FATHER AND SON
IN JUNE 2004, as I was fighting for my final private member’s bill, Billy and Milena got married. Both of Billy’s families attended the ceremony and the reception afterwards. The four parents had met before, all proudly attending his graduation in 1998. Now, on this occasion, all the brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces were able to connect. At the wedding, Billy’s father, Chris, and I sat in the front-row aisle right across from his adoptive parents, Bram and Helen, and Billy went out of his way to be attentive and kind to all four of us.
It had taken some doing to get to this point. In the early days of our reunion, Billy and I had spent countless hours together and things moved along very quickly. I’d told him quite a bit about the circumstances of his conception and birth, including why I gave him up for adoption and some not-so-kind details about his father. He wanted to know everything—he soaked it all up. And things sort of spilled out; I wasn’t very circumspect about what I revealed.
So one day I asked him a rather big question: Did he want to meet his father? He looked uncertain and said he wanted to think about it.
The next time we got together, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Yeah, I would really like to meet Chris—I’d like to see what kind of man he turned out to be.”
Billy and Milena at their wedding with both sets of Billy’s parents, June 2004.
With Chris and our son on Billy’s wedding day. Don’t we look happy!
I got it. And it brought tears to my eyes.
Adopted people who want to know about their origins are not looking to replace their adoptive parents. They just want to know who they are and whom they look like. They also want to know what they are likely to be like when they get older. And, of course, there are family medical histories to consider. Those of us who grow up in our biological families take these things for granted. You look in the mirror and curse your Uncle Bob’s big nose. Your mother tells you that you sound just like Aunt Nora when you laugh. You know your grandmother and your aunt had breast cancer so you take precautions and get screened early.
I had completely lost track of Chris. The last time I’d seen him we had a terse and unhappy conversation. It was at a party in Toronto sometime after I returned from New York, a year or so after I had given birth. He asked me what had happened to the baby. I told him it was a boy, that he’d been adopted, and that I didn’t know where he was. Chris expressed shock that I had given up the baby and suggested that I try to get him back so he could take care of him. It was such a preposterous and tactless thing to say. I walked away in disgust and I hadn’t seen him since.
Now I found myself searching for him. I hardly knew where to begin. He had a very common last name, and I didn’t know much about his family.
I inadvertently got a direct lead to Chris at a political gathering. After the Ontario NDP suffered its spectacular loss to the Harris-led Progressive Conservatives in the 1995 election, Bob Rae announced his resignation effective June 22, 1996. My friend Frances Lankin, then the member for the riding adjacent to mine, Beaches–Woodbine (now Beaches–East York), was the first to announce her intention to run for the leadership. I proudly endorsed her and joined her nomination committee. Shortly thereafter, Tony Silipo, Peter Kormos, and Howard Hampton signed up. The race was on.
New Democrats from all over Ontario came to the convention in Hamilton, at which Hampton was declared the winner. At a party afterwards with the Lankin camp, I found myself talking to a man from Ottawa who knew some of the same people I had known in that city. As we were reminiscing, I told him the story of my son, which led to my explaining that I was looking for his father. I asked if he had any idea where I might find him.
It turned out that not only had he stayed in touch with Chris, but he also had a current number where Chris could be reached! He promised to send it to me after he got back to Ottawa.
A few days after I arrived home from the convention, my telephone rang. I could not believe my ears when Chris identified himself. His old friend had done what I had expressly asked him not to do—he had called Chris and given him the news, man to man. I didn’t know Chris at all anymore, and it was important to me to have control over how this information was revealed to him. I was upset and angry, but it was too late for any of that. Here we were, having the conversation.
Chris’s voice was shaking. He was excited but also traumatized by the news. We talked for more than an hour as I told him how I’d found Billy and what he was like.
Then he dropped a bombshell. He said that he was concerned that the child was not his and wondered if it might all be a hoax in an attempt to get money out of him. I was insulted to my core, but I forced myself to coolly explain that once a child was relinquished for adoption, you not only lost all parental privileges and rights, but you were also relieved of all responsibilities. I wanted to slam down the phone and never speak to him again, but I had to focus on the main goal—my son wanted to meet his father. I was going to do whatever it took to make that happen.
