Infant Of // Patricia Knight Meyer
“Infant Of” is an excerpt from the forthcoming novel WONDERLAND: A Black Market Baby’s Life Underground
“At thirty-eight, you want to find her?”
My mother is stewing in her wheelchair, pulled up alongside the bar in what she calls her “shithole shoebox” senior-living apartment. Although she still walks short distances, she likes how the footrests of her wheelchair rise to meet her feet, accommodating her short legs, “which don’t go all the way up,” she sometimes jokes.
It’s a gray fall day, and we’re sharing our Wednesday happy hour. Having made gin and tonics, I sit in my usual spot on the futon, ready for our chat about how my day at work went, what the pundits on TV are saying, and which news anchor she dreamed she danced with the prior night.
“Oh, Dan Rather had all the moves! With him, it’s always the tango.”
It touches me that despite the limp from a broken hip and the oxygen cord stretched across her face, she still dreams about moving and grooving with journalism’s hottest.
“Do you ever sleep with them?” I once asked.
“No, but Anderson Cooper lets his hand wander.”
“You’re not his type,” I’d reminded her.
“What can I say? Gay men love me!”
She works hard to get the last word, and usually it’s a zinger. But today, my mother isn’t talking about her dreams; she’s talking about mine. It seems she’s seen the Ancestry.com charge I made on her credit card while chasing that dream, and now I’m cornered.
“I thought you’d at least wait for me to drop dead before you looked for her.”
She’s only half joking.
Behind those boxy frames, she studies me. Adjusting her posture, she attempts to appear more composed, perhaps a tad healthier.
“Someday I’ll look, but not now,” I assure her. Having Mommy’s blessing to search isn’t the same thing as telling her I’m already doing so.
“You wanted me to find out, didn’t you? Why else would you use my card?”
She’s got me there. Apparently, not too blind to take a magnifying glass to a credit card statement, it’s like she’s caught me up to something. Which she has.
Having learned that Texas’s birth records were searchable on Ancestry.com, I’d gone momentarily bonkers and used my mother’s Mastercard to open an account. I’d left my wallet at home that day, and her emergency card in my work drawer offered an easy solution to my immediate predicament. I thought I’d gotten away with it.
While at UT Austin years before, I’d stood in the capital-based Bureau of Vital Statistics, mouth agape at the three-foot pile of volumes—all the 1970 birth records for Harris County, one of nine counties in the Houston metropolitan area. “They aren’t by date,” the record keeper said, grunting while she’d stacked them before me. “Each is listed alphabetically, by mother’s last name.”
I’d leafed through thousands of bible-thin pages that day, looking for mothers whose babies were listed as “infants of,” those who most likely had relinquished, women like my birth mother who’d blindly trusted the system that absconded with their infants. But without knowing her name, my birth name, my date, or even the exact year of birth, searching the stacks had seemed daunting and pointless. Now, according to my sources, these records have been digitized and are awaiting scouring. And that’s when I set up the account and started digging. The act seemed benign at the time. Why didn’t I wait until I got home to use my own card? Did I subconsciously want Mommy to find out? Maybe?
“I’ll pay you back,” I say.
“It’s not the money I’m concerned about,” she snaps, side-eyeing me while fumbling in the pocket of her robe for a cigarette and lighter. I check for the hum of her O2 machine, which I don’t hear, and relax—glad she’s not about to accidentally set herself on fire again.
“Even if I found something, I wouldn’t reach out. Not now.”
“Why not?” She asks like she really wants to know. “Don’t you want her to meet me?”
“It’s not her meeting you I’m worried about,” I answer, rattling the ice in my glass, wishing I’d poured a stronger drink.
Hopefully, that puts her questions to rest. She doesn’t need to know about my years-old profile on CousinConnect.com, or the warning received from a well-intentioned stranger: “I hope you already have a passport. Since 9/11, the passport office only accepts long-form birth certificates.” I don’t know if that’s true, but long-form requirement or not, since the state seems to have no record of me, adoption or otherwise, I guard the one “identifying” document I have with my life—even if it’s a fake, which it very well might be. It’s all I’ve got.
“So, you didn’t find anything?” Mommy pries, the smoke from her last drag screening her concern.
“You remember that massive stack of birth records at the Bureau of Vital Statistics I told you about? How I wanted to go through them, but it was just too much? Well, now they’re searchable online. So, I could potentially find something.”
