Jessica Lost: A Story of Birth, Adoption & The Meaning of Motherhood

By Bunny Crumpacker and Jil Picariello

A mother and her child, lost and then found again after four decades: this extraordinary story of love, loss, and reunion is told in alternating voices by the two women, each relating her own powerful experience.
For the mother, its the tale of an unhappy marriage followed by betrayal, a pregnancy of uncertain paternity, and the heartrending decision to give up her newborn. The daughters search begins 40 years later, as she slowly, painstakingly, stitches together her story.
These intertwined tales give us two unforgettable points of view of a remarkable journey-and of the multiple meanings of motherhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Union Square Press
• Release date: May 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781402789649

Bunny Crumpacker

Bunny Crumpacker (1933-2010), a New York native, has been a professional caterer, editor, newspaper columnist, and school community relations officer. Her book reviews appear in The Washington Post. She is the author of How to Slice an Onion, The Sex Life of Food, Perfect Figures, and two cookbooks based on food and recipe pamphlets issued from 1875 to 1950--a chronicle of American cooking in those years. She and her husband, a record producer, lived in the Hudson River Valley region, just north of New York City.

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9781402789649_0002_001

JESSICA LOST

A STORY OF BIRTH, ADOPTION

& THE MEANING OF MOTHERHOOD

BUNNY CRUMPACKER

AND

J.S. PICARIELLO

9781402789649_0003_0019781402789649_0004_001

STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crumpacker, Bunny.

  Jessica Lost : a story of birth, adoption & the meaning of motherhood / Bunny Crumpacker and J.S. Picariello.

    p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4027-7570-3 (alk. paper)

 1. Adoptees--United States--Biography. 2. Birthmothers--United States. I. Picariello, J.S. II. Title.

  HV874.82.P53C78 2011

  362.734092--dc22

  [B]

2010039324

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© 2011 by Faith (Bunny) Crumpacker and J.S. Picariello

Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing

c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6

All rights reserved

Sterling ISBN 978-1-4027-7570-3

Sterling eBook ISBN: 978-1-4027-8964-9

For information about custom editions, special sales, premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales Department at 800-805-5489 or [e-mail].

All photos courtesy of Jil Picariello and Bunny Crumpacker

To my men: Lenny, Damien, Alex

                                            —JSP

For Jil

  —BC

Memoir comes from the Latin word memoria, which means memory, or reminiscence. This book is a remembering of the past, and is, as much as any memory can claim to be, a true story. Others may have different memories; that’s not surprising: It is the very nature of memory to be as individual as fingerprints. Although this is a true story, some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals portrayed. And, of course, since we weren’t carrying recording devices with us at all times, conversations are reconstructed to the best of our ability.

Bunny Crumpacker

J.S. Picariello

CONTENTS

1. BUNNY: LOST

2. JIL: THE LETTER

3. BUNNY: THE NEW YEAR

4. JIL: THE CHOSEN BABY

5. BUNNY: EARLY DAYS

6. JIL: ANOTHER CHOSEN BABY

7. BUNNY: WAITING

8. JIL: NINE AND NEUROTIC

9. BUNNY: WILKOMMEN

10. JIL: MADISON

11. BUNNY: PARIS

12. JIL: WEDDING

13. BUNNY: WITH CHILD

14. JIL: LOSS

15. BUNNY: BIRTH

16. JIL: BIRTH

17. BUNNY: THE END AND THE BEGINNING

18. JIL: THE SECOND TIME

19. BUNNY: THE SECOND TIME

20. JIL: MEETING RUTH

PHOTO INSERT

21. BUNNY: HOPE

22. JIL: FINDING FAITH

23. BUNNY: FOUND

24. JIL: FOUND

25. BUNNY: GETTING TO KNOW JIL

26. JIL: FATHERS

27. BUNNY: EVERY WOMAN IS A DAUGHTER

28. JIL: MYSELF

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A NOTE ON NAMES

Alike in so many surprising and often stunning ways, my birth mother and I also shared a history of fluctuating names. In addition to the changes wrought by adoption and marriages on our surnames, our given names metamorphosed as well. I was born Jessica, became Jill Ann, changed it to Jilann, and am known as Jil. Inspired by a book she was reading while pregnant, Faith’s mother put Faith Ann on her birth certificate, but nicknamed her newborn Bunny. The pet name (in both senses) took: Faith was Bunny to herself, her family, her friends. But I first heard of her as Faith, and it stuck.

