ICARE - Wisconsin Adoptee - Birth Family Registry Glossary

11,000 Days

On a Sunday evening in late October 1999 I logged into the Internet for the 20th time that day. I was hoping, praying, for a message from my firstborn son, Daniel, whom I had placed for adoption three decades earlier.

Cary Daniel Heistad was born on Christmas Eve in 1968. I held him and fed him for three glorious days in the hospital. I memorized his face, so I'd know him if I saw him in a crowded place later on.

A social worker for the agency handling the adoption visited me in the hospital. She told me to forget about Cary Daniel, to walk away, and to never, ever try to locate him later. A couple was waiting to adopt him, and they'd give him everything I couldn't, she said. I was doing the right thing, I was assured, to give him up. Besides, I could start over, get married and have another baby, to replace this one. The social worker assured me that she knew what was best for my baby and me. Walk away, she insisted. Do it!

I walked away, but I never forgot my little boy. Not for one second.

He was never far from my thoughts. Although each of his birthdays was a painful event, his thirtieth birthday in 1998 was especially difficult. All day I replayed the promise I whispered to him when he was three days old, out of the earshot of the social worker: "I will always love, and I'll look for you someday."

On his thirtieth birthday I made another promise to my lost boy. I vowed that I wouldn't let another year pass without finding him.

Shortly after New Year's in 1999, I registered with several online adoption search registries, including Wisconsin-based ICARE. Weeks passed. Although I checked my email several times a day, there were no messages from anyone who might be my son or who might know him.

I looked in the local phone directory for private investigators and wrote down a few names, but didn't pursue them. It just didn't feel right. I thought about contacting an attorney - I know several competent lawyers in my town - but that didn't feel right, either.

Then on March 2, 1999, I received an email from a woman named Carolyn, an independent searcher affiliated with ICARE. She offered to locate my son. Though I'm usually suspicious of strangers, especially on the internet, Carolyn's email was intriguing. She explained that she had successfully reunited 100 lost family members, and she believed she could find Cary Daniel. Carolyn herself was an adoptee who located her birth mother twelve years earlier. She offered references. Kindness and compassion emanated from her words, creating the "right" feeling that had been lacking in all the other search options I had considered. I told Carolyn I'd contact her when I was ready to proceed.

Trepidation set it and it took another six months for me to jump off the fence and consent to the search. Carolyn was patient while I recited a stream of questions and concerns throughout the search process, which she began in August. She answered each question as though talking to a close friend. I felt safe. Feeling safe was a unique emotion to assign to the subject of my teen-age pregnancy and subsequent relinquishment of my child. Before Carolyn, all I had ever felt was pain and loss topped off with a good dose of shame.

On a warm, balmy late September day, I opened my email during a break at the office. And there it was, Carolyn's announcement that she had located my son's amended birth certificate. Using his birthdate, time of birth, hospital name and attending physician, Carolyn was able to find my son, born on December 24, 1968.

"We have a match!" she wrote. My heart pumped out joy, which coursed throughout my body and made me giddy. His first name was Daniel. I took it as a good omen that his adoptive parents named him one of the names I had given him when he was born.

"Daniel," I repeated all day. "Daniel, Daniel, Daniel."

Daniel no longer lived in Wisconsin, so Carolyn widened her search to the rest of the United States. She was careful, too, in that she wouldn't tell me his full name until she was certain that she had found the right person.

She thought he was living in Washington state. While she looked for him there, I moved to the state of euphoria.

I remember sitting on the bed in the master bedroom on the first Sunday in October. I was oddly calm as I held the phone and listened to Carolyn recite Dan's full name and address. In the time it took for Carolyn to complete those sentences, Daniel was transformed from a memory of an infant into a man with a name and a life.

Would he want to know me, I wondered? My calm quickly gave way to a case of the jitters that rattled my teeth and nerves. Would Daniel be angry with me for relinquishing him? What kind of person had he become? How would my other son, Matt, handle the news that I had hidden the existence of his half-brother? Was a reunion right for Daniel? Would it make him happy or bring him pain? My mind was like a coffee grinder…I'd throw in a question and it would chew it up and spit out another cup of anxiety.

Over the next week Carolyn walked me through the anxiety and the delicate process of establishing first contact: a carefully worded certified letter explaining our relationship as birth mother and son. I mailed the letter on Wednesday, October 19, kissing the envelope before handing it to a postal employee. "For luck," I told her.

I tried to imagine my son's reaction as he read:

Dear Daniel,
If you know you were adopted when you were a baby, then maybe you have wondered about me. I have thought about you often in the 30 years since I placed you for adoption through Lutheran Social Services in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My name is Ellen and I am certain I am your birth mother.
My reason for writing is to let you know that I do exist and that I have never forgotten you. It was very difficult to give you up, but even though I was only 18 at the time, I knew adoption was the only way for you to have a real family and the security that you deserved. I also knew that I would try to locate you some day.

I ended the letter with an invitation for contact, and included my email addresses.

I waited.

On Sunday there was no word yet from Daniel. I passed the day torturing myself with a few hundred "what-ifs" and a couple of thousand "Well, what did you expects?"

Still, at 6 p.m. I dialed the Internet to check one last time. Though usually nimble on a computer, my fingers were sluggish while typing the email log-in and password. Everything moved in slow motion despite the fact that my heart was thundering and my pulse was forming whitecaps in my veins. Maybe I should call 911 for an ambulance instead of checking email, I thought wildly.

While the email site chugged through an interminable log-on sequence, my thoughts turned to Daniel. I had reached out to him to end our 11,000-day separation. Would he reach back?

The email site was maddingly slow to load. As I drummed my fingers on the desk, I stole a glance at my other son, Matt, who was seated beside me in my home office. As he looked up from his senior English assignment, his face broke into that twenty-car pile-up smile of his that makes me an instant believer in the goodness of humankind.

What a beautiful boy he is, inside and out. I admired his profile and wondered for the ba-zillionth time if he and Daniel look alike and if they share common interests, like music or art. Only five days earlier Matt learned that he wasn't an only child, as my husband Ed and I had told him for the past seventeen years. The day I mailed the letter to Daniel I revealed to Matt that I had been a pregnant, unmarried teen-ager who had to give her newborn up for adoption. I braced myself for his reaction.

"When did that happen?" he asked, stunned.

"I had him in 1968," I said, trying not to look ashamed.

"It's a him?" Matt responded, suddenly delighted. "I have a brother?"

Relief washed over me like a clean shower. I should have given Matt more credit for his maturity and his love for family. Of course he'd accept Daniel!

I explained what I knew: his half-brother lived in Washington, ironically the state that Matt had talked about visiting ever since he was 10 years old. (We would learn later that the start of Matt's preoccupation with Washington coincided with Daniel's 1992 relocation there from Wisconsin).

I explained that I had recently mailed a letter to Daniel and invited him to contact me. Over the next five days Matt, Ed and I talked a lot about teen-age pregnancy and the shame imposed on girls who found themselves in that predicament in 1968. We talked about how Daniel must have felt, wondering about his birth relatives all these years. I explained how grateful I was to the married couple who adopted him, giving him the security that I could not.

On Sunday, Matt asked if we'd ever visit Daniel in Washington. I replied that perhaps we would, but not until Matt's English assignment was done. He smiled and went hunting for grammar errors with one eye while keeping the other eye planted on my computer screen.

Watching Matt, I was able to relinquish the fear that had nipped at my heels all week. I decided to have faith that everything would turn out well. As that thought formed in my mind, it was as though a truth had revealed itself.

I took a deep breath and clicked on the inbox of my email account.

Oh, my God! It was there! A message from Dan, my son!

Numb, I opened the email and scanned the first few sentences, then held my hand over my mouth as tears welled.

Dear Ellen,
It rained here last night for the first time in weeks. I stood in my doorway reading and re-reading your letter over and over again while the rain came down. My head was swimming in thought. I breathed deeply trying not to cry, but it didn't help; I wept sweet tears of happiness. I ran my fingers over where you had signed your name. You are alive. You really exist.

"Wow, he's a good writer," said Matt, who read over my shoulder.

Yes, it was obvious that Daniel had a talent for what had been my vocation for many years. His words resonated like notes floating off an angel's harp. I flashed on the heartache of handing my newborn son to the nurse in the hospital and walking away. I felt grief over the loss of three decades that would never be retrieved.

Dan wrote that he had longed to find me ever since he was an 11-year-old boy who had became acutely aware that he was different from his family. He begun the search process in 1997, but was crushed upon finding that his adoption file didn't have my signed affidavit giving him the green light to establish contact. (I sent for the affidavit in 1991 but did not mail it back to the agency that handled the adoption. I wasn't ready.)

By accident, Daniel did find my first name while reading through non-identifying information he had petitioned from the agency that handled his adoption.

He wrote:

… There was one place where though, either through divine intervention or slip of the hand, that the person attending to my case failed to white out your first name. I know that your name is Ellen, and for the past two years I've said it over and over again in my head.

With Dan's words, my fear went sailing over the cliff, along with the what-ifs and all the other paralyzing phrases that played in my head since commencing the search for him. As my eyes dropped to the bottom of his email I had the first of many epiphanies that would follow in the hours, days, weeks and months following this first contact.

He wrote:

It took a lot of courage to write to me. I want you to know that I acknowledge that. You have just (re) taught me a lesson about not operating from fear, but rather from faith: faith in the fact that everything will turn out well if you simply try. Thank you.

I glided three feet above the surface of the earth in the weeks that followed the arrival of his email and our subsequent telephone conversations. Then I flew to Seattle from my home in Arkansas, and drove 90 miles north to the city Dan calls home: Bellingham. He watched me drive up and I watched him watching me.

With a gait as familiar as my brother's, he ran down the sloping lawn in front of his house and met me in the middle of the street. We hugged, trembling. We stared at each other with familiar eyes and smiled the same smile. We clung to each other during the next three days while sharing our separate histories. We became mother and son that rainy, wondrous weekend in November.

Matt, Ellen, Dan

We've been together four times in the past eighteen months. In April 2001, Matt, Ed and I traveled to Washington to spend five days with Dan. Standing near the top of Mount Baker one sunny Friday afternoon I watched my two sons chase each other while lobbing snowballs and laughing the way that brothers do.

Peace and gratitude have filled the space in my heart that for thirty years had held regret and longing for my long, lost son. I have him now, and he has me, for the rest of our lives.

Ellen Heistad Hosafros

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