Echoes, Lies & Enduring Mysteries

By Raziel Bearn

Within the initial five minutes of their first phone call, Raziel’s birth mother erected a well-rehearsed sounding defense designed to discourage further questions: “I was attacked by a stranger.” The adoption file, however, had painted a rosier picture, claiming she'd had a fiancé who simply stalled too long in marrying her when the pregnancy was discovered. In trying to sort out what really happened, two more birth father possibilities surfaced. Which story was really true, and who was her mother trying to protect by lying about how she was conceived?

Echoes, Lies, and Enduring Mysteries is a psychotherapist's memoir of adoption, discovery, disappointment, and dilemmas during a year of finding and communicating with her birth mother. After a life-long search for belonging and a secreted soul’s need to matter, Raziel Bearn learns that unearthing a hidden past can be disturbing and disorienting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liminal Realities
• Release date: Jan 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005226626

Raziel Bearn

Raziel Bearn is a seeker of ancestral and personal truths, who discovered her birth mother when Raziel was 63 and her mother had less than a year to live. They never met. Genealogy opened to her a vast new world of relatives and centuries of great grandparents. Some of these connections have been surprising, and worthy of having their own stories told. Vignettes from her own life are now being explored, in hopes of the discovery of lessons of redeeming value and reader interest. Raziel writes true memoirs and fictionalized stories about herself and her family connections, always with an eye toward illuminating the emotional truths and fascinating women who persisted in her heritage.

Book preview

Echoes, Lies, and

Enduring Mysteries

A psychological memoir

of adoption, discovery,

disappointment, and dilemmas

© 2014

Raziel Bearn

Updated © 2022

All Rights Reserved

No part of this ebook may be reproduced or distributed in any manner with any technology method without the express permission of publishing company Liminal Realities.

Smashwords Edition

Thank you for downloading this adoption memoir. This publication is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or shared with other readers for any purpose or intention. This restriction contributes to an accurate accounting of readership. To support author Raziel Bearn please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your understanding.

Dedicated to the

Native American children who

were sent to boarding school,

stripped of their language, culture,

spiritual practices, and identity.

Preface

This memoir represents the internal search for answers in the mind of the author. In no way does this personal story claim to represent the specific circumstances or full reality of any other person. Nor is it a representative example of adoption and search for birth parents, as each adoptee’s experience is unique. Some names of living and deceased individuals and locations have been changed to protect the privacy of relatives and others I encountered during the time period in which the events of this story took place.

I know there is repetition of explanation and musings in this book. It is there not because I’ve forgotten my editorial training, but as a device to replicate the dizzying, ruminating swirl of thoughts and feelings that I have lived throughout the year of discovery, connection, dilemma, and loss. The tolerance of the reader is much appreciated. It has been my intent to demonstrate the disorientingly non-linear phenomenon of finding out, at such a late point in life, that I am part of a family story that I never could have imagined.

Prologue

Adoption Secrets

The Adopted Child

Echoes

Secrecy Collusions

Psychic Input

Second Contact

Scent Trail

Enduring Mysteries

One More Try

The Unexpected

Waiting Again

Epilogue

End Notes

Prologue

Having been adopted was not a secret kept from me. But everything else was. And as of this update writing in 2022, much still is.

Even after the Missouri laws barring adoptees from information about their birth family loosened up the tiniest bit in August of 2011, gaining the basic details about how I came into existence and where I come from are denied to me. Normal bits of biographical information that natural born kids take for granted, such as who my family is, what their lives were like, family lore, ancestral details and the like remain forever lost or inaccessible to me.

Initially, I accepted that I would never know. Off and on I danced with fantasies and curiosities. As children do, I painted imaginary rationales for how I came to be, creating imaginary parents like kids create imaginary friends.

Surely, I mused as a teenager, my mother was in a tough situation in 1950. It wasn’t acceptable then to have a child out of wedlock. I bet my parents were lovers who were somehow separated by circumstances beyond their control. Maybe he was drafted, then killed. Maybe her parents sent her away out of shame or fear. Maybe she ran away to be with her lover, and then he abandoned her. Perhaps my imagination was tapping into elements of truth, like trying to identify an elephant in the dark, having never known what one looks like. Perhaps these fictions planted the seeds of a desire in me to be a writer.

A fine education in psychology taught me that such imaginings are a normal response to an existential yearning to know who I am, who I am like, and where I belong in a biological chain of being. The emotional mind has a need to defend against uncertainty by filling in the blanks as best it can. Distinguishing facts from fictions, bringing the fantasies into focus, would eventually become a driving force in my later years. As I got interested in genealogy, I felt a growing anger that there were multiple forces colluding to prevent me from knowing everything about -- and connecting with -- blood relatives. That anger fired me up for a long time, as secrets, lies, and mysteries continued.

