087 – A Journey To Find Out Where I Came From

Who Am I Really?

When he was a kid, Bill saw clues here and there that he was adopted, but no one ever actually said it. It wasn’t until he called an uncle he’d never met before that the truth was revealed, turning Bill’s world upside down. Reunion with his birth mother was an emotional event with a woman who was told never to speak of his existence again. Bill talks about how he felt toward the father he grew up who took the secret of his adoption to his grave, and how redemptive it’s been to be accepted by his birth parents and his new siblings on both sides.

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Damon: 00:00 Hey there. I just wanted to take a sec to let you know that in between producing the show, chasing my son Seth around and generally living life, I took time to write a book about my own adoption journey. It’s called Who Am I Really? Of course. If you’d like to preorder a copy, go to WhoAmIReallypodcast.com and click shop where you will be redirected to the publishers bookstore. I hope to make it to your reading list. Okay, here’s this week’s show.

Bill: 00:30 I just realized that what was so upsetting was all the stuff I had missed. I missed 54 years with these people. I missed 54 years with my parents. I missed 54 years with my aunts and uncles and my sisters that I’ll never get back and that was really, really weighing on me and I just, I got to a point where I learned that I have to just accept that and I got to try to get past it.

Voices: 01:05 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon: 01:16 This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Bill. He called me from Virginia Beach, Virginia. When he was a kid, Bill saw clues here and there that he was adopted, but no one ever actually said it. It wasn’t until he called an uncle he’d never met before that the truth was revealed, turning Bill’s world upside down. He talks about how he felt toward the father he grew up with after learning the news and how redemptive it’s been to be accepted by his birth parents and his new siblings. This is Bill’s journey. Bill tells his adoption story in parts. I gathered, It was because he’s had to accumulate the facts over his lifetime. The first part of his story he calls, what I knew, where he describes exactly that, the things that he knew were the facts of his life. For example, he was born in January of 1963 his birth place was a Methodist hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. His father’s name was Bill. His first wife’s name was Audrey.

Bill: 02:27 I knew that sometime when I was two years old, Audrey passed away in June of 65 and I know that, uh, my father remarried my mother who raised me and uh, November of 67 that I knew, I knew that I grew up with a mother who wasn’t my real mother. I knew she was my step, but I grew up with that stereotypical Walt Whitman, uh, suburban family. There was nothing that we couldn’t do. Daryl and uh, his wife Jean went on to have four children, two boys and two girls. So I grew up as the oldest of five. Typical Irish Catholic family in Nebraska, the siblings, we were very, very close, but we fought like cats and dogs just like kids do. They were never any knock down drag outs. They were just those, you know, he took my toy, that type of stuff.

Damon: 03:25 sibling rivalry stuff.

Bill: 03:27 Yeah. Yeah. Now if someone outside of the family, picked on one of us, well then it was on because we would all take care of each other. But we’ve, you know, we fought like cats and dogs.

Damon: 03:39 Bill said he did all of the typical stuff boys did back then. He was a scout. He went camping and hunting, hiking and stomping through the creeks. Bill attended Catholic schools through high school when he was 16, the family relocated to California, but back when he was around 11 years old, he got his first piece of hard evidence about his adoption.

Bill: 04:02 I never had any clues that I looked at as clues at the time that I was different than the others. I knew that she was my stepmother, but I, I just didn’t. It didn’t matter. She was my mother. A couple of times, I remember asking my father to tell me more about my mom’s side of the family, Audrey’s side of the family, because we are an Irish Catholic family, but we didn’t have cousins. Um, my father, my father had a older brother, but he was, he was mentally handicapped and never married. And My mother Jean had a, had a brother, but he was the stereotypical California lifelong bachelor. So when all my friends would go visit cousins and stuff over the summer and Christmas, we didn’t do that. So I remember asking him about my mom, Audrey’s family, because I knew about his family, but I didn’t know anything about hers.

