Imogene’s Daughter

An Adoptee Searches For Her Birth Mother And Finds A New Cause

By Gabriela Carvalho

Nancy Bennett leafs through her family photo album. Old pictures of her mother, father and grandparents are neatly organized on the self-adhesive pages. She stops at every picture of her mother, trying to find a similarity with her own face.

“See? I look more like my father, I guess,” she says, disappointment in her voice.
She has pictures of herself as a child placed next to pictures of her mother when she was the same age. Two smiling, curly-haired girls stare out from the pages. Bennett, now 54 years old, smiles when she sees a resemblance, reassuring herself over and over again that maybe, just maybe, she does look a little like her mother.

Bennett’s mother, Imogene Gann, died in 1968. She shot herself at age 32. At the time, Bennett didn’t grieve her death. She didn’t even know her mother had died. She also didn’t know how her mother had lived. As a matter of fact, she didn’t even know her mother’s name.

Bennett’s mother gave up her daughter for adoption when she was born; the two never met. It is a piece of unfinished personal business that haunts Bennett. The loss has led her to support legislation that, if passed, would make it easier for adopted children to find their birth families.
“I would gladly give up a part of my life to be able to meet her,” Bennett says with teary eyes.

Nancy Bennett had good parents. She was raised in Springfield by the couple who adopted her as a 3-month-old. She says her adoptive mother was a good person, but she had a temper. That is why Bennett never dared ask too many questions about being adopted and especially not about her birth family; she didn’t want to see her mom upset.

“I didn’t feel like my mother loved me for the person, the individual that I was,” she says. “It was like she wanted to make me into somebody else.”

Now don’t get the wrong idea, she says. Her mom was a great person and Bennett says she had a great childhood — a much better one, she knows, than if she had never been given away. But she always felt like her adoptive mom was trying to get her to be someone she was not. She wanted her adopted daughter to be more like her, and Bennett couldn’t figure out where she got her unique traits. Why did she talk so much and so fast, embarrassing her polite mother?

“My mother used to get so aggravated with me because I was a chatterbox,” she says. “Especially around my family, it was like she was embarrassed by me. She would get very aggravated because I talked a lot. And I got a sense that it was something she didn’t like in me.”

It would be many years later before she would learn from her birth mother’s cousin that she talks exactly like Imogene did. As a child, Bennett didn’t know that, and it hurt to be so different.

“What I missed was a sense of identity,” she says. “My parents loved me, but I just always knew I was different. I felt kind of odd.
“I felt like I didn’t belong to them.”
The insecurity and yearning for approval left Bennett with low self-esteem.

“I had this innate feeling that Mother wasn’t happy with who I was, my own individual,” she says. “She wanted me to be like her. And maybe that was her way of feeling complete. It was, ‘you’re not my own, but I’m going to make you my own.’ ”

Bennett spent her life trying to break away from the control of her adoptive mother. She thinks that was why she got married when she was 18, to a husband who was equally dominating. He left her recently.

“I wonder what would have happened to me if my mother hadn’t been so controlling,” she notes.

Three decades after she left home, Bennett finally bonded with her adoptive mom; she was 49 years old and her mom was in the last months of her life. The search for her birth parents would be the key to a belated but meaningful relationship with her adoptive mom.

According to Missouri law, an adopted child — even as a grown-up — needs the authorization of the adoptive parents to be able to search for identifying information about the birth family. By this time, Bennett’s adoptive father had died, succumbing to cancer in 1993. Although already in possession of nonidentifying information about her birth mother, Bennett needed her adoptive mom’s blessing to start the search for her birth father, so she wrote her mom a letter, because she was “too chicken” to say it in person.

That letter in 2003 set loose the elephant in the room: adoption. Her mom had always assumed Bennett would ask about it earlier, but she never did and her mom never questioned her reticence. Once they talked about adoption, the relationship between Bennett and her adoptive mother could finally move to the next level.
“Once we broke down that wall of adoption stuff, we grew closer,” she says.
Bennett began to see her mom in a different light, but their remaining time together was short. Bennett, who had spent 49 years trying to escape her adoptive mother, would now give anything to have her back.

“The last year and a half with my mom was priceless,” she says. “I wish I had gotten to know her better.”

