Pained By His Search For Birth Family, An Adoptee Found Hope In a Tattoo, a Photograph and a Rock Star

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50 years ago today, I was born to a teenage woman and a man with a heroin conviction.

He never laid eyes on me. She did, briefly, before passing me off to a long succession of strangers.

I lived the next few months without a name. Or a mother. Or a father.

My adoptive parents were thrilled when the foster home called, and thoroughly kept up their end of the bargain. They loved me and provided for me and did their best to acknowledge the relatively uncommon circumstances in which we came together.

When I was five years old, they approached me with a grave seriousness. “Um, Bobby, we have something we want to talk to you about. You had a Mommy who gave birth to you but she felt like she couldn’t be the best Mommy for you, so, because she loved you so much…”

I didn’t mind. Being adopted seemed neat. I had two mothers in the universe who loved me. My friends only had one!

————

The world would quickly snatch that notion out of my small hands.

Whether it be a friend’s father citing a man’s adoption as the reason he committed murder…or a neighborhood kid taunting me during an argument because he had ‘real’ parents…or my page in a ‘slambook’, where grade school kids wrote the most derogatory thing they could think of about their classmates (“Adopted”)…I learned that my peculiar origins were not cause for celebration everywhere.

Be it related or not, I lived out my childhood years as an incredibly sensitive and terribly insecure being. I cried a lot and was frightened a lot and spent an enormous amount of time inside my own head, fantasizing myself into imaginary existences where I was popular and handsome and had siblings who loved me and protected me from things.

With each passing year, my emotional unsteadiness brought higher stakes. I grew to be restless and disruptive, hornets replacing the butterflies in my nature. School psychologists tried to understand me for the same reason teachers and principals did not  – I was a problem.

I first ran away from home at 14, dropped out of school at 16, and had my first gun pulled on me at 17, while frequenting the most unforgiving parts of New York City to buy drugs. My life was lived out in dark places with dangerous people doing dangerous things, and none of it was a fantasy.

My parents felt the brunt of it. All of the lights they provided for me had dimmed, their hopes for me replaced by fears of their own. Particularly of their phone ringing late at night, for it might be the call informing them that the child they prayed so hard and waited so long for, was dead.

But I reformed myself. I could be stubborn like that. I was sober by 20, attributing my highwire past to typical teenage restlessness and not some deep seated harbinger of things to come again.

Until the first girl who loved me told me that she no longer did, and a bomb I didn’t know I was carrying exploded inside of me.

It felt more like a life threatening trauma than a mere heartbreak. It decimated me. At times, I literally struggled to breathe. I moved out of state in the hopes I could leave the pain behind, but it followed me. I became intense and cruel, and I thought about dying a lot.

———–

I had not been a good boyfriend. I behaved badly during our relationship, and earned what I had received. But this would be the abandonment – the first of many real and imagined – that revealed the bomb, and I would spend the following decades trying to keep others away from the fuse.

If an employer thought too much of me, I’d quit. If I became too comfortable somewhere, I’d move. And if a woman had real feelings for me, I’d withdraw until our inevitable parting became her idea. Coldly abandoning her was out of the question. I knew no deeper cruelty.

All of this might sound soft to you. Everyone in this world has faced rejection and abandonment, right? You certainly have, and you almost surely got over and past it, right? Of course. Everyone does.

So why couldn’t I just toughen up? Or better yet, grow up, and accept that life is hard and things between myself and others won’t always go my way?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t insightful enough to answer that. I had no real idea why rejection and abandonment and disregard harmed me so severely. Luckily for me, the late Betty Jean Lifton, a fellow adoptee who wrote numerous books about adoption, did:

“A deep identification with our forebearers as experienced originally in the mother-child relationship, gives us our most fundamental security.”

“The blood tie is important for the human psyche, and without it, the Adoptee is programmed for a difficult future.”

“The child who does not grow up with his own biological parents and does not know anyone of his own blood…has lost family continuity…”

“Most adoptive parents are unable to see the child’s loss of his birth parents as (the) psychic trauma (it is)…”

and

“It is difficult to be a survivor of any kind, but even more difficult when you are kept in ignorance of what it is you have survived.”

I first read those quotes while leaning against a shelf in a crowded bookstore. I found myself reading them on the floor a short time later, with no memory of having sat down. Literally and figuratively, the information knocked me off of my feet.

Neighboring books spoke of an adoptee’s penchant for risky and erratic behavior. Their fear of intimacy and commitment. Their erratic job and dating histories. Their high sensitivities, floating and dreamy demeanors, and the fantasies they create about their identity, and those of their birth parents.

This was not reading material intended for the masses. This was a surveillance report. This was my fucking biography.

I brought home everything I could find on the subject, and read into the early morning hours. With every word, I felt more understood. More real.

Still, one line in Lifton’s book “Lost And Found” didn’t ring true.

“Although (the adoptee) perceives that a bit of his world has been swept away, he also perceives that he must not attempt to retrieve it.”

That…did not describe me at all.

————-

I paid a fee to the agency that handled my adoption, and months later, 4 typed pages about my family background arrived in the mail.

I was real. I was real? I was real! These papers proved it. My birth parents were no longer mythological figures. They had first names! Diane and Rick. And they had stories. Sort of. My mother was a teenager who worked at a car rental company. My father was discharged from the military and had a drug arrest.

I wanted more.

Birth mothers are frequently anglicized by the adoption system, and my paperwork did nothing to change that. Diane was portrayed as someone who had made a great sacrifice, and was likely mindful of her connection with me during most if not all of her days. Every woman in my life felt that she would undoubtedly be thrilled to hear from me. This included Laura, my adoption case worker and an industry veteran of almost 40 years. She said the info suggested a very compelling case for Diane welcoming my outreach.

So, more than 10,000 long days after we first ‘met’, the agency placed a call to her on my behalf. It was unquestionably the most exhilarating day of my life, made more so by my optimism. I told my parents. I told friends. I took the day off of work to experience it fully.

That afternoon, Laura called. She had spoken with Diane! And Diane was…outraged. She was ornery. She was abrasive. And she was entirely resistant to the notion of engaging me in any way.

When she wasn’t mad, she was curious. “What the hell does he want from me?” she asked. “I gave him a life!!!”.

I seethed at this. She…did not…give me a life! She gave me life. My parents gave me a life, and they had a lifetime of manic ups and downs to prove it, along with financial receipts and the investment of the entirety of their hearts.

In an attempt to keep me steady, Laura gently suggested that I had one more shot to gain something worthwhile from the experience. They could ask Diane for a family medical history, and my father’s identity.

Diane agreed to fill out the medical forms.

Many weeks later, we received an envelope from her, stuffed with passive aggression. Dismissive slashes ran through most of the answer fields, save the one and only question where she was generous – a detailed accounting of her menstrual history.

She also passed along a message for me.

One, she didn’t want to hear from me ever again.

Two, she was no longer with my father but would not provide me with any information about him.

And three, she had two other children. Both of whom she kept and raised, the oldest having arrived only a few years after me. She would not tell me their sexes.

Not long after, I experienced an abandonment in a relationship and had no defense left to offer. I failed to eat or sleep for weeks, lost my sanity, and made real plans to end my life. I landed in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, as ordered after a state evaluation.

While admitted, I vowed to gain control over Diane once and for all. I developed a mantra that spoke to me, “My Love Is Stronger Than Your Disregard”. Once I was out, I had it tattooed to my dominant forearm, where I could see it while attempting just about anything for the rest of my life.

———–

In 2016, while waiting on a line for coffee, I recognized Sean Hopper, longtime keyboardist for Huey Lewis and the News. A passionate music fan all of my life, I struck up a conversation and he remarked that I really knew what I was talking about.

Years earlier, Celine Dion, after a chance conversation at my place of business, enthusiastically suggested that I should interview musicians for a living. I showed humility at the time, but deep inside, I agreed that I might be good at it.

Now Hopper had me thinking about the possibility again, but far more urgently. Within months I would sell the only valuable asset I owned to finance an attempt at becoming a music journalist.

————

I had less than a year to do it, and behaved accordingly. I begged, borrowed, embellished, lied and would have stolen if I could. I wrote hundreds of email and facebook messages to publicists and managers, virtually none of whom acknowledged me.

Soon the year was nearly up, my money gone. I had little to show for it, and was resigned to the fact that the only avenues I knew that led to breaks in this industry, were dead ends for me.

But late one night, while leafing through the pages of a 70’s music magazine, a photograph drew me in. It was of Ann Wilson, the legendary singer of the band Heart, and she looked soft and beautiful and welcoming. Even though the photo was decades old, I was moved by it. In a fit of fantasy, I envisioned her being sympathetic to my plight. In reality, I reached out to her publicist in the morning.

Surprisingly, her rep’s reply was immediate. She was part of Ann’s family, and operated more informally. Still, my request for an interview came down to qualifications I didn’t have.

Do you have a website hosting your past work Robert? Do you have information in regard to the size of your readership?

None of these questions were unreasonable, but they were unreasonable for me. My previous interviews were few, and virtually no one had read them. The fate of my request appeared to be the same as the fate of my entire mission. Delaying the inevitable, I said I would contact her later.

This was maddening! Didn’t anyone understand that this was a mission of love?! I wanted to experience this so badly, and theoretically, I was so close.

If only I had an angle, I thought to myself. Just one.

Like having gone to school with a well connected industry person. Or knowing a famous musician personally. Or best of all, benefiting from the most tried and true path to success – being born to someone who could get me a start.

Being born to someone.

Being born…

….to someone!

I hurriedly contacted the rep.

“Hi. I admit that this is going to sound a little odd, but I just want to say that I’m barely part of this industry yet. I’m not an established journalist. What I am…is adopted. I’m adopted, and I could really use a break, and if you would kindly tell Ann that I…”

Within minutes, I received a reply. It had been a very long time since I nervously waited for make or break news, but good or bad, I was ready for it. My love was now stronger than anyone’s disregard.

Still, I nervously closed one eye as I opened the message. The other read these 12 words.

“Don’t worry about the numbers Robert. Ann wants to speak with you.”

Ann had adopted both her daughter, and her son.

———–

The rest is not history, but it is my history.

We did the interview, where I was professional and prepared and made Ann laugh heartily at a joke I had written about her fans while I was a teenager. She was warm and lovely, like the photograph that led me to her.

Thanks to her gravitas in the industry, doors opened for me. I went on to interview stars and musicians I held great affection for – voices who emanated from my radio and faces who appeared on my television and bedroom walls, their art lessening the blow of slambooks and addiction and heart piercing attempts to connect pieces that will never fit.

I soon decided that if I was truly going to fuel this quest with love, I should facilitate love between others. I established www.thegivingarts.com where I help stars promote the charitable causes that mean so much to them.

As for Diane?

I found her on Facebook a few years ago. Occasionally she’ll post a picture of herself with my two brothers. They look like nice guys. She looks like me.

50 years ago this morning we spent a moment together. Now, we’ve spent up most of our respective lives.

I hope to live the rest of mine in peace, and I wish the same for her.

But if you happen to meet her, please pass along a message for me.

Let her know that I was wrong.

She did, indeed, give me a life.

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