Family: ‘My Mother’s Daughter’ And Uncovering Long Buried Family Stories

0:00Country singer and rapper Shibuzzi wants us to remember our history accurately. A cowboy image, you know, we tend to think that was just a white man, you know, on a horse with a cowboy hat. But, you know, one in every four cowboys were black. On the Sunday Story from Up First, Shibuzi talks about his latest album and the black roots of country music. Listen to the Sunday Story in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:31This is 1A. I'm Jen White. When parents choose to share with children about their pasts and when, can shape generations to come in powerful, profound, and unexpected ways. We've been hearing from you about buried pasts that have a way of lingering long after the fact. Charles in Tulsa, Oklahoma, growing up the only brother in a sibling pack of five other sisters, had a longing to have a brother relationship. Then one day in my 30s, my father revealed that as an 18-year-old, he'd actually impregnated this high school sweetheart but was never able to follow up with her because he was then being stationed and deployed in Vietnam.

1:11Later in life, he was told that this son was not born viable and died a week after childbirth. And when he disclosed that, it really filled in a kind of genetic longing that I felt I'd always had. It gave a revelation to my father that showed him more as a fully formed person who had to make tough choices and gave me a better glimpse of who that man was that raised me. Thanks for that message. For one family, a past that had been buried for decades finally came to light after a DNA test connected two long-separated sisters. Their mother placed the eldest for adoption after staying at a home for unwed mothers in the 1960s.

1:5050 years plus later, her daughters found each other as adults. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Today, both of those women are here to share their stories. That's after this.

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2:39Seriously. Oh, that's a great question. I think I want to think about that question for the rest of my life. Oh, good question. This is Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air, and the questions are only the half of it. Listen to Fresh Air on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's start the conversation with Tracy Clark Flory, joining us from the Bay Area. She's the author of the book, My Mother's Daughter, Finding Myself and My Family's Fractured Past. Her first book is Want Me, a sex writer's journey into the heart of desire. Tracy, welcome to 1A. Thank you so much for having me. Tracy, you were 16 when your mother told you that you have a sister.

3:22Tell us about that moment. Yeah, she sat me down one day at the kitchen table, and she said, I have something to tell you. It's serious. And then I watched the color drain from her face. And she said, when I was a teenager, I had sex and I got pregnant. My father sent me away to a home for unwed mothers, and I placed the baby, a girl, for adoption. And I'd been raised as an only child up until that point, and an only child who often begged for a sister. So here I was finding that I actually did have a sister who was out there somewhere, and that she was almost 20 years older than me. And then my mom told me that my sister was black.

4:06She told me that the father of her baby was a Nigerian man that she'd met at college. She told me just a few sparse details. And she asked me if I had any questions for her. And I remember asking, do you ever wonder about her? And she just said in this gush of a whisper, I think about her every day of my life. And then we barely spoke of it again. And I could tell that it caused her a lot of pain. And so while I was filled with questions, I didn't understand what a home for unwed mothers was really. The conversation sort of ended there. Yeah. You heard in that voicemail message we received about a genetic longing.

4:54and you write about laying in bed as a child, holding your breath, trying to hear what you called your secret sister down the hall. You had this sense of someone or something that was missing from your life. Where do you think that came from? I mean, I love that caller's story so much and it resonates completely for me. For me, it was a combination of, I would notice little hints, little clues. Like when I begged for a sister growing up, I have this one very clear memory of riding in the car with my parents, my dad driving, my mom in the seat in front of me. And I'm saying, I want a sister. Why can't I have a sister?

5:38And I noticed the way that the car fell silent. And I couldn't see my mom's face, but I could see my dad glancing over at her. And I could just tell from his expression that my question had done something to my mom. And so while they gave me an explanation for why, you know, why I couldn't have a sibling, I could tell there was something there. There was the sense of a secret, something beyond what I was being told. But I do think there was something a little bit beyond, right? You know, this idea, I concocted the story of a secret sister that my parents were keeping from me down the hall in our house.

6:18And this idea of sort of holding my breath and trying to hear her, it really does to me suggest some sense of intuition of sensing her almost. Well, part of the story is about better understanding these homes for unwed mothers. You said your grandfather sent your mother to one of them in 1965. She was a young college student. What did you learn about these places? Yeah, I learned that my mom was one of 1.5 million women who were sent away to these homes in the pre-Rowe era. There were 3 million women who placed their babies for adoption between 1950 and 1975. And the idea was that they would be hidden behind the walls of these homes as soon as they started to show in their pregnancies and lives would be told to neighbors and friends and family members about where they were, they would stay there until they could give birth and place their babies for adoption, typically with married couples who were often struggling with infertility.