In March 2002, Bennett finally discovered what had happened to her birth mother. A social service agency sent Bennett a letter offering the scant information in the agency’s records. Imogene Gann grew up in Missouri. When she was 3, Gann’s mother drowned, possibly a suicide, but never confirmed. A few years later, her father remarried and the family moved to Oregon, where Imogene lived with her father and his new wife. Her stepmother didn’t really like her so when she was about 15, Gann returned to Missouri to live with her maternal grandparents. She got a job at a factory, where she met Nancy’s father. They dated for a few months and talked about marrying, but the young man was arrested for robbery and the marriage was off. By then, Gann was pregnant but decided not to tell her lover. She moved to Springfield to live with her aunt. After she gave birth, Gann opted to give up her baby because she didn’t want her daughter to be raised by a single mother.

The letter writer from the social service agency thought Bennett’s mother would really like to meet her daughter, but that kind of information couldn’t be released. Included in the mailing was a letter from her mother, written shortly after Bennett’s birth, where she told the social worker how much it bothered her to give up her baby, and she asked how her daughter was. The birth mother’s name was blacked out in the letter, but Bennett held it up against the light in the kitchen. The light wasn’t good enough so her husband took the letter to the bathroom, where the light was better. Bennett waited outside the door, hungry for any information.

“I think her name is Imogene Gann,” her husband yelled from the bathroom.
At age 48, Bennett finally knew the name of her mother.
“I can’t even begin to describe how I felt. This was about me,” Bennett recalls.

She couldn’t sleep that night, so Bennett went on the Internet and searched for information about Imogene Gann. Among the many results was one from a “people search” Web site. One post was seeking a woman born to Imogene Gann in the ‘50s.
Bennett began crying in front of the computer. Someone was looking for her! But at the bottom of the post was a note that Imogene Gann had died on Jan. 29, 1968. Bennett would never get to meet her mother.

When Nancy Bennett was 4 years old, her parents adopted another girl, but the two girls never bonded. Her sister is bipolar and refuses treatment, which means she suffers extreme ups and downs. They weren’t close friends as children, and they remain apart as adults. Bennett says she always missed having a sister she could really bond with, envying people who did have close relationships with their siblings.

In 2002, Bennett acquired two more sisters. The poster on the Internet was a second cousin who told Bennett that Gann had borne three daughters. Bennett’s youngest sister lives in Oregon, but she and Bennett are not close. Raised by their mother until the suicide, the youngest of Gann’s daughters went into foster care, where she was abused. The disparity in the sisters’ upbringing has prevented them from connecting as yet on a familial level.

The middle child, however, has fulfilled Bennett’s dream of a best-friend kind of sister. As with Bennett, Gann gave up her second daughter, Sioux Roslawski, for adoption as a baby. Roslawski now lives in St. Louis and they talk to each other frequently, and see each other as often as they can.

Bennett and Roslawski share the same passion for handcrafts — making jewelry is their favorite — and onion rings. And, when they get together, they can laugh and make jokes and share stories about their mother. They are both stubborn and independent, a trait they call “Gann temper.” They try to get together as much as they can and Roslawski feels like other people might not understand. Having left a reunion one night to go visit Bennett, she had to explain that Bennett is not a sister she grew up with, but one she only recently met.

“We’re never going to make up for those lost years, but there is more of an urgency to spend time together,” Roslawski says.

On the second Saturday of every month, Bennett meets with Adoption Triad Connection of Mid-Missouri at the Columbia Public Library. She started ATC — a support group for adopted children, adoptive parents and birth parents — with Judy Bock, a birth mother looking for the child she gave away. They have been meeting for four years. The group helps people search for lost family and, in early April, they had their first successful case: one of the group members found and met her brother.

“I can’t even describe it,” Bennett says about witnessing the reunion. “It’s so wonderful!”

In the ATC meeting, Bennett, Bock and four other women talk about their experiences with adoption and their search for either their birth parents and siblings or the children they gave away. And they complain about the current law.

“My husband has pages and pages of medical history. I have to write down: ‘adopted, don’t know,’ ” says Jean Killion, an 80-year-old adoptee who was attending her first ATC meeting. Killion doesn’t know her birth parents’ first names or if she has any siblings.

“All we have is what they said when they gave us up,” Bennett says. “Girls don’t have cancer when they have a baby at 16 … they do when they are 40, 50, 60.”
The women agree. Even if birth parents don’t want to meet the children they gave up, ATC members believe birth parents should be obligated to update their medical history regularly so that adopted adults can have that information. They also think adoptees should be able to get their original birth certificates once their birth mothers are deceased. And what about birth mothers? Shouldn’t it be easier for them to find their children if they want to be found?