Several days passed. Chris called back and asked me if we would be willing to have blood samples taken for DNA tests. That gave me pause. Could I ask my son to do this, so that his father would accept him? I agreed because I had no choice. I still had only one goal. But it took me a while before I worked up the nerve to ask him.
When I finally did tentatively tell Billy about Chris’s request, he seemed to be taken aback, as I suspected he might be, and said he needed some time to think about it. Even though he was overjoyed that I had found his biological father, it took him a while to decide what to do. In December he wrote to me saying that he was willing to go ahead with a DNA test. After working out the details with Chris, I made an appointment at a clinic close to home, and the samples were sent to British Columbia for testing. We were told it would take at least four weeks before the results were ready, and that they would be relayed to Chris. He would be the first to know.
I knew Chris was the father. Of course, he was the father. There was no way that he couldn’t be the father. But still, weird thoughts started fluttering in my mind like little birds. We all get nervous waiting for important test results. What would I do if I were wrong?
On February 26, 1997, Chris called me with the results. His voice broke as he confirmed that he was Billy’s father. After all our nervousness, we rejoiced together and began planning for him to come to Toronto to meet his son. He would also now be able to tell his daughters that they had a brother.
Chris had written a letter to me before he was confirmed as the father. Understandably he was traumatized by the whole situation. He wrote that he was feeling nervous but relieved that Billy was willing to go through with the DNA test so we would all know for sure about paternity. He also wrote that whatever the outcome, he was experiencing “surf quality waves of shame and guilt” and that he was finding it hard to forgive himself for being such a jerk.
A few weeks later, I picked up Chris at the airport. As we careened along the expressway back to my place, we got into an intense and emotional conversation. My pent-up anger and hurt spilled out, as I told him about the loneliness and terror of the childbirth and the anguish of losing my son. I caught myself; this was not a good time to talk about it.
Just as I was about to change the subject, Chris apologized for letting me down and causing me so much pain. But in his next breath, he said something that took the sweetness out of the moment. When we had first talked on the phone, he’d told me that he wanted to be sure it was his child. But now he explained why he had doubts. He told me some of his friends had convinced him that I was one of those women who got pregnant to trap a man into marriage and that he was the one I’d picked to marry. After all I had been through, this was too much. It’s a wonder I didn’t pull off the road and strangle him with my bare hands.
We did, however, arrive home in one piece and have a fantastic gathering at my house. My daughter, Astra, and my grandson, James, joined us for meals. We talked and talked and got to know each other, and Billy spent a lot of time alone with his father.
We found out that Chris’s father had been a famous documentary filmmaker in the 1950s and ’60s. He was now in his eighties and dying. Chris had not yet told his mother about Billy and didn’t want to during this difficult time. Nevertheless, he wanted Billy to see his grandfather before it was too late, so he took Billy to Ottawa and managed to sneak him into his father’s room for a brief visit. Shortly afterwards, Chris told his mother about his son, and she welcomed Billy with open arms. Billy would join the family at his grandfather’s funeral a few months later.
Billy visited Chris in British Columbia and Chris came back to Toronto. Sometimes they met at his grandmother’s house in Ottawa. She accepted Billy completely and joyfully as her grandson, and treated him lovingly from day one. She died a few years after they met, but during that short time, they became very close. Chris’s eldest daughter, Billy’s half-sister, wrote a beautiful letter to Astra and me, and shortly after that she came to Toronto for a visit. Astra went out to British Columbia to visit them. And so it went.
When Billy came back from his first visit with Chris in 1997 with photographs in hand, I understood completely why he needed to meet his biological family and why most adoptees want so badly to know where they came from. He handed me a black-and-white photo that featured about thirty young men squatting in that familiar way boys’ sports teams pose for a camera. The small faces looked very much alike to me.
Billy and Chris finally meet.
“That’s my father’s high school soccer team. Can you tell which one is Chris?” Billy asked eagerly.
I scoured the faces, desperately hoping I would pick the right one. I finally pointed to the face that most reminded me of my distant memory of Chris as a young man. Billy’s face fell. Wrong guy. He pointed to a little face and said, “I can’t believe you couldn’t tell. At that age, he looks just like me!” His own face glowed with satisfaction.
That was so important, so dear to him; to have a picture of a man, his father, who looked just like him. That’s why we needed to change Ontario’s laws. So it would be easier for adoptees to find their birth parents, and to give them the chance to experience the joy that Billy had finally found.