Unlike many adoption stories, mine had some false trails, some intentional roadblocks, and many frustrations. I had to pay for information that should have been my unimpeded right to know. I ran into seemingly unbreachable walls that kept me away from knowing myself and an extensive biological family.

Since so many of the details are buried with the dead -- grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, even siblings -- much will remain a mystery. What was left to me was a search for meaning-making from the pieces of lives that could be fitted together.

Finally, at age 64 a few sparks of light began to provide hope for answers.

It was time to weave the strands together – no matter where they lead, no matter who was uncomfortable by the revelations. I owed this to myself, I thought, and to my children. Pieces of a journey towards discovering who I really am and where I belong, were at last getting uncovered. This writing is my attempt to fit the pieces together to reveal the whole, if messy, story.

Adoption Secrets

One day in mid Spring of 1949, a young woman somewhere in east Texas determined with certainty that she was pregnant. At that moment, the trajectory of her life changed forever. She was not yet 19.

A bright and forward-thinking high school graduate employed at a newspaper, the teen from Texas had decided after high school to take training on the new technology of the day with a machine called a varityper. The varitype machine -- which was an early ancestor to our modern computers -- looked and operated somewhat like old, non-electric typewriters.

It was a smart decision that ultimately served her well after I was born.

The varitype machine was revolutionary for the world of publishing. No longer would newspapers, books, and other printed materials need to be produced by arranging tiny blocks of individual letters – upside down and backwards – in neat and narrow, heavily inked rows set into wooden frames, over which heavy rollers would press huge sheets of paper in a process that had changed little since Gutenberg’s or Franklin’s day.

Coincidentally, in the late 1970s when I worked in Germany for the US Air Force, I participated in producing a newspaper with this old letterpress method. It was back-breaking, eye-straining, mind-numbing work. The base newspaper editor, Staff Sergeant Ben Wilson and I would travel 30 minutes south every week from our base outside the village of Bitburg to the ancient town of Trier with its three-story Roman stone gate to the city. There we would spend the day proofreading the tiny shards of lettered metal, upside down and backwards.

It seemed miraculous after a year or so when we switched printing companies to use what was called a camera-ready method. From then on, our layout pages were produced on a varitype machine, and we proofed right side up, left to right, reading large mock-up pages while sitting down, saving our backs and eyesight. The varitype method seemed intuitively natural to me, but I had no inkling why it would. Was it in my cellular memory?

In 1949, being a varitype operator gave the young woman from Texas a marketable skill that – when burdened with a dire personal need to leave home -- would provide her an occupational security ticket. It might be said that I was pre-natally marinated in the new mechanics of the world of publishing.

She had had time to plan. Whether by the grace of genetics, mid-century fashions, or her own intentional attempts to remain slender as long as possible, it is recorded that her pregnancy wasn’t unavoidably obvious until possibly as late as her 8th month.

She arrived in St. Louis with a friend that late October or early November of 1949, and wasted little time setting about to arrange for the relinquishment of her soon-to-be-born baby girl. Somehow she located the Lutheran Children’s Friend Society, an organization with a history of caring for orphans dating back to 1868 and the aftermath of the Civil War. It was by far the oldest of the agencies dedicated to child welfare in Missouri, with more than 40 years experience in the unwed mothers and adoption field than the similar Catholic Charities of St Louis.

Since no one would hire a young woman about to give birth, she moved into the agency’s home for unwed mothers. According to records kept by the Society—which in 1968 was renamed Lutheran Family and Children’s Services -- she voluntarily contributed to household chores, worried about paying expenses, and was cooperative with the social worker assigned to collect some family history details.

After the Missouri law changed in August 2011, a $150 check and a required court authorization permitted an independent social worker to cull from the still existing files a set of what is called non-identifying information about my birth mother and my earliest pre-adoption months of life.

As most adoptive children want to hear, the non-identifying information said that giving me up was a difficult decision for her, but the only choice she felt she could make at the time. She was 19 by then, with no intention of returning to Texas. She had not told her parents, or siblings, about her pregnancy. She did not want them to know why she had really left town with a friend. The road before her was uncertain. A practical young woman, she opted for the best plan she could imagine, to ensure a good life for me, and fresh start for herself. I can imagine thinking it through to the same conclusion, had I been in her place in that