Seventy-two, my mother nods like she knows everything there is to know about electronic records. Her silence is accentuated with a long sip of her drink and an even longer drag on her smoke. Sometimes silence means things are about to go sideways, and I’ll leave with her upset or crying. Either way, she cries, sitting here hours on end with no one to talk to. She’s not one to join gardening clubs or crochet circles, and her eyes are far too bad for driving.
“I have nothing in common with those people,” she says, peering through the blinds, as shadows shaped like her neighbors amble up to the clubhouse for bingo or backgammon. Unless they are belly up beside her at the neighborhood bar, she considers most her age “fuddy-duddy drips” and “such boring bastards that neither Heaven nor Hell will have them.”
On these visits, I usually call in any meds needing refilling, tidy her apartment, and make a day or two’s worth of food so she eats well while I’m away. “Congrats, you’re finally rid of me,” she’d spat the day she moved in, sulking about her new five-hundred square feet of independence, resigned to accept the fucked-up fate I’d dealt her.
“You can’t leave me in this hellhole to rot and expect me to cope without my vices,” she often barters. “Make it a carton of smokes and a gallon of Bombay if you love me.” I agree reluctantly. My compliance is ushering her to her death, but as Daddy did, I give her whatever she wants; Band Aids for the wounds she believes I’ve inflicted.
Lately, though, the Lexapro seems to be bringing Happy Mommy back, at least a friendlier drunk than the previous version. I’m no longer the “ungrateful, self-centered bitch” of a daughter who dropped her here. Now I’m “the world’s best daughter,” especially when I deliver the goods on time and in sufficient quantities. Still, how can I leave?
No matter how much she says she’s fine, each time I drive away, I’m abandoning her all over again. I look at the clock, calculate the time between now and when I need to head home to my husband, and push the guilt of leaving to the back of my mind.
Pulling out a tray of meds from under the coffee table between us, I begin refilling her massive monthly pill planner. Snap, snap, snap. Prying rows of lids open, I dose each slot, one after the other: morning, noon, afternoon, and night—plop, plop, plop, plop. “Truly, without being morbid,” I say, “I don’t want to share what time we have left with another mother. If I look, it’ll be when you’re gone. Not that you’re replaceable or anything.”
“You sure you didn’t find anything?” she presses.
“Not really,” I lie, dropping each pill into its umpteenth slot.
I had looked. And one record had stood out, an “infant of” with no birth name given or birth father listed, delivered the very same week I was presumably born, to a woman named Dinah—a name that sounds a whole lot like the name my mother let slip long ago, the name Diane. Within seconds, I’d slapped shut my laptop, overwhelmed by the prospect of sliding down a rabbit hole that I—the me I know myself to be—might not climb back out of.
“I saw some ‘infants of’” I admit, “but no real leads. Even if I found a name, can you imagine how hard it would be to track down a person? People get married, they move, they die. But since we’re on the subject, is there anything you need to tell me that you haven’t yet?”
I keep plopping: diuretics, blood pressure pill, blood thinner, heart pill, thyroid med, anti-depressant, NSAID, iron, potassium, vitamin D … Plop, plop, plop, I focus on the slots and try not to look overly interested in her answer.
“What do you mean?” she asks, wiping away a tubular grey ash that has tumbled from the tip of her cigarette and landed in the lap of her lilac house dress.
“Like some details you still need to share? Maybe about how things went down the day you drove away with me. You know, with no papers or BC? It’s not like I have a lot to go on.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she says, eyes on the floor. “But don’t worry,” she adds, “Lola gets what Lola wants.” I’ve never figured out why my mother loves quoting old musicals as a way to taunt or humor me. Lola is from Damn Yankees.
“You know what Lola really wants?” I prod on, snapping thirty days of pill box lids closed in rapid succession, “I want to find that attorney. Find out what he did with your $30K and my papers.”
My mother raises a dismissive eyebrow and turns her head. End of conversation. I may not be done answering her questions, but she’s done answering mine.
The medicine tray rattles as I slide it back under the coffee table. I look up to find my mother’s gaze has wandered out of the room, thoughts threading through the sliding glass door, beyond the autumn leaves, to a time when I’m again alone in this world. I’m at once aware of the wind whistling along the windowsill, the tick of the clock on her wall, the dripping faucet at the sink.
“So, once you find her … after I’m dead,” she sighs, eyes cast out the door, “how will you feel if she doesn’t want to meet you?”