I never thought of her as Bunny, and could not write of her as Bunny. She was Faith to me, and I loved the name, and found it fitting for her as a person, and for her role in my life. That’s why, when she writes of herself in this book, she is Bunny. But when I write of her, she is, and always will be, Faith.

J.S. Picariello

1. BUNNY

LOST

The knowledge of the past has been as an overture

to what we have learned in the most recent ten and twenty years.

It gives the theme (all life from a single cell . . .)

but leaves the subtle details still to be discovered.

GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN

THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE

Before she found me, the last time I had seen my daughter was when she was four days old. When she found me, she was fifteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-one days old—just over 42.

In my mind, she was always four days old. She was always ‘The Baby," the one I’d lost—the one I’d given away.

The adoption agency told me I could give her a name. Her adopting parents would keep the initial, they said. I named her Jessica, but I still thought of her as The Baby.

I wasn’t supposed to see her; the belief at that time was that it was harder for a birth mother to give up her child if she had seen it. But it isn’t any harder than being pregnant for nine months with a baby you can’t keep, or giving birth to a child who will not be your own. And what could be harder, after nine months, than not seeing the baby at all? There would be no way to know the shape of her mouth, the color of her hair. The baby would never be real, never have substance; and all those months of swelling and growing would have produced nothing but a few hours of pain. Flat again, myself again, but now with something missing; and how was I to know what I’d lost?

Fortunately, in the busy, crowded nursery, the nurses let me hold my baby. She was wrapped in a pink hospital blanket. A nurse placed her so that she rested on my arm in the classic pose. I wanted to hold her forever, watch her, forever. The love I felt was chemical, cellular, galactic—a flow as natural as that in the cord that had so recently connected us.

For four days, she was mine, not yet The Baby, the name for loss. For those four days, I could touch her shoulder, examine her fingers, watch her eyes and her mouth, feel the softness of her hair, look at her, and tell her, over and over: I love you. I will always love you.

I try now to remember her face. She had a birthmark across the bridge of her nose. That’s important. But the four days in the hospital, with her, remain something of a blur—like the nine months before them.

I think of myself then as numb, as if I had been pregnant with numbness, and was left with it after giving birth. The few things I remember about being pregnant are the times it was all right—I want to put that in capital letters—ALL RIGHT— to be pregnant: the days at the hospital clinic with the other women whose bodies were swollen like mine; the times I was alone, standing in front of the mirror, naked, looking at myself sideways.

But there are also many smooth and empty spots in my memory: What did I wear? How did I get to the hospital when I went into labor? What time of day was it? Was anyone with me during those long hours? I can’t recall even getting from the hospital to the adoption agency for the formal transfer of The Baby. It’s all a wall of glass—smooth, cold, and blank.

I do remember that, afterward, I went to the movies, because there was nothing else I could bear to do. I don’t know what I saw. Afterward, I remember standing on the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan, waiting first for the light to change; and then just waiting. I was unable to put one foot in front of the other to cross the street, or to move at all. If I took a step, I would be beginning the rest of my life—and I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave the first part of my life behind me, and I couldn’t face what was to come. Paralyzed, having given away my baby, I could no longer claim myself.

I was too young to recognize how alone I was; but that’s what I knew.

Not many people knew about the pregnancy then, or later. It was the great secret of my life. I can tell you how it began. I can tell you how it affected the rest of my life. I can tell you what kind of mother I turned out to be. But there is only a little I can tell you about the pregnancy, or the birth of that lost child. I kept my secret so successfully, for so long, that I no longer have it to share. For a long time, I no longer had it for myself to know.

2. JIL

THE LETTER

January, 1997

Dear Mr. Aylford,

This is a very difficult letter to write. You see, I am an adult adoptee currently searching for my birth parents. I believe my birth father’s name was John Aylford.