“People change. They are not the same as they were at 16,” Bennett says, railing against the current law that says birth mothers have no rights after they relinquish their children.

Bennett and the other members of her group are hoping to make changes in Missouri adoption law. Bennett tells the group that proposed legislation would allow adult adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates and adoption records soon after the death of birth parents. The women nod in approval. She adds that the state should allow governmental agencies to make confidential telephone calls to birth parents when adoptees start looking for them, requesting permission to release identifying information.

Also on her wish list: Adult adoptees wouldn’t need authorization from their adoptive parents to look for their birth parents. If both adopted adults and birth parents want to meet, they should be able to, without the need for so many affidavits. And even if birth parents don’t want to meet their children, they should have to update their medical information. The women agree: This is how it should be.

Bennett is pinning her hopes on Missouri House Bill 48, but the actual HB 48 doesn’t encompass nearly as many issues as the ATC members hope it will. Although all of Bennett’s issues were discussed as the bill was drafted, the current version of the bill limits itself to the issue of the birth certificate. There is no mention of medical records or easing reunions between adopted adults and their birth parents. HB 48 does go much further on birth certificates than the group was hoping. The proposed bill states that an adopted person over the age of 21 has the right to his or her original birth certificate, without any requirements. It eliminates the need for authorization from adoptive parents, birth parents and birth siblings. Birth parents would not be informed; affidavits and notifications would be extinct.

“The job of the bill is to stop being a brick wall,” says state Rep. Cynthia Davis (R-O’Fallon). Davis calls it a civil rights issue, adding it is not the job of the government to take sides on the relationship between adopted adults and birth parents. The state’s job, Davis says, is to keep records, and she believes Missourians should have the right to see government-held documents with their names in it.

“It’s not government business,” she says.

But before adoptees can have the right to their original birth certificates — a right, Davis points out, that is not denied to anyone else — they will have to fight to get their bill assigned to a committee. Opponents of the bill say the government must keep the promise of anonymity made to birth mothers when they give up their children.

Abortion has crept into the argument. Bill opponents fear HB 48 could decrease adoption numbers or increase abortions. Davis denies that possibility, saying that in open-records states such as Kansas, adoption numbers have actually gone up.

“Women don’t get abortions because they think the baby will want to meet them some day,” Davis says. “They are not even thinking about the baby when they have an abortion; they are thinking about themselves, what it is going to do to their bodies, their careers.”

Davis adds that parents don’t adopt children with the proviso that their children will never go looking for their birth parents. “When you adopt or give birth to a child, there are no guarantees as to what they will want to do as an adult,” she says.

ATC is supporting Davis with an e-mail campaign in hopes that the bill will receive an official hearing soon. In the last week of March, the bill was presented in a work session and Davis was optimistic the bill would be assigned to the Committee of Children and Families, which she chairs. Even as the 2009 legislative session winds down this month, supporters still harbor hope that the bill will be assigned, heard and approved before the session ends. If the bill doesn’t pass this year, supporters plan to start all over again next year. ATC members say they believe it will be approved some day; they just hope it’s soon enough for them to benefit from it.

Bennett drives back to Columbia after meeting with her sister Sioux at a Warrenton diner, halfway between Columbia and St. Louis. They had breakfast and talked and laughed. They discussed their relationship with their younger sister and Bennett mentioned she wants to look for Roslawski’s birth father — she is the one who worries about these things. Roslawski says she wouldn’t mind meeting him if he fell on her lap, but she doesn’t really take the time to search. Bennett talked about her new dog, an 8-year-old Maltese named Lucy, adopted from the Humane Society two days earlier.

“It’s not a dog, it’s a rat,” Roslawski teases her sister with a smirk on her face.
“It’s a dog!” Bennett replies, jokingly slapping at her sister and rolling her eyes.
“A golden retriever is a dog. That thing you got is a rat.”

Roslawski loves golden retrievers. She volunteers for the Love A Golden rescue group. Bennett wanted a lap dog, one that doesn’t need much exercise, one that she could just pet and cuddle.
They are still debating on the phone later when Roslawski calls saying she just got home. Bennett is still on the road to Columbia.

“She steps much harder on the gas than I do,” Bennett explains.
That is the kind of thing she can say now. She has a little sister.