My dear, beautiful birth mother’s birthday came and went again this week. I will always love the mother I never met and painfully regret never having just one chance to celebrate her or my birthdays together — with her and the three full-blooded older siblings I found in the summer of 2005.
Happy birthday, Betty Louise, from all four of your children: Crys, Robin (who’s been in heaven since 2009), Terry and me.
A divorced single mother of three who was five months from turning 40 when she gave birth and placed me for adoption in Huntington, West Virginia, Betty would’ve been 103 Monday. Her 71-year life, stopped short by lung cancer and the early part of which my siblings and I know very little, was full of valleys, some of which Betty never really found her way out of.
I’ve spent much of the past 19 years riddling my siblings with questions about our mother, in an obsessive quest to know every detail of every size that I can squeeze out of their memories. Part of the reason is because it’s who I am — a seeker of information and knowledge, eager and curious to learn about the things that most pique my desire to know.
But most of it emanates from a heart that will always hurt, for different reasons. It hurts because of a forgettable childhood spent with an adoptive mother from Panama whose abuse in multiple forms robbed many of the joys kids should be allowed to experience growing up. As a sensitive boy, I took her often insensitive treatment hard but catered to her outrageous whims and followed whatever rocky path her sometimes violent actions took us all on.
Those tormenting memories helped give me the final push to finally begin searching when I was in my early 40s. But my pursuit was entirely singular: Just months after the passing of my adoptive mother Olga, the anguish she’d left me with still fresh decades later, I wanted — needed — to find my biological mother. Anyone else I tracked down would be secondary — although the results of my search forced a change in my thinking.
When that search ended in June 2005, the sorrow of finding out that Betty and I would not meet in this life because she had died 13 years earlier was deeply distressing. But the discovery of my siblings — who we’d soon learn were my full sibs, once we concluded their father Bob was also mine and a DNA test confirmed it — lifted my spirits.
I decided the better-late-than-never coming together of her three oldest with the baby she’d had to give up was what Betty must have always wanted — even if she’d misled at least her oldest into thinking I hadn’t survived childbirth. Our sister Terry was too young to know Betty was pregnant, and when my brother Crys, who turned 17 the day I was born, asked Betty what happened to the baby, she said she’d lost me.
I don’t know if I was quickly whisked away from Betty at Cabell Huntington Hospital or if she was able to spend at least a few minutes with me. But she’d already been a mother for 17 years, and you can’t tell me she wasn’t hurting in those moments and didn’t think about and love me every day of the rest of her life just like she did the three children she raised.
And I think of her and love her all the time too. It’s only natural, I figure. Even though we never met, thanks to the shared recollections of my siblings and other people I’ve spoken to who knew Betty and the remarkable person she was despite her hardships, it feels like we did. One thing I’m certain of: Our bond will last forever.
I love you too, Betty. ❤️
A Life of Words 