I was born on November 15, 1954 at New York Hospital. I have been told my parents were a young couple who married in the early 1950s after a very brief courtship, and then were separated by my father’s time in the service. After his return, they realized that their marriage was not going to work. Finding that they were going to have a baby, they made the decision to put that child up for adoption.

I am that child, now forty-two years old. I began searching for my birth parents about a year ago. I believe my birth mother’s name may be Sara. I know little about her except that her father, a pharmacist, died several years before I was born of a brain tumor, and she had one sister.

My birth father was trying to make a living as a photographer when I was born. His father was an advertising executive who died, I believe, in the 1970s. His parents had divorced when he was younger, and he had one sister who died in an accident.

Mr. Aylford, I don’t know anything about you except that you have the same name as the man I seek. If you are my birth father, please understand that I don’t want to cause problems for anyone, or intrude on a life that may not welcome me. I am just trying to put the missing pieces of my life together—to find out who I am, and who I come from.

Although I found your telephone number, I hesitate to use it—I don’t have the nerve, I guess. As I said earlier, this is a difficult letter to write. I hope that you will write back to me, or call me if you would rather (maybe you have more nerve than I). I would love any information you can offer about my birth family, especially my birth mother. If you are my birth father, I promise I will follow your lead. If you don’t want a surprise forty-two-year-old baby in your life, I understand and I won’t bother you. I would just like to know.

Thank you,

Jil Picariello

3. BUNNY

THE NEW YEAR

We were very tired, we were very merry—

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,

From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;

And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,

And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

RECUERDO

In my first year of college, a small, nervous professor repeatedly told us, If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. I didn’t know what he meant; I liked being able to take any road. My official grade for the term was an incomplete.

I was very passive then. That was the year my father died. He had been ill for years with a brain tumor, though it was a long time before we knew what was wrong with him. At first, he had problems with his eyes, though the doctor could find nothing wrong. Then my father began to behave oddly, in a variety of ways no one understood, but that my mother and I resented. After he collapsed on the street suddenly, while waiting for a bus, we found out about the brain tumor.

The coffin we lowered into the ground contained a person who could not have been my father. He resembled my father, but only in unpleasant ways. The living man who behaved so strangely all those months could not have been my adored— and adoring—father, who suddenly wanted to touch me too often, who stared at me for no reason, or was frequently angry about nothing I had actually done. His long, slow decline and death left more than his absence: It left an inexplicable gap of love and sorrow for the father he had been, and a chilly mystery about the man he had become. After he died, I dreamt he was still alive, but as he had been when I was younger.

Going back to college, to Antioch, the year after my father died was a refuge. There were friends there, and laughter. There were classes, even ones I slept through; and there were boys. There was music, a pile of 78s, and the first long-playing records. Back in New York City, between times at school, there was jazz uptown, with guitar, harmonica, and washtub bass, Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. There was sentiment and there was nostalgia: Though the present was intense, we knew we’d want to remember everything.

Somehow there were almost always three of us. Everything was drama, but we were all so innocent. We were neither ignorant nor stupid; we were simply unprepared.

I’d known Jake at college from afar. He was a year or two ahead of me, a transfer student. He acted in various plays; he directed one; he painted; he wrote. He went out with Carol, and was a friend of Ann’s. The third was another Ann, called by her last name, who kept company with a trombone player. Carol was beautiful—tall, as tall, or taller, than Jake. She moved slowly and serenely. Her eyes were huge and still. Ann, her friend as well as Jake’s, was full of good cheer, a soul of sympathy and wisdom. I wasn’t sure which of them I wanted to be. They were both ideal. And they were part of how I saw Jake: They gave him an aura beyond his own.

He smiled and said hello if we passed on the diagonal paths that crisscrossed the grass between buildings. But, then, Antioch was famous for its friendliness, among other things.

Jake also went out with one of my roommates, Karla. Together with my other roommate, Mary, Karla and I made three as well as one. Karla even looked a little like me, with a round face, soft, dark eyes, full lips—a face well-set over its bones, full of sympathy and strength. The look in her eyes said she was funny and smart.

I really met Jake at a New Year’s Eve party in New York City. Though he was supposedly there with Karla, she spent most of the evening with someone else. We did that; but it wasn’t that we didn’t take the boys seriously—we didn’t take ourselves seriously.