Bill: 04:58 And the answer I got on two separate occasions was, it’s not something that I like to talk about because you know, I loved her and she died from cancer and I, it’s just not something that I could talk, I can talk about. And as, as a kid I just kind of said okay. And I didn’t push it. There was another time, uh, I was, uh, using the parish directory to call a friend of mine to see if I could come over and play. Well, he, he and I were on the phone, I was flipping through the directory and I found our name and like kids do. I’m just sitting there and reading, making sure everything was right. And when it listed the siblings, it said me with A after it brother one, brother two, and sister. And I thought, well, what’s the A mean?

Bill: 05:48 So I looked at the front in the key and it said adopted. So when I hung up the phone, I found my, my father and I asked him, why does it say adopted after my name in the parish directory and his response was, well, when I married your mother Jean, she adopted you. And I thought, Oh okay, can I go to my friend’s house now? And I never thought anything else about it. The last time I remember asking him about it was, it was probably after we moved, we were living in California and I was like probably been in an argument with somebody and I was feeling a little cranky and I remember asking him another time about, who I called my real mom, Audrey. And again, he gave me the same story and I said, you know, if you don’t tell me, I’m just going to have to find out all my own. And his response that time was, well, if you do, be careful because you might not like what you find. And I just thought it was an odd response, but I just didn’t process it. I just didn’t do anything with it.

Damon: 06:57 If you haven’t figured it out. Bill grew up not knowing he was adopted. He’s a late discovery adoptee. Bill told me his life just kind of went on and he joined the US navy in 1982, when he was 19 years old. Bill had posts in different parts of the country and all over the world. Eventually landing on the east coast where he met his wife. They started a family, bought a house and started having children.

Bill: 07:25 I had just deployed, going across the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and I get a message that I need to call home immediately because there’s a medical problem. So I was able to get ahold of a phone. This was before the internet, before emails. So we just had to do things the hard way. I called home and I was told that my father had been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. He had three to five months and I needed to come home because it’s going to be a a six month deployment. So there was a shot that I wouldn’t see him again. So I went, uh, I flew back to the states. Spent some time with my father, the family, and then eventually get back to the ship. Uh, finished the deployment and I get home, uh, 20 years ago, this month in January of 99 this day actually that we are doing this, marks the 20th anniversary of his passing.

Damon: 08:21 Oh Man. I’m sorry. Wow.

Bill: 08:23 Yeah. Uh, he was in hospice when I finally got back home and he never said anything to me. So you know, he died in January of 99

Damon: 08:35 so I think what you were saying is he never revealed your truth there on his death bed.

Bill: 08:39 That’s true. Yes.

Damon: 08:41 Bill’s father died in January of 1999, in April of that same year he was stationed back in his home state of Nebraska. He traveled to Nebraska to search for a place to live and since he was home, he visited the cemetery where his mother, Audrey is buried along with his grandparents. Visiting the graves Bill, started writing down birth and death dates for his relatives. He hadn’t had that information before. He realized he would like to see his birth announcement, something the Omaha newspaper used to print. So he went to the central library to do some research. Unfortunately, the newspaper wasn’t posting the birth announcements in the year Bill was born, so his announcement wasn’t in the libraries archives. So he decided to look up Audrey’s obituary where he learned she had six siblings, aunts and uncles on her side of the family that he didn’t know. He printed the document and took it home to jump on the Internet, which was brand new at the time. Bill found what amounted to a gigantic phone book listed online. Audrey’s brother had a very unique name and lived in a small town, so he seemed like the easiest person to locate.

Bill: 09:54 So I thought, what the heck? I typed in his name and I get one return and I write the phone number down and I do it for all of her siblings and I find, I don’t know, three or four of them. So I remember sitting on that for a little bit, a couple of days, and then I thought, you know what? What’s the worst that can happen? So my, my wife wasn’t home, she was visiting her parents, uh, with the boys and I just picked up the phone one night and I make a, a long distance phone call. And this elderly man answers the phone. And I asked him, are you so and so? And he says, yes. Then I asked him, did you have a sister named Audrey who was married to a, this man Bill? And, uh, she passed away in, uh, in June of 65.

Bill: 10:44 And he hesitantly says yes. And I just blurted it out. I said, well, sir, I guess that makes you my uncle. And the first words out of his mouth were Billy? So he, he knew about me, but I didn’t know anything about him.

Damon: