Tag: El Paso TX

No More

No more lies, no more shame, no more hiding.
I’m done with that already.

When my parents died, our family history was full of stories that weren’t true.

My mom was stolen from her parents at the hospital where she was born in Virginia by a nurse in cahoots with the baby stealing and selling Georgia Tann.

Not true.  It was the only way my mom could explain how she could have been born in Virginia but adopted as an infant at Memphis.  The only fact she really had to go on was the scandal that was Georgia Tann at the head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society branch at Memphis.

My dad was left on the doorstep of the Salvation Army in a basket in El Paso Texas by a Mexican woman because his father was Anglo and he was conceived out of wedlock.

Partially true.  He was conceived out of wedlock and he was adopted from the Salvation Army in El Paso Texas.  He wasn’t Mexican, he was half Danish and his father was dark complected.  His mother was English/Irish not Mexican.

I was an Albino African.

Okay, so I really didn’t believe that one but I did say it on numerous occasions because I didn’t know what I was, so no one, not even myself could deny it.

Now I know the truth.  To find out that you are not who you think you are is mind blowing.  Your world tilts on its axis and nothing is ever the same again.  Even the simple act of looking in the mirror changes.  It brings a whole other element into the equation of my identity.  I am grateful to finally be “whole” after 6 decades of uncertainty.

Adoption is a strange thing that does strange things to the people affected by it.  It doesn’t matter what angle you are coming from – there’s shame and secrecy involved.  That much proved to be true.

Door of Hope

 

On this day in 1935, my dad was born in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers called the Door of Hope in Ocean Beach, a suburb of San Diego.  The building still stands.  I believe it is some kind of restaurant/bar at the moment.

My grandmother was a self-reliant person.  She had to be.  She grew up without her natural mother who died when she was only 3 mos old.  On a visit to California at about the age of 15 (when her family visited relatives living there), she refused to return home.  Until then she had been enslaved by her step-mother in a Rayon factory in Asheville North Carolina.

My dad’s father was a much older man married to an even older woman who was a private nurse by profession.  I doubt my grandmother knew the man was married when she started seeing him in La Jolla CA.  She most likely knew it by the time she knew she was pregnant.  It is just a likely he never knew he had become a father.

What is clear is that my grandmother didn’t run around with every Tom, Dick and Harry.  She clearly knew who my father’s dad was and although she gave my dad her maiden surname, she left us breadcrumbs as to his father’s identity – both in how she named my dad after the man as well as placing a head shot of the man with his name on the back right next to a photo of her holding my dad.

They are seated on the front porch of another Salvation Army home for unwed mother’s that she was hired at in El Paso Texas.  That is how my dad got there and eventually was adopted from there when he was about 8 mos old.

Note on image –

In 1915, the Door of Hope, a home for unwed mothers, was built on a 10-acre site in Ocean Beach’s Collier Park. Initially operated by the Sand Diego Rescue Mission, it was taken over by the Salvation Army in 1931. In 1962, the Door of Hope moved to a much larger facility in Kearny Mesa.