before I called myself that again."

Betty was intrigued. Why?

I answered hotly: Because we aren’t just procreating protoplasm, that’s why. I was surprised by my own fervor.

Whoa, Lee! I love it when you get all fired up. Betty laughed. You have such a way with words, you know. Then: You can do this! Now, get back to the name you would give your organization.

I ignored the your. There was almost no chance I would start such a thing. But she was building on that almost — that tiny blip we had both detected on my radar screen. And now she had pushed my button for creativity. She knew that would at least temporarily override my misgivings.⁵

Ok. Well, here’s why I don’t like those other terms. As I opened my mouth, my reasons announced themselves to us both, which sometimes happens when you think out loud.

"‘Natural mother’ pisses off adoptive mothers. The ones who have written to me through ‘Confidential Chat’ have let me know they don’t want to be thought of as ‘unnatural,’ though why they have to make themselves opposite of us, I really don’t understand.

"‘First mother,’ same thing. They don’t want to be second-best, second-rate.

Original mothers? As a recovering Catholic, it reminds me too much of original sin. Besides, adoptive mothers don’t want to be thought of as carbon copies.

I paused for a second after I realized I had said an uncharacteristic pisses off —no doubt Joanne’s influence. Then, a little proud of myself, I skipped over Betty’s chuckle.

"I guess I don’t have a problem with ‘birth mother,’ though. The only possible opposite of that is ‘nurturing mother,’ and I can’t see adoptive parents having a problem with that. Besides, ‘birth parent’ honors our connection to our children. After all, we did give birth to them, though some people would like to pretend otherwise.

I like honoring birth. It’s very, you know, pro-woman. I thought of something else. Maybe if we used ‘birth mother’ some feminists would endorse our cause as a reproductive issue?

That was definitely a question mark for me. I only knew enough about feminists to be aware they focused on abortion rights and women’s rights in the workplace. When I first heard about the women’s movement, I resented it. I thought such beliefs threatened my place in my marriage and in my world. I had only recently begun to soften my stance and become willing to admit feminists made a few good points. Still, would I be willing to formally associate with them? For this cause?

Back to Betty, I resumed listing the virtues of birth parent. I reminded her — and me — that Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor use the term ‘birth parent’ in their new book, ‘The Adoption Triangle,’ in the many letters we now wrote to each other, and in the studies they sent to me to support my Release of Protection.

See, Lee. That Release of Protection idea of yours was brilliant.

Not really, I hedged. "I had to do something!"

Did you come up with that idea or not? Betty asked, using a tone that was somewhere between tease and frustration.

After my first couple of meetings with members of Betty’s support group for adoptees — a branch of the New York based Adoptee’s Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) — I had returned home firing on alternating currents: I was upset adoptees were unable to get their original birth certificate, the way I and other non-adopted people were able to. And, I wanted to find some means to counter the reason agencies denied them, since the agencies were saying they had to protect the mothers they were born to. In Michael’s case: me.

I knew a so-called need to protect us was crap. No mother I knew — and I admittedly didn’t know too many at that time — ever said they had been promised protection. ⁶

Still, I thought I needed to meet agencies on their own turf, if I was going to make any progress with them. If my agency was using the excuse of needing to protect me, then it seemed to me I could tell them to un-protect me.

I began a year-long campaign with my agency to un-protect me. My Release of their protection had two parts. When Michael was 18, the Release would apply to him; the agency would not need to protect me from him. In the meantime, the Release would apply to his adoptive parents, Peg and Doug. The agency could act as our liaison. Peg and Doug could ask the agency anything they wanted to know, the agency could relay their questions to me, and then they could convey my answers back. This way, Michael’s parents could keep their identity a secret from me, which I thought I was fine with.

Over time, I added a small packet of materials with my Release of Protection. The packet included copies of highlighted excerpts from New Hampshire law (best interests of the child), copies of recent studies, copies of letters from adoptees, and even from adoptive parents who had replied to an earlier Chat post I directed to them. I put everything in that packet I could think of to prove to the agency their thinking was outdated and that there was a new and improved way to think.

My Release packet started with the Manchester branch of the New Hampshire State Welfare Department, since my surrender had been taken there. When I was ignored, I re-sent the packets along with a paper that listed likely options they could check off. I included a self-addressed and stamped envelope.

When my Release was eventually dismissed at the local level as irrelevant, I got officially mad. I took my campaign to the head of the agency at the state capitol in Concord. There, I finally found an ally in the Assistant Director. He took me seriously and encouraged me to petition the county court where my records were stored. He gave me the address of the court.