Technically, I met Jake on the stairs outside the apartment where the party was taking place. I wasn’t having a good time, but I wasn’t ready to leave. If I left, I would have to go home. I wasn’t ready for the Long Island Railroad and the long ride to my mother’s house—the widow’s house.

This was my first weekend away from my co-op job. Antioch was a cooperative college, which meant that students worked in areas related to their field of study for half the time we were there, to gain practical experience to complement theoretical ideas and choices. I was interning in the music therapy department of the Marlboro State Mental Hospital in New Jersey, and I hated it.

At nineteen, I wasn’t ready for underground tunnels lit by bare lightbulbs, or nights spent in my room in the employees’ hall, hearing screams echoing across the lawns. In the dining room, we used the same napkin for several days, rolling it up into its ring after every meal, and unrolling it—damp, greasy, dirty—when we sat down again. Patients waited on tables, and watched us eat. I didn’t think these were the patients who screamed at night, but it was hard to be sure. Though I kept a light on in my room all night, I found only a little less discomfort in the brightly lit dining room.

As part of my job, I had to take a portable record player to the electroshock therapy room, and play carefully chosen music for the patients as they were brought, struggling and shouting—resisting—into the room. After they had convulsed, there was different music to accompany them as they emerged from the shock, weak and sick, in a stupor, smoke drifting away from their bodies.

I also played the piano for Sunday morning chapel, as the patients shouted hymns, boisterously or reverently, but always with intense feeling. The music was new to me; Jewish girls don’t know hymns.

Oh, He walks with me and He talks with me, I sang as I played, and He tells me I am His own. . . . I didn’t believe it, but I loved the music, and I loved hearing everybody sing as we rollicked along. During the sermons, on sunny days, I sat on the chapel’s front steps and smoked.

On weekdays, I collected patients for music therapy sessions, going from building to building through the underground tunnels, waiting for doors to be locked and unlocked, with the more dependable patients at the head and the end of the line. In the middle were the patients who mumbled all the time, or were silent, or stared too much. They made sure never to look directly at anybody.

I played the piano again for them in the big music therapy room, with the emergency button on the wall near the door. We sang songs, and we danced. There was supposed to be a pattern to the music: quiet and slow at first, then faster and louder—the patients loved polkas —then quieter and slower, until the end of the class. Then back through the tunnels in our disorderly line.

Before I came to Marlboro, I thought the patients would be just like everybody else, but with problems that were perhaps just a little worse than most. I had imagined sitting next to some sweet, unhappy soul on a piano bench and teaching him a scale, or a simple melody, thus touching both his mind and his heart. Ah! Cured!

It wasn’t like that. They were not almost like everybody else. They stared at nothing; they didn’t move, or they moved too much, yelling, jerking, hulking, curled into themselves.

It all terrified me. Where do you find sense and reason in a world where the people who are supposed to be sane are giving electric shocks to the ones who are called insane? The insane ones have the sense to resist, but the others drag them into the room, while they scream and try to get away. Still fighting, still resisting, they’re tied onto platform beds and attached to equipment that, in effect, plugs them into electric sockets. Through the shouts and the shocks and the smoky recovery, distant melodies were played on a tinny portable record player.

I had been wrong about insanity; I might be wrong about sanity, too. This party was my first weekend away from all that, back in the world I had once thought was reasonable. It would have been very difficult for me to have a good time at any party, when I was so unsure, and so alone.

I was just old enough to have learned to set myself apart when I needed to— to be separate by choice. Before, I would have stayed at the side of the room, at the edge of the party’s life. I learned to be physically separate by watching Karla, who sat under tables, oblivious to everything at parties when she wasn’t having fun—full of mystery and an odd, introspective air. That’s what I wanted to convey.

I sat on the stairs, leaning my head against the wall, and listened to the music, barely audible under the voices, though the apartment door was open. When Jake came out, I moved closer to the wall so that he could get by. Instead, he sat down next to me.

I have to imagine words I don’t remember, but the imagining—like memory—is real.

Jake’s smile was lopsided, and because it was not perfect, not what it should have been, it seemed intimate.

Which were you—on your way in, or out?