7:30And what I learned very quickly as I started looking into it was that my mom had been pulled into this racist and sexist system that was really designed to reinforce marriage and the white nuclear family norm. Most of the women who were sent away were white because it was seen as a way for them to be redeemed. They were seen as having fallen from their pedestals, and this was a way to return them to their pedestals, to return them to marriage, to give them a second shot at becoming proper women and wives and mothers. Black women who got pregnant outside of marriage at that time were not expected to go to these homes, in part because of racist stereotypes about black women's hypersexuality that were seen as ruling out the possibility of redemption.

8:24and so it really was about returning these mostly white young women to the marriage market. It was both a way to punish their premarital sexuality and a way to return them to their white privilege too and these adoptions were coerced and sometimes even forced. There was a lot of brainwashing that happened. And the majority of women who went into these homes ended up placing their babies for adoption. And so what I'd previously understood as my mom's difficult choice, I kind of saw it as that she'd been in a difficult predicament as a young woman who got pregnant in the 60s. I came to understand as not a choice at all, that there was so much coercion that she actually wasn't given any real options.

9:18and so my understanding was just completely turned upside down. Your mother died after being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer when you were in your late 20s and you describe her in your writing as someone who was at once very present in your life but also had a part of herself that was unavailable to you and better understanding her experience how did that recast the way you understood her oh completely you know I think that as a kid I'd grown up noticing that distance because she could be so completely connected and and you know um very doting and very concerned um and but there would be moments where she kind of it was like as though she secreted part of herself away and I have these core memories from childhood of like you know being in a happy moment with my dad where we're like you know throwing the frisbee on the front lawn and and I'm in this state of bliss and and looking over at my mom and and seeing that she has this sort of look of almost ironic detachment that there's this way in which she can't fully join us in these happy family scenes and as a kid I didn't know how to make sense of that.

10:39But as I started to reflect, I understood her as someone who had been traumatized by being sent away. Coming up, Tracy ordered a DNA test years after her mother died, not knowing what she'd find. And within hours, she was on the phone with a sister who had no idea Tracy existed. We meet Tracy's sister ahead.

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12:17Let's get back into the conversation and hear from some of you about the discoveries that expanded your understanding of your family's past. My name is Gloria. I found out two years ago that my father was not my father. and I felt unmoored. David in Virginia Beach. When my aunt was 94, she told me my grandmother and grandfather ran away to be married. My grandfather was Jewish. My grandmother was Catholic. Both of their parents said, heck no. Dave from Oxford. My wife and I have just finished writing a book about her great-grandfather, who we discovered in the last five or six years was a murderer and a thief and ran a brothel in Des Moines.

13:02Thanks for those calls. And here's PJ in Jordan, Minnesota, whose sister discovered unknown cousins after doing a DNA test. We asked my mom what was happening, and she said that my father had had mumps as a child and was completely infertile. So in the 50s and early 60s, they really wanted children of family, so they went with donors. and no one knew, not even her own mother. And it doesn't matter to me really at all. If you've uncovered or researched a family secret, tell us about it. Does the discovery matter to you? Email us at 1a at wamu.org. Tracy, your grandfather sent your mother to a home for unwed mothers.

13:49These are places that largely closed after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S. in 1973. But the 2022 Dobbs decision reversing it came down while you were researching this book. And since then, the U.S. has seen a rise in so-called maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers. And these centers are often affiliated with religious organizations. They are anti-abortion and often advocate for people to place their babies for adoption. Well, last year, the podcast Liberty Lost from Wondery took an inside look at Liberty Godparent Home. It's in Lynchburg, Virginia, on the campus of Liberty University, an evangelical school founded by conservative activist and pastor Jerry Falwell.

14:26Last year, we spoke to the journalist behind the podcast, TJ Raphael. There are now nearly 500 maternity homes across the United States. They're in 48 states. And I think in the past, we often thought about, you know, pregnant teenage girls going to maternity homes. But nowadays, it's really a myriad. It's, you know, adult women in their 20s and 30s who are going to maternity homes. And the reason why pregnant women turn to maternity homes is because they don't have access to a stable partner or co-parent. It could be because of a domestic violence situation or their partner is just out of the picture.

