READERS OFTEN ASK ME, “Is Lizzie McLane really you?” I have to explain that no, she is a fictional character who “lives” only in my imagination. I do like to add that Lizzie is the teenager I wish I had been. At least, I wish I had been as brave as she is when I was young, as determined to speak my mind and to express my feelings in poems, if not out loud.
Like Lizzie, I am adopted. But I wasn’t writing poems about that when I was fourteen, as Lizzie does in the first book I wrote about her, The Secret of Me. While I started writing poems when I was about twelve, adoption was a subject I avoided on paper and in most conversations until I was in my mid-twenties. And though I lost my dad at a fairly early age—twenty-six—my second book about Lizzie, The Girl in the Mirror, tells of her losing her father when she’s only a senior in high school. Still, losing my dad rocked my world much the way Lizzie’s father’s death rocks hers.
In this third book Lizzie, or “Liz,” as she is now known, searches for her birth mother—which I also did, but it took me until I was twenty-eight to begin.
Yet we do have a great deal in common, Liz and I.
Like Liz, I spent the first five months of my life in foster care. Until that point, my birth mother had hesitated to sign the papers that would mean surrendering me and making me available for adoption. She wanted to raise me. She wanted me to have a life filled with love and with opportunities. She believed that, “So many doors are open to the mind that is filled with the beauty to be found everywhere—in nature, poetry, music. The person who is out to learn all that is good sees so much more in everyday life, and lives a much richer existence than the one who remains passive in the doldrums of routine.” Those words, contained in the letter written by Liz’s birth mother to The New York Foundling, were actually written by my own first mother about me. That letter is ninety-nine percent my birth mother’s words, verbatim.
How lucky I was, like Liz, to be so loved. My birth mother, who was a schoolteacher and a deeply religious woman, did not believe she could offer me the life she thought I deserved, and so she finally did sign those papers, relinquishing her parental rights. She told the social workers at The New York Foundling that she had broken up with my birth father months before she realized she was pregnant, and so decided not to involve him. To this day, he probably does not know I exist.
A month later, I was adopted by Joe and Trudy Kearney and immediately had not only two new parents but also a brother and a sister, who were adopted as well. The three of us kids came from different families, but all of us were placed with our mom and dad through The New York Foundling in New York City. We lived in a little town called LaGrange, about seventy-five miles north of Manhattan. The fictional town of New Hook is in the same region—just west of Red Hook in New York State’s Hudson Valley. I was brought, as Liz was, into my birth mother’s dream family: affectionate, close-knit, Roman Catholic, living in the country. I was surrounded by books and music. My mom was a nurse and, in her younger years, a painter. My father was a teacher and then an elementary school principal. I had an older brother and sister who watched over me, and who today rank among my closest friends.
So the first two books of the trilogy mirror my own life in many ways, although growing up I didn’t know anyone else (beside my siblings) who was adopted—I didn’t have a Cathy or a Jan or a Jade, friends who understood my longing to know where I came from because they had similar questions themselves. (Luckily I did have a best friend, who is still very much a part my life, who saw me through all the trials and joys of growing up.) But the subject of adoption was avoided in my home much the way it is in Liz’s. My siblings and I were Joe and Trudy’s children; the word “adopted” was left out of conversations with anyone from outside our immediate family. I understand now that this was done out of love alongside a fierce sense of loyalty felt by all of us. I was the one who continuously wondered about my origins, especially about the woman who gave me life, though I learned pretty early on to keep my curiosity to myself.
Inside the four walls of our house, we would talk about the facts of our adoptions—what Mom and Dad were doing when they got the phone calls from The Foundling announcing the child they’d been hoping for was there, ready to be picked up; what few facts they’d been told about our ethnicities. But once the subject of feelings came up—confusion, pain, longing, or plain old curiosity—the conversation petered out or someone changed the subject. To ask about birth parents was disloyal, as it might have meant that Mom and Dad weren’t “good enough.” It took me, and thus Liz McLane, years to realize that wanting to know who your birth mother is has nothing to do with how much you love your parents. My family, like Liz’s, finally came to understand that, too.
At first I resisted writing When You Never Said Goodbye. One hesitation came from the idea of reliving the emotional rollercoaster of searching for one’s blood relatives. Did I, through Liz, really want to go for that ride again? One major obstacle I ran into during those years of my own search was my birth surname: Smith. (How I discovered my surname is too long a story to tell here.) Searching for a woman with the most popular surname in the United States is a bit daunting, to say the least. Liz, of course, discovers this as well. (While I’m on the subject of names: readers might remember that Liz’s given name is Elizabeth Ann. Elizabeth Ann was the name of my birth mother, who as an adult went by Liz.)
At the same time, I knew that if I were to write it, this book would be the only one of the three that did not largely parallel my own story. I could not end Liz’s search the way my own ended. After the eight-year quest for my birth mother, I discovered at age thirty-five that she had died of breast cancer years before, when I was nineteen. She was dead. It leveled me. I would never know Elizabeth Ann Smith. As the writer, I had the power to keep Liz from that fate. I could allow her birth mother to explain and express herself, to say “I love you”—even if Liz didn’t get to meet her. So when I decided to forge ahead with book three and Liz’s own search, I didn’t know exactly how it would end.
The results of my own search weren’t completely bad news: I did find blood relatives, including an aunt and uncle, a half-brother and half-sister, and many cousins. They all knew about me and welcomed me with an enthusiastic love that lasts to this day. And I look so much like my birth mother that when we met for the first time it seemed (they told me) as if I were a ghost, Elizabeth alive again in their midst. It was all a miracle. That said, I am still coming to terms with the idea that I will never meet my first mother. Maybe I’ll never completely be at peace with that fact.
After struggling with the ending of the book, I realized that in order for it to ring emotionally true, I needed to find a way for Liz’s birth mother to be alive and able to express her love for her daughter, and yet not be “available.” This would enable me to tap into my own emotions that came with discovering how much my own birth mother had loved me and that she was dead. The idea of making Liz’s mother a nun was something that had been in the back of my mind all along, but I kept resisting it. Who would believe it, a woman becoming a nun in the twenty-first century? Then I did some research and discovered that there are a few small convents in the United States that are thriving—and growing. Maybe it wasn’t totally out of the question, the idea of Liz’s first mother becoming a religious sister.
On a whim I decided to read a book that had been on my shelf for years, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, about fourteenth-century monks. Because some monks, like some nuns, are cloistered, the book seemed like a promising choice. Perhaps it would guide me. It turned out that the paperback had a bookmark inside it from New York University, where my dad earned his undergraduate degree. The book must have been his. That was my sign! The rest of Liz’s story flowed after that.
Here’s what I know about Liz McLane’s future. She will become a published poet. (After all, poetry is a gift both of our birth mothers wished for us.) She’ll stay in New York City. She will always be rich in family and friends. That family will expand in time when she meets her birth mother’s sisters and brother, and her cousins related to her by blood. Occasionally, she will spot new photos of her birth mother on the convent’s website, and swear that Sister Dorothy is waving hello. She and Tim? I think they’ll stay together. And always, she will be Lizzie, beloved daughter of Margaret and Patrick McLane, devoted sister to Kate and Bob. My blessed and plucky girl.