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People often forget that I was adopted. I don’t talk about it much. It’s not that it bothers me or that I have particular issues surrounding my adoption; the subject just never seems to come up much. My adoptive parents were always open about it and I have always known “I wasn’t expected, I was selected.”
Up until the time I was about 16 or so I was always told the same story: I was born in Germany…my birth parents were killed in an automobile accident and I was given to my aging grandparents who decided that I would have a better life if I had younger parents who would better be able to raise me and offer me more than they could in their advanced age…so they put me up for adoption. At the age of 1 ½ , I was put into a German orphanage. I was adopted by the time I was 3.
When I turned 16, about the same time I came out to my family and was sent to Seabury Hall to attend my final two years of high school, I was given a folder that contained all of the information surrounding my adoption…all the correspondence, all of the signed documents, and even my original birth certificate. Many of the papers were in German, but the folder contained translations as well. The original documents that would have transferred custody of me to the orphanage were included. They were signed by Ruth Meyer Dohle, aged 24…my mother. She was alive at the time I was put in the orphanage and of course it raised a lot of questions in me. My adoptive parents, Gene and Betty, said the story they had always told me was easier to explain…easier than trying to figure out why my mother would have given me up…and of course it raised a lot of questions for me that at the time seemed unanswerable. Mostly, and to this day, I would just like to see what my mom looked liked. For some reason, I’ve never had much curiosity about my birth father, but my mom was different.
My adoptive Father, Gene wrote a short memoir about my adoption…about being stationed in Naples, Italy and how he and my adoptive mother, Betty, had sent letters to adoption agencies around Europe stating that they were ‘in the market’ for a child. Dad was in the Navy at the time and they had just purchased a town home in Naples. Betty could not have children naturally and in all honesty, if there ever was a sign from God to a human being, this would have been it…Betty was not meant to have children. Gene was.
Mid March, 1970, I was 2 years old. Instead of the normal first years of life afforded most people, I had been shuffled between my birth mother, my grandparents and ultimately an orphanage. If the psychologists were correct in their assumptions about a human forming their “trust” with the world in their first year of life, based on the stability of their given environment, I was already outside of the ‘box’ and I guess I have carried this trait with me throughout my life. There was anything but stability, and I don’t know how long I was with my birth mother, or why she decided to give me up. I’m not sure I even really spent time with ‘grandparents’ and by the time I was 1 ½ , I was already an orphan, the youngest of a large German house full of parentless children…all waiting for a new set of parents.
Gene and Betty received a letter in the mail near the end of March 1970, attached to the top of the letter was a thumbnail photograph, a picture of a blonde haired boy in a snowsuit and a simple paragraph underneath.
“Jerry is an active and alert child that has adapted well to his surroundings.” Jerry was my original name; Jerry Wayne Dohle.
I’m sure with much anticipation and trepidation, Gene and Betty completed the needed paperwork to initiate my adoption from Italy and with the subsequent go ahead from the German government drove from Italy to my orphanage to pick me up. Along the way there was much nervous chit chat: “What if he doesn’t like us?”…”What if we don’t like him?”…accompanied with half felt reassurances that everything would work out. I’m not sure if they felt like expectant parents or more like they were picking up a really neat ‘gadget’ to complete what they felt was lacking in their lives.
They arrived at the orphanage, and like visitors were escorted around the grounds, among the children and made no attempt to immediately approach me, but filtered among all the children and observed. I was the youngest and they saw a lot of the other children showering me with attention. In the office, they signed some final forms and were told, in broken English, “We think the best way to take Jerry, is just to go in the playground and scoop him up, put him in your car and just go!” It sounds odd, but they planned my kidnapping essentially. There would be no goodbyes, no Hallmark moments of meeting, no packing my things…it had all been planned and the orphanage official gave Gene and Betty my pre-packed suitcase along with my beloved blankey.
With the best of intentions, Gene and Betty pulled the 68 Cougar convertible they arrived in to the front of the play ground and left a back door ajar. They circled the playground and watched me with my friends for awhile before they made their move. When I had wandered away from a group of children, they scooped me up, walked directly to the car, put me in my car seat, slammed the back door, got in the front, started the engine and drove off. I protested, they assumed, in German, which they could not understand. I pointed out the window and began to cry. I cried until I fell asleep and when I woke, I began again, in German, asking questions perhaps, wondering what was going on, who are these people, where are we going, what happened to my friends….thinking, perhaps…am I safe…but mostly…what the fuck just happened? Gene and Betty eventually stopped on an American Military Base and found someone who spoke German to interpret what I was saying. And that action would be repeated all the way back to Italy. I would cry, speak, and they would stop and ask someone to tell them what I wanted.
I could not get Gene or Betty to dig this memoir out of their files, they say it’s buried somewhere and they’ll look for it. The first time I read it, I cried, loudly. I cried for this child, this part of me I don’t really remember, but I know has been carried within and has touched every part of my life since. I cried for their ‘good intentions’, I cried for my lost ‘family’…the birth one and new one I had at the orphanage. Mostly I cried for the three year old German speaking boy that was kidnapped one afternoon and thrust into yet another life he had not chosen.
I wonder what my real mother looks likes. I wonder if she misses me. I wonder what my life would have handed me as Jerry Wayne. I wonder if I found my real mother, if she would welcome me. I wonder if being sent away to Seabury Hall was so difficult at first because I felt like an orphan all over again. I wonder if that Ruth Meyer I found on Facebook could be my real mom and I haven’t the nerve to find out because the thought of a rejection keeps me from it. I wonder if there’s a German family somewhere feeling a hole where I should be. I wonder if I have a brother or a sister. Life is always full of “What ifs”…these are my biggest.
Love,
Steve