“Well,” I say, scooting to the edge of the futon, reaching for her hand, “at least I’ll know I tried. I do wonder about her, but mostly I want her to know that I’m okay, that you and Daddy gave me a good life.”
The last part is a lie, but my “good life” response draws my mother’s eyes and hands to mine.
“Well, I hope you aren’t hurt or disappointed. What if she’s ignorant white trash?”
“Seriously, is that your opinion of my DNA?” I joke, and she raises a quizzical eyebrow that makes me laugh, signaling I’ve set her mind at ease.
“I’m empty,” Mommy whines, playfully upending her glass, and I rise to pour another round. The booze eases the pain of my leaving, and my second, her third, will seal the deal for us both.
“The mystery of me is a lot like Alice in Wonderland. Alice slides down a rabbit hole and loses all sense of herself. It’s like that, but it’s more about climbing out of that hole, like to find out who you were before you fell in, than finding any particular person.”
Measuring out shots of Bombay by the fridge, I realize I just compared my life with her and Daddy to falling into a massive sinkhole.
“I don’t care who she is.” I go on. “I just want to thank her. Hell, she may not want to hear from me. I’m likely a dirty little secret kept from a family that knows nothing about me?”
I turn around, drinks in each hand, to find worry wilting my mother’s face. It’s as if she’d never thought of this before. It says, I don’t want you to do this now, but I don’t want you going through it alone, with me dead and gone.
My heart drops. This is harder for her than it is for me. I simply want a legal birth certificate, but she’s dead-dog frightened. Is she fearful I’ll be disappointed by the mother I’ve compared her to all these years, or is there something darker I might uncover?
Who in the world am I? has always been my great puzzle. Mommy still needs groceries, meds, trips to the doctor, and bi-weekly visits. Me. She doesn’t need me searching for her replacement.
Yet, if I lose my only identifying document, I’ll likely never be able to replace my passport or prove my citizenship. The minute people start dying, the truth will get that much harder, if not impossible, to uncover.
“I may never look, you know,” I say, pushing the glass across the bar, urging her to drink up, forget about it. “I guess it’s just curiosity.”
*
And that was it. The last time we ever talked about it. I wish I’d told my mother that, despite being each other’s replacements, no one could ever take her place. That she was and would always be my only mother. That she’d been enough. But the last part, her being enough, I could never have said, even as much as I wanted to.
Separation trauma had clouded every aspect of my life. I couldn’t yet embrace the truth—that even when adoptive parents are the very best, they likely aren’t enough to fill the gap in your abandoned soul. That’s normal. Not betrayal. I didn’t just want or need to know who I was and where I came from; I deserved it. Raised by those who created you, dropped in a baby box, placed for adoption, donor conceived, or trafficked on the street, every soul deserves the right to their true identity.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that if I ever met my first mother and wanted an authentic relationship with her, I, too, would have some ugly facts to face. I’d not been raised by the idyllic family of so many first mothers’ fantasies—the placement fallacies woven and sold to them by coercive agencies, lawyers, and parents of their generations.
Who knew what lies the attorney had told her? How many promises he’d broken? Or what she’d think about the less-than-perfect couple who raised her baby. Nor did I realize that she, too, might not be the ideal, uncomplicated mother of my dreams.
Leaving my mother’s apartment that day, stopping on the sidewalk as I stepped toward the car, I still recall the sight of her through the window, seeing her little legs through the half-open blinds, rooted there at the bar in her wheelchair. Despite her inability to be the kind of mother I needed, I still remember wondering how sad she’d be ’til I returned, how I stuffed down the sobs that squirmed in my throat as I shut the car door and backed out of the parking space, but I can’t for the life of me recall if I told her how irreplaceable she truly was.
Patricia Knight Meyer is a journalist, adoption reform advocate, and survivor of the Baby Scoop Era black market. Born in 1970 and sold on the black market via an illegal adoption, she obtained her first legal birth certificate at age 47. She serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP), keynotes at national adoption conferences, and leads memoir writing workshops nationwide. She divides her time between the Texas Hill Country and New Orleans. Wonderland: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption is her first book, and it releases Nov. 3 by Unsolicted Press. Find her on Facebook at @Wonderlandthememoir or
@patriciaknightmeyer, and on Instagram at @wonderlandthememoir or
@patriciaknightmeyer. Visit her website at www.myadoptedlife.com