Domestic Adoption Reunion Story

“After 36 years, Ann Chapin finally learned three facts about her son: His name was Alonzo. He was alive. And he was searching for her.

“This just came out of the blue,” Ann, 65, said of the information she received from an adoption reunion agency eight years ago. “I cried tears of relief for basically a month.”

When the Reading woman gave her healthy baby boy up for adoption in 1969, closed adoption procedures were the norm.

Ann was denied any information about her son and feared no one would adopt a biracial child. The thought of her son growing up in a Catholic children’s home terrified her.

So when the reunion agency sent her his email address in September 2005, Ann wasted no time contacting him.

“Dear Alonzo,” she typed, “Rumor has it that you were looking for someone. I don’t know where to begin.”

Painful rejection

It was August 1968 when Ann experienced the most painful rejection of her life.

The 20-year-old had delayed facing her parents for as long as she could, taking a summer job in New Jersey after finishing her junior year at Penn State.

But she had to come home to Reading sooner or later, and her four-months-pregnant belly would spill her secret.

“My parents were understandably upset, and had no idea what they could have possibly done wrong to have this happen to them,” Ann said.

To her parents, it was bad enough that she was pregnant out of wedlock. But pregnant with a half-black baby?

They arranged for her to live with her uncle in Arizona, where she was to have her baby in secret and never tell a soul.

And when Ann’s parents told her they wouldn’t help her raise the baby, she had no one to turn to. Her boyfriend was already out of the picture, and chronic fatigue syndrome left her bedridden for days or weeks at times.

“That left pretty much one option, which was putting the baby up for adoption,” Ann said.

Abortion was not legal, and Ann strongly opposed it.

“I didn’t have a prayer of raising a baby on my own,” Ann said. “It was a matter of survival for both of us.”

Relieved to leave

Ann was relieved to get out of Reading.

She was five months pregnant when she went to live with her uncle, who was a doctor. For the first time since she became pregnant, Ann was receiving medical attention.

“Uncle was cool,” Ann said. “It was the first time I felt loved in a long time.”

He looked into adoption agencies and gave her three to choose from. She went with the closest place.

While Ann now counts her faith as more important than anything, she remembers going into the adoption agency and asking for a nonreligious family. That didn’t happen, she found out later.

“They give you this whole list of stuff that you want and don’t want for the adoptive parents, and I think they pretty much ignore it,” Ann said. “The people just didn’t seem nice at all at the adoption agency. They pretty much said, ‘This is how it’s going to be.'”

The agency would try to find a family for her baby, but there were no guarantees.

Separated

Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s passed, and Ann was nearing the end of her pregnancy.

She realized she would soon be separated from the child who grew and kicked inside of her. A snip of the umbilical cord would be the severing of their relationship.

On Jan. 22, 1969, after four hours of labor, Ann gave birth to a 10-pound, 2-ounce baby boy without complications.

But nurses at the Arizona hospital wouldn’t let her see him.

“If you held the baby, you would change your mind,” she recalled them saying.

Ann knew she would have to live without knowing her son’s name, where he lived, or even if he was adopted.

But she refused to leave the hospital without at least laying eyes on her son. And on her third day in recovery, the nurses relented.

Ann was allowed to stand outside the maternity ward and look at her baby through the glass. That was it.

She watched as a nurse picked up a dark-skinned boy with sparse, fuzzy hair and held him up to the glass.

For 10 pounds, 2 ounces, he didn’t look that big.

Quiet and alert, he looked up at his mother’s tear-stained face with the steady gaze of a newborn.

“I cried and cried and cried,” Ann said. “It was my kid, and I wanted to take care of him. I wanted to see him speak his first word. But I knew that if he was going to have a fighting chance, this was his best option.”

Wondering

Ann never married or had any more kids.

Shortly after giving birth, she returned to her parents’ house and re-enrolled at Penn State.

Ann finished her bachelor’s degree in fine arts and went on to work as a manager at various retail jobs. Later, she picked up skiing and became an instructor at a Vermont ski resort.

After 10 years, she returned to Reading and joined the board of Mercy Community Crisis Pregnancy Center, a Reading nonprofit that offers Christian counseling and support services for people facing unplanned pregnancies. She found meaning in the work and has been with the organization ever since.

All this time, Ann wondered what had become of the child she carried for nine months but never held.

“You see a child walking around that looks like the age he would be,” she said. “And you have to wonder: What would he be doing now? Is he healthy? Is he able to walk? Is he able to talk?”

Although Ann didn’t know her son’s name, he was Christopher Asher in her heart.

“Asher means blessing, and I just really liked the name,” Ann said.

She obeyed her parents’ order to keep quiet about the baby, but it took a tremendous toll on her.

“Mother’s Day rolls around and you get no recognition,” Ann said. “You get people saying, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have a child. You don’t know what it’s like to go through life.'”

No doubt

Ann was nearly 58 when she got a call from someone with an Arizona adoption reunion agency.

The agency representative asked Ann if she would release information to her son or contact him herself.

Ann emailed Alonzo, and he replied the next day.

Alonzo told her he was curious about his heritage and never knew what to say when people asked about his racial background.

He started searching for Ann after one of his friends, who had also been adopted, had a positive experience reuniting with his birth parents.

Tears rolled down Ann’s face as she read what she had longed to know for so many years: Alonzo did not grow up without a family. He had been adopted by a black couple in New Jersey, and his adoptive father had given him his own name.

Alonzo was married to a Swiss woman he met in college and they were living in Switzerland, where he had a good job as an information technology professional.

“Everything that I prayed for him, God answered it,” Ann said. “I didn’t know how much of a burden I was carrying until it was lifted.”

The photos Alonzo sent left no doubt in her mind that he was hers.

He had attached earlobes, unlike her, but they each had an eye that drooped a bit. They had the same eyebrows and were both tall and slender.

The two started emailing back and forth, and in time, Alonzo asked Ann to come to Switzerland.

He even bought the plane ticket.

Finally together

Ann and Alonzo were both reserved when they met in 2007.

“I knew I had to be careful in establishing the relationship because this is a total stranger,” Ann said. “I knew that this was a relationship that I wanted to continue, and I don’t want to jeopardize it by pushing too hard.”

Alonzo was 4 inches taller than her 6-foot frame when she held him for the first time.

“Hugging was very difficult for him at first, but he would let me take his arm and hand and we would walk places together like that,” Ann said. “When somebody made a comment about it, he said, ‘She likes to take my hand, and I kind of like the contact.'”

They went shopping, out to eat, and skied the Alps during their two weeks together.

“When I went to see my son, I felt better than I ever felt,” Ann said.

It was difficult to say goodbye, but two years later, Ann was back for another visit.

Common interests

Ann smiled when Alonzo sent the photo of himself crocheting. In Switzerland, they had browsed yarn stores together.

They also both love science fiction, especially the “Star Trek” series.

But what really unites them is the game of Scrabble.

Hardly a day passes that Ann and Alonzo aren’t playing the popular word game against each other online.

She introduced him to his first game several years ago and beat him by 30 or 40 points. But Alonzo kept playing and started winning, Ann said.

While Ann feels she gave her son a better life by placing him for adoption, it grieves her that she had to wait 36 years to even learn his name.

Ann said that if she would have had the option to maintain contact with her son and have information about him, as many birth mothers do today, she would have had less pain in her life.

But the visits, the text messages and the Scrabble games, they all give her peace.

“The fact that he learned Scrabble and chooses to play it with me shows that I had some influence on his life,” Ann said.”Reading woman reconnects with son given up for adoption

[Reading Eagle 7/28/13 by Beth Ann Heeson]

REFORM Puzzle Piece