The Gift of Time: A Birth Mother's Memoir

By Julie McLaughlin

"Do we have any skeletons in our closet?"

That was the question posed to the author's mother-in-law by a niece after receiving a private message through Facebook from a stranger who said, "I think you are my cousin." This led to a shocking phone call on a normal June day, which altered the life of the author.

For forty years, Julie had kept a secret from most of the people in her life. A Catholic girl from a good family in the late 1970s, she had become pregnant in her late teens but was not ready to be a mom. With guidance from her parish priest, Julie went away to live in a home for other unwed, pregnant girls and made the difficult decision to give her baby up for adoption. Not for forty years did she know a thing about him--what his name was, what he looked like, where he lived, or what he did for a living. Until that June day in 2018, when he was revealed to be that baby, now a forty-year-old man. Yet she always had faith that her decision was the right one as she placed her son in God's hands.

Over the course of two years, this birth mother and biological son get to know each other and enter into each other's lives. There are interesting twists and turns. Had their paths ever crossed?

This very personal and honest memoir dives into the heartache, loss, and guilt suffered by the author. You will laugh, and you might cry. Some who have experienced the real story compare it to a beautiful Hallmark movie. In the end, the hole in the author's heart is filled.

It is the author's hope that this adoption story can bring peace to others who have endured a similar fate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685709013

Julie McLaughlin

Julie McLaughlin is an award-winning illustrator of numerous children's books, including Pride Puppy, Little Cloud, and Why We Live Where We Live, winner of the 2015 Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction. Her work with various editorial, advertising and publishing clients can be seen around the world. Julie grew up on the Prairies and now resides on Vancouver Island.

Book preview

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The Gift of Time

A Birth Mother's Memoir

Julie McLaughlin

ISBN 978-1-68570-900-6 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68570-901-3 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Julie McLaughlin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Cover designed and illustrated by Rebecca Allen in collaboration with the author.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Call

Humble Beginnings

Singer in a Sunday Choir

High School Sweethearts

Reality Has a Face

I'm Pregnant

Home Away from Home

The Cover-Up

The Wooden Floor

The Christmas Stocking

She Ain't Going Anywhere

You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail: Part 1

Life After No Baby

As the Law Firm Turns

You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail: Part 2

The Meeting

Para Gravida

Para Gravida: My Forty-Year Secret

It's a Boy

Getting to Know You

The Trip of a Lifetime

The Letter

The Reveal

The Missing Piece

Hershey, Pennsylvania, and All Things Sweet

I Used to Hate February

The Necklace

The Necklace: Magic Happens When the Grandmas Meet

Mother's Day

The Best Parade Ever

In Witness Whereof

Fore!

Can You Forgive Me?

Epilogue: It's a Wonderful Life

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Michael—my best friend, biggest fan, and the love of my life

And written to honor all the birth mothers who selflessly gave the gift of life

Time can heal.

Author's Note

In writing this memoir, I drew from my personal collection of memorabilia, news articles, journal, letters, emails, texts and my memory. When I could, I consulted with several people who appear in the book.

My dear husband, Michael, is lovingly called Mike throughout. Although I am the author, he was along for the ride with me the entire time. Please pardon the I/me and the we/us dilemma. My intentions were honest and pure in portraying my/our emotions. No disrespect, especially to Mike, was ever intended.

JT and Carrie graciously granted me permission and approval to proceed with this project.

During the time it took me to complete my first draft, my computer crashed, my phone died, and some important texts and messages were lost. I did my best to recall the incident, conversation, or dialogue as close to the original as I could.

The Gift of Time is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect privacy.

Otherwise, this is a true account of experiences as I remember them.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

I hope it will be time well spent.

Julie Reimer McLaughlin

Summer 2021

Prologue

I received the illustration shown above as a gift on Mother's Day 2019, from my firstborn child, a son, a man I had only met ten months before. The graphic was displayed in a glass-encased frame and depicts the star constellations for the longitude and latitude of Magee-Women's Hospital located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 9, 1978, the day he was born.

This was the first Mother's Day that I spent with my son. I had given him up for adoption when I was a teenager. Had there been a window in my labor room on that dark night at Magee, and, if it had been a clear night, those were the stars I would have seen. But, to the best of my recollection, there was no window in my room—I was nineteen years old, alone, in pain, and scared. I was there to deliver the child I would not take home with me.

For forty years, I didn't know a thing about him—his name, where he lived, what he did for a living, or what he looked like. Mine was a completely private adoption in the late '70s. I was one of those good Catholic girls who got pregnant. I fabricated a cover story and went away to have my baby.

For forty years, I kept a secret—from my daughters, coworkers and employers, priests and teachers, friends and family. However, it was not a secret I had to keep from my husband—because he was the father of my son. Michael and I had ended up together, married. Parents. Grandparents. Best friends. Retirees.

In spite of what happened to me when I was a teenager, I've had a wonderful, full, rich life. Yet, there has also been a hole in my heart—a hole that might now be healed.

If I've learned anything, it's that timing is everything.

This is a story about accepting God's timing and how my faith has been my anchor.

The Call

On a sunny afternoon in late June 2018, my husband of thirty-seven years, my high-school sweetheart, my one and only, Michael, said, We need to talk.

My initial thought was Oh no. Has something happened to Pete? (My mother's husband, ill with pancreatic cancer.) Or perhaps my mom or Mike's mom (both aged, with some medical issues). Mike handed me his phone that he was clutching in his hand.

You need to see this picture.

I took his phone and glanced at a photograph of a man in a military uniform who looked exactly like Mike's dad.

I said, Who is this?

Mike replied, That is our son.

And with those four words, I was stunned to learn that the secret we had so carefully guarded and kept locked up in our hearts and minds, a subject we had rarely, if ever, talked about for forty years, had somehow been exposed.

I gasped. "What? What do you mean?"

I was dazed and dumbfounded and caught completely off guard. My heart began racing, and my legs turned to jelly. I thought I might fall to the floor, so I reached my arm out, and with Mike's help, I slowly lowered myself to the couch.

Mike, what is going on?

Actually, I didn't even know the words to say or the questions to ask.

In a stilted, shaky voice, unsure how I would react, fearful of my reaction, and still reeling himself from the shock, Mike told me that he had received a telephone call from his mother and sister that morning while I was at a baby shower for my niece who was expecting a boy, her first child. While I was at the shower, Mike was receiving news about our firstborn child, also a boy. Sadly, there had never been a shower for him. In fact, there was only a handful of people who even knew about his existence.

Mike's mom, Carol, and his sister, Linda, had called Mike. They were actually glad I was not home and explained to him that they had hoped to get him alone on the call because of the shocking news they were about to convey.

Through the combined forces of an ancestry/DNA service and Facebook, the son we had given up for adoption when I was nineteen years old, forty years ago, had found us, his birth parents. His search results had located a cousin of Mike's, Laura, who had responded to his inquiry. These newly found cousins began communicating with each other via text and Facebook. The problem was, Laura had no idea who this guy was, or how he could be a member of the family.

To further her probe, Laura had contacted Mike's mom and asked, Do we have any skeletons in our closet? I've had a dude contact me through Facebook who says he is my cousin. We've been talking, and he seems like a nice guy. He looks familiar, but I don't know how he is related.

Laura was stumped and said, Who is this JT guy?

Mike's mother had been one of the handful of people who knew about my teenage pregnancy and the decision Mike and I had made to give our child up for adoption. At the time, I went away to live in a facility with other pregnant girls, and we had fabricated a fake story surrounding my absence. In the late 1970s, that is what good Catholic girls did when they got pregnant. Laura would have been just a kid at that time. She, along with almost everybody in the family, was kept in the dark about the truth.

As Laura continued to receive additional information from JT, one of the match results showed a relative bearing my maiden name, one of my cousins. Laura was astonished to conclude, Oh my God. This is Mike and Julie's son.

A secret that she had known nothing about.

Concerned and worried, and before she provided any more information to JT, she contacted Mike's mother for guidance. What had she gotten herself into? How would this affect our lives? What had she done? Mike's mom asked Laura to refrain from any further contact with JT until she could figure out what to do, how to handle this discovery, and obviously, inform Mike and me.

But not before Laura had assured JT, I do know the identity of your birth mother. As a matter of fact, I know the identity of your birth father too. They are still together, married, and happy.

Laura refrained from providing any further details, no names or other pertinent information, and indicated that things needed to slow down.

JT said, Please tell my birth mother that I'm not mad. I'm happy and have had a great life. Don't want to upend her life. Just thought she would want to know that I'm okay.

That message was sent in the form of a text. That text was sent from JT to Laura to Mike's mom to Mike, along with the picture of JT.