Undecided, I said.

I was thinking about leaving, he said. New Year’s Eve parties don’t make it. You keep thinking you’re supposed to be having a better time, and you never do.

Last year was lovely, I said. We all went to Karla’s mother’s house and at midnight, we called Mary.

Doesn’t Mary live in Texas?

Dallas. It wasn’t midnight there yet.

You could follow midnight around the world that way, Jake said. The planed, flat surfaces of his face connected when he smiled.

After dropping out of Antioch, Jake had been drafted. This was 1953, and there was a war on in Korea. He wasn’t wearing his uniform; if I had to guess, I’d say he was wearing brown corduroy pants and a blue shirt. His hair, brown, hung straight and fine across his forehead, which rose flat and high over his dark eyes.

Do you hate the Army? I asked.

It’s worse than anything anybody ever says: Nothing redeems it.

What do you do? March around, clean rifles, all that stuff?

I did. Now I’m in Special Services, not quite so bad. I’m in a photography school.

That sounds as though it might be a little redeeming.

I won’t allow it. I can be redeemed, but not the Army. So my redemption—my revenge—is photography school. I’m learning to see through a camera, to be a camera. They made me say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and they made me wear khaki underwear, but now I’m learning what I want to learn.

Khaki underwear? Even on your days off?

When I start wearing khaki shorts on my days off, I’ll know they’ve got me.

Do you get to do anything you really want to, when you’re not looking through a camera?

Sure. You’ve always got to find something you really want to do, and then you just do it. I come into the city. I go to parties. I talk to you.

I could only smile.

And you? Jake said. Do you do what you really want to do? If you could do anything you wanted to do tonight, New Year’s Eve, on the edge of 1953, what would it be?

Want was such a strong word. I’d like to go someplace I’ve never been, I replied.

We paused for a minute.

Have you ever been to Staten Island? he asked.

The native New Yorker blushed. No.

We could go over on the ferry, and when we get there, we’ll get off and walk straight ahead, wherever that takes us.

Jake was an explorer, not a surveyor; he would never stay to measure. He was a person who found new places, new things, and new people, and then told others about what he’d found. That was how he saw the world: always brand new. Everything he did was an adventure, and every place he went was newly discovered. Life was a romance. He was the captain of the Staten Island Ferry, sailing through the dark and icy waters of the Hudson River for the first time; natives waited for him on the far shore, and though they might be wild, he would know them, and love them. They would enchant him.

The second lesson in Jake’s charm, after his smile, was that it was like a politician’s, totally focused on you while he was in your presence. Later he might forget your name; but while he was with you, he was hard to resist.

After our walk from the ferry, we wandered into a neighborhood bar, decorated with bits of pine and Christmas tinsel, to warm ourselves. A Schaeffer beer sign on the wall opposite the bar offered Season’s Greetings in big red letters. A few men sat at the long, dark counter, ringing out the old year in wet circles on the bar’s shiny wooden surface. These people were, for the moment, and for whatever reason, where they wanted to be. Their fellowship was no less deep for being fleeting. Circumstances made them friends, not anything else. One of them smiled at us, surprising me; I had never been in this kind of bar before, and expected it to be a sullen place.

Cold? the stranger asked.

Freezing, Jake said, and we both smiled. We’ve never been here before, and we thought we’d start the year off by seeing Staten Island.

The men laughed. That’s the way to start the year, all right, the bartender said.

Listen, said the first man, lotta good people on Staten Island.

Name three, another man said.

Him, him, and him, somebody else volunteered, pointing at the bartender.

I like it here, I said.

I felt as though I’d been allowed into a new part of the world, one that I’d always thought was private and closed, especially to women. No one in my family drank—except before family dinners, when the men would gather in the kitchen for schnapps, each holding a shot glass, calling out the toast—L’chaim!—and then throwing their heads back to swallow the amber liquid in one gulp before going back to the dining room to rejoin the women and children for dinner. I was sixteen before I found out that people drank in living rooms before dinner, men and women sipping slowly together. I’d been in bars at Antioch, but those were college bars. It wasn’t that nice girls didn’t want to go into corner bars then; it was that they—or I—didn’t think they’d