That was a gift, for he had inadvertently told me where Michael had been placed. Michael’s adoption had been finalized in the southwest New Hampshire area. Not in the White Mountain area as my social worker had deviously pretended to let slip.

But the court idea also went nowhere. After I followed my ally’s advice to petition the Court, the judge consulted a local social worker —who had not been briefed by my ally. And she encouraged the judge to deny my Release.

Over the previous year, Betty had watched my frustration with the agency grow. She had repeatedly urged me to let her find Michael’s identity. Time and again, I maintained I didn’t want that. I still trusted the adoption system, I told her. I knew they would change their approach once they understood the relatively new idea that adoptees had a right to know the truth.

At the end of a year, when it seemed my Release was dead meat, I finally gave the go-ahead to Betty to uncover Michael’s identity. My new plan was to seek out Peg and Doug’s local priest and ask him to act as an intermediary between them and me.

My attachment to Catholicism was complicated. Growing up, I had loved all its rites and Latin verses. I had been a big fan of the saints and prayed to them regularly. I had prayed with all the fervor of a Believer for some way to raise Michael, only to have my petition denied. I thought I was denied because my mortal sin of sacrilege — becoming pregnant before marriage — had made me unworthy. My Italian-Catholic social worker had reinforced that notion and prescribed a heavy dose of forgetfulness for my penance.

With my memories under anesthesia, I could continue as a Catholic. I even began to raise my sons as Catholic. When the anesthesia for my memories wore off, and nothing else I did effectively delivered another dose, I told myself the return of my memories was just an oversight by my Guardian Angel.

Surely, this designated deity, or the Virgin Mary, or my Confirmation Saint, Maria Goretti, would sprinkle an anesthetic into the holy water with which I doused myself. But my memories were more alive than ever. And that was when I returned the favor and gave up on Catholicism. ³

Still, there was a part of me, as small and thin as a preserved Host, that was willing to give the church one more chance. The chance hinged on whether a priest would agree to act as my intermediary. But it never got that far.

When Betty had called me that cold October day to give me Michael’s identity, my kitchen clock read 4:10. Exactly 24 hours later, when my kitchen clock again read 4:10, my ally phoned to say he had acted on my Release the day before.

After receiving a scathing update from me about his local agent, he had finally directed her to ask Peg and Doug to go to her office and to let them know I was willing to answer questions. They have no questions for you at this time, my ally now told me, but they know if the need arises, they can contact us.

The coincidence wasn’t lost on me. After a year of false starts and stalls, the agency had at last told Michael’s parents about me . . . at the exact time I had learned about them.

Still over the moon after Betty’s call, I confessed to my ally that I had learned Michael’s new identity the previous day. I let him see the synchronicity for himself. When he asked me what name I had, I told him. His silence confirmed Betty had found the right Michael.

Once my ally and I knew the same thing, we became equals. I stepped up, and he stepped down, to a first name basis. From then on, I was Lee to him and he was Art to me.

I agreed with Betty that the Release of Protection had worked out well, finally. But that didn’t mean I was the right leader for the job she had in mind.

Betty had taken us off topic by bringing up the Release of Protection, so I tried another distraction.

Tell me again, Betty, I urged, how you took the picture of Michael you gave me.

In her sweet, little girl voice, Betty repeated my favorite story.

"Well, I walked down his street. See, I knew you needed to imagine his life better so I was going to take a picture of his house. I was looking at the house from different angles, you know, trying to find the best shot.

As I looked around — you know I can be unobtrusive when I want to be — I saw two boys coming up the street.

It was true. Being able to look ordinary had enabled Betty to search for adoptees and their mothers. To unknown eyes, she could practically disappear. Her slight frame, stooped posture, Charlie Chaplin-like bowlegged walk, and her unassuming clothes camouflaged the powerhouse inside.

I was quiet on my end of the phone, loving the part of the story that came next. She was about to confirm Michael was alive. And that he was walking now! And that he had friends!

I knew one of the boys was Michael.

I couldn’t help myself. I interjected, And tell me how you knew it was Michael.

"I just knew."

It was a busy street, she had told me before. There were a number of pedestrians. School must have just gotten out, as some of them were kids. But my Michael, she just knew.

I should have stepped to the side, to let them pass, you know. But I was like rooted to the spot. They had to walk around me.

Tell me again, I begged, what you heard them talking about. It made my temples throb to be one degree removed from the miracle that Michael not only walked but talked. As a new parent to Scott and Todd, I had felt the miracle of milestones before; still did. But since Michael was as unreachable to me as a superstar, he was like