15:07Maybe the safety net they had suddenly disappeared. They lack support from their families. It's kind of like your whole life is falling apart, but you're also pregnant. And so, you know, that kind of instability and financial pressure can lead someone to consider a maternity home. And once they're there, they can often feel stuck and feel obligated to surrender their baby for adoption, especially if while they're living at this facility, they continually get the message that adoption is the best option for their child, that their baby deserves a two-parent household, and, you know, it's not right for them to be a single mom.

15:44Um, Tracy, considering that maternity homes exist today, how, what does that mean to you, given what you learned about your mother's story? Yeah. I mean, it was really, the timing was uncanny, really, um, as immediately after just mere weeks after I found my sister and started diving into this research, the Dobbs decision came down. And I had been feeling like I was kind of traveling back in time as I was doing this research. And then suddenly it felt like we were all traveling back in time with that decision. And so it was very uncanny to me. It made this story feel so unfortunately relevant to our current times.

16:36And there are so many parallels to be drawn. I mean, just in the sound clip that we heard about women who are internalizing this idea that adoption is the best choice, the only choice, you know, women in this pre-Roe era were often sat down and were told things like, write a list of what you can offer this baby. Now write a list of what a married couple can offer this baby. And so there was a profound amount of brainwashing that was happening. and clearly we have not escaped that. Kim emailed, My mother became pregnant in 1957 at age 15. She spent her pregnancy in a home for unwed mothers. The baby was taken from her for adoption.

17:21She was coerced into marrying the father because she was quote-unquote ruined for anyone else. She had to drop out of school. My father just went about his business. Every year on that baby's birthday, she would bake him a birthday cake and cry. My father would beat her for crying. When you think about your mother's story and in both the current context and the context of the time she was a teen in, what bigger story about women and sex and motherhood and society do you see when you think about it through that lens? Yeah. I mean, I certainly see the control of women's sexuality, the punishment of women's sexuality, the attempt to reroute women into marriage, right?

18:10You know, I had spent so much of my career as a journalist writing about sex, writing about sex workers' rights. And, you know, I come to find in my research that these homes initially in their earliest days were actually started as an attempt to, quote unquote, rescue sex workers. And so I certainly found this connection between my mom's past and my career as a journalist covering this subject matter. But I also saw this connection between her being sent away in shame and my attempt as a young woman in this world to kind of claim my sexuality, I wanted to prove that I could not be punished in the way that she had, that I wouldn't suffer in the ways that she had.

19:06And so I definitely see this generational connection between, I think I thought that times had changed more than they actually had. That as a young woman coming up in the 90s and the 2000s, I really sort of believed that the sexual revolution had been fought and won. And I saw the way that my mom really worried for me as this young woman going out into the world and, you know, writing about these topics on the internet. I think she understood that the world had not changed as much as I wanted to believe that it had. You write about the period after your mother died when you considered hiring a private detective to find your sister.

19:48And then you decided against it? Why did she hesitate? Yeah, well, my mom had mentioned to me that she knew that people hired private detectives, but she was very clear that she did not want to interrupt her daughter's life. She felt it was not her right. And so I think I internalized that sense that it would be wrong to interrupt her life. So I hesitated. I also hesitated because I really had this renewed desire to find my sister after my mom died. And I didn't want to go out in search of my sister out of my own sense of grief over the mother that my sister never got to know. And so I held off.

20:36It just didn't quite feel right. And for a while there, consumer DNA testing was not really available. And even once it did become available, I really resisted it because I had privacy concerns. And it was really only that I got to a point where a friend told me about a family secret that had been revealed through a DNA test, that it really clicked that this could be the way to finally find my sister. And so I ordered a test right then and there. So about 10 years after your mother died, You order this DNA test. And then within hours of getting your results, you're on the phone with your sister.

21:22Walk us through that day because that's a lot to happen in the space of a day. It's a lot. It's a lot to go decades, right, with so much mystery and secrecy and unknowns. And then to, you know, I was like riding in the car with my family and I was just, you know, idly checking my email and I saw that my DNA results were in. I clicked immediately and this woman named Kathy was my number one top genetic match. This total stranger who I nonetheless felt like I immediately recognized. And I hammered out a message to her immediately. I overthink everything. But in that moment, I really felt like the decades of secrecy and silence and unknowns and longing.

22:15And it just felt like I couldn't hit send fast enough. And then, yeah, within hours, she was calling me and we were on the phone. And this mystery was suddenly unspooling at a very, very fast rate. When the phone rang, I would imagine you see this number come up on your phone. What was your physical reaction? So beyond the emotional reaction, I would imagine there was a physical reaction as well. Oh, yeah. I mean, there was just this warm wash of heat. You know, my mom had told me early on that she had listed herself on an adoption registry, and she'd listed our home phone on there. and that was during that first conversation that we had about my sister and I realized looking back that I was waiting for that phone to ring ever since but it never did and so then to have my own phone ring and to know finally and to know it was my sister it was unbelievable it was just like here we finally are all these decades later Allison emailed we used to tease our granny that she was a little Italian grandma, and then DNA testing, initially just for fun, revealed that her mother had an affair with the Italian grocer she worked for.

23:37What was a joke turned out to be quite shocking for my mother, whose sense of family relationships had to be re-examined. However, we are thrilled to have a little bit of spice and sass in our very British ancestry, and it explains our abiding love of pasta. And another of you emailed, via DNA, I learned at the age of 74 that the man I grew up with as my father and the man I was named after was actually not my father, nor was he the father of my two younger sisters. We are all half siblings. Now let's bring in another voice now. Kathy Monroe is Tracy's sister, the sister at the center of this story.

24:12She joins us from Atlanta. Kathy, welcome to 1A. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. So we just heard Tracy describe the day when she found out about you. What was that day like for you? Surreal. So I had submitted my test, and it had been a few months. And I kind of got to the point where I thought, you know, I'm probably not going to find anyone. You know, there won't be a connection. And I just happened to check my Gmail account, and I saw an email. you know, and I responded right away. I saw that it was a potential half-sister. I was very excited and I just picked up the phone. Didn't even think about it.

24:58Picked up the phone and after reading her message, it became clear to me that she desired to have the connection. So, I just picked up the phone and called. How much did you know about your birth parents when you were growing up? Not a lot. Not a lot, but it did turn out to be fairly accurate. So what I had been told was that my mother was a white college student and that my father was an African exchange student. And because of that dynamic that she was either forced or decided to give me up for adoption. And that was literally pretty much all I had been told. But your adoption wasn't hidden from you.

25:52You learned about it at a fairly young age. How was that explained to you? And just explain a little bit about the family you grew up in. So actually, it was hidden from me. I didn't actually find out. Well, so I didn't find out I was adopted until I was about 13 years old. And it was under, it was not because my family sat down and told me. It was actually because I was a biracial child, which I didn't really even think about or realize at the time. But the neighborhood that I grew up in was predominantly black. And it was a result of kids teasing me or calling me names such as Zebra or Oreo Cookie.

26:42One day I just got sick of it. I went home and I'm like, I don't understand why people are calling me these names. And my mother said, you know, I've got something to tell you. And so that's when I was told about, you know, having a white mother, father being an African exchange student. And another thing I found out is that my birth name was Martha Jane Clark. And what was interesting about that is I was actually named Catherine after my adoptive mom's sister, who was my favorite aunt growing up. But her husband, my uncle, for as long as I could remember, and he was the only person in the family, called me Martha Jane.

27:30And I never understood why until that day because he actually always referenced me by my birth name. And tell us a little bit about your parents and the family you grew up in. So I actually grew up in a very loving home, especially for my mom. But they were older. And it's funny, I think back now, and I don't know why it didn't really dawn on me, but I think part of the reason was because I did have a happy, secure childhood, so I just didn't question it. But my parents were actually more the age of probably what my grandparents would have been. I grew up the youngest of four siblings. All of us were adopted.

28:17None of us biologically related. My mom made sure she worked very hard to ensure that I went to private school from kindergarten through high school. Had a very good childhood. She made sure, though, one thing that she was very adamant about is putting us, especially me, in situations where I had a lot of interaction with other white children. She always told me that she wanted to make sure that I felt comfortable in any situation that I would encounter in life. And she always would drill into my head. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. She didn't want me to feel inferior to or less than or uncomfortable in any circumstance.

29:11Well, we have to take another quick break, but we'll pick up Kathy and Tracy's story right after this.

29:20This season on Planet Money Summer School, we have drilled for oil in Norway. We've smuggled products into North Korea. And now we make it to our seventh continent. Antarctica. That's right. Speak for me. Mr. Penguin, speak for me. That's another sound of Antarctica. That's a reporter trying to interview a penguin. We'll explain on Planet Money Summer School. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get back to the conversation with this message we got from Suzette in North Carolina. I was an only child and was just totally thrilled to discover and then successfully document and get in contact with two sisters.