And that was what I was staring at. A picture of a young man, perhaps thirty years old, in a military uniform. He looked so much like Mike's deceased father that it was hard to determine who was who. But, wait, Mike's dad did not serve in the military. He would have never been in a uniform like this. Besides, Mike had just told me, seconds before, This is our son.

I was staring at my son, a grown man, a person I knew had existed, but about whom I had no personal information whatsoever. I was numb.

Mike and I handed the phone back and forth between each other that afternoon. I would ask Mike over and over again, Read me the text again. Show me the picture again. This went on for part of the afternoon. We had a birthday party to attend that evening, and at some point, needed to get ready. But for several hours, it was just the two of us, sitting in the living room, passing the phone back and forth, back and forth. And we began talking.

Mike told me that he had been having dreams recently—dreams about a boy. Julie, this was always such a sad part of your life, I never wanted to upset you. I didn't want to tell you how I was feeling. I've always wondered where he was. I was always so afraid to talk to you about it, and I never wanted to bring the subject up.

He spoke in a low, serious tone, gentle but with conviction. He looked directly into my eyes and gave me the time I needed to respond. He kept looking at the photograph, too, and said, I can't believe how much he looks like my dad. They could have been twins.

Mike was seated in a chair directly across from me, and our hands clasped at times. There were periods of genuine, open, and honest discussion, along with times of complete silence, each of us reflecting on this revelation.

Mike had already had a few hours to think about all of this. As a retired general manager for a coal company, he was trained in problem solving. His thoughts and mind had gone to How will this affect JT's parents? What do I tell my daughters? How will it affect their lives? Will they no longer see me as their knight in shining armor? Have I fallen off the white stallion? What do we tell our friends? What will they think of me? How is this going to alter my extremely comfortable, settled life? He shared some of those concerns with me.

When a bit of reality set in, my mind, too, began racing, and my thoughts jumbled. I said, Oh, my God. What are we going to do? How do we handle this? Where do we go from here? What is expected of us? What does he want? What do we tell Shannon and Cate?

I was not one to blog or seek out adoption information. I didn't research that subject. I didn't subscribe to any adoption magazines or websites. I had never sent my DNA into an ancestry site. This was a closed book, never discussed. Our adult daughters had children of their own for crying out loud—we were grandparents! They knew nothing about their big brother who had been given up for adoption—a completely private adoption. Forty years of friends, neighbors, priests, and employers, they didn't know.

In the forty years since his birth, when I allowed myself to think about it, when I unlocked that part of my heart, I had wondered if, how, when, and where this day would come.

My Dream Sequence

There would be a knock on my front door, and I would fling it open. A man would be standing there with a bouquet of beautiful red roses. I would immediately recognize him, and we would run into each other's arms and embrace.

Isn't that the way they show it on TV?

Or…

I would receive a phone call from a number I didn't recognize. For whatever reason, I would actually answer this call instead of letting it go to voicemail. The male voice, unrecognizable, would ask, Is this Julie? I would say, Yes. And his reply would be, Hi, I'm your son. Can we get together?

I often wondered if I would recognize him if I saw him in a crowded room, grocery store, or restaurant? I had considered that he might be in the military, and if so, was he okay? It must be why I enjoyed parades so much and cried every time I saw the servicemen and women marching in them. There was some comfort in knowing our child was a male, in my mind, strong, and able to care for himself. But to allow myself to go to that subject, to think about him somewhere out there, was so awful that I just didn't do it. Up until this day, I had no answer to any of my questions. My musings were just possible scenarios that ran through my head. But I always had faith that he was in God's care.

Mike called his mom and sister, as they were anxiously awaiting a response.

How are you going to handle this? they asked.

Mike said, We need time. We are in shock. This is a secret we have kept for forty years following the hardest decision we've ever had to make in our life. One of the saddest times of our life. They understood and assured us they would support us, and they would let Laura know it was now in our hands.

We needed some time to wrap our heads around this.

There were more pictures. I was confused. My head was saying, Mike just told me this is our son. My heart was saying, But it looks like Mike.

Truth set in. I had been a pregnant, unmarried teenager who had gone to live in a home for unwed mothers. I had given up a son for adoption. This was all fact. This was my life. If the DNA tests were right, and if he was born on February 9, 1978, at Magee-Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, then this was my son. I was his birth mother. He had found what he was looking for. The day had come, but were Mike and I ready for this?

The definition of shock is a sudden upsetting or surprising event or experience. I was definitely hit with a shock that day, although, surprisingly, I didn't cry or scream. Tears would come