A Mosaic of Sentiments On Father's Day, Two Adoptees, Two Extraordinary Stories
I reached out to Jack about the launch of his new book, Recycled, and I invited him to share sentiments about this remarkable milestone in his life.
Father's Day is upon us, and it packs a potent punch for many people worldwide. But today, I am shining a light on two extraordinary adoptee stories who share personal sentiments on Father's Day.
My friend and fellow adoptee, Jack F. Rocco, M.D., and I first crossed paths in our Adoptees Connect - Cromwell, Connecticut, group. I previously had the honor of being a guest on Jack & Michael Rocco's (they are not related) Podcast, which was a wonderful conversation we had together. You can check it out here.
I reached out to Jack about the launch of his new book, Recycled, and I invited him to share sentiments about this remarkable milestone in his life. We are collaborating about our feelings on Father's Day from two uniquely different adoptee perspectives.
We appreciate one another's stories, and our adoptee bond connects the common adoption thread creating affection and respect for one another that is exceptionally awesome. I respect Jack and his story, and he respects me and my story, but like most adoptee stories, they couldn't be any more different.
Pamela's Sentiments on Father's Day 2023:
I was adopted in a closed adoption in Iowa in 1974, and it’s no secret times were different during that era, especially when it came to adoption. After finally learning my truth well into my adult life, I learned I was conceived out of an affair with a married man approximately seven years older than my birth mother. He was a friend of my birth mother's family and a pall barrier at my late grandfather's funeral. My birth father was 35 years old when I was born, and my birth mother was 27 years old when I was born. They weren't young, still in high school or trying to finish college, as many adoptees discovered.
They both worked in factories; my birth father, John Deere, and my birth mother worked at Engineered Products in Waterloo, Iowa. They were both alcoholics, and they got together under the "fling" act, and soon my birth mother learned she was pregnant by an older married man, whom all her family knew.
I can only imagine how that would feel, but based on her actions, shame took hold as the monarch of this era of her life, and secrecy wasn't far behind. She chose to keep the pregnancy hidden from as many people as possible. However, people caught on. I heard stories that she wore big, baggy overall blue jean bibs every day to hide her bulging belly, hiding me inside. I also learned she was never seen without a drink in her hand, even through her pregnancy with me, until she died in 2010. Ultimately, she rejected the pregnancy, she rejected me, and she chose at 27 years old to relinquish me for adoption.
While being separated from my birth mother has ultimately shaped my identity, I have made peace with this. I think in her heart of hearts, she was doing the best thing she could do for me. Give me life, and give me away. I was an inconvenience and a problem for her, and she just wanted it to end. She went into the hospital nine months pregnant in 1974 under an alias. She walked out a day later, babyless, and returned to work the next day.
After searching my entire life and childhood, I met my birth mother once in 1995, and she shut the door, locked it up, and I never saw her again. She rejected a relationship and never wanted anything to do with me.
I asked her several times, "Can you tell me who my birth father is." She said, "He didn't know anything about you and wouldn't want to!" A family friend even told me that my birth father was dead. I said, "If he's dead, I want a DNA test to prove he's my father, and I want to stand over his grave!" Until then, I never believed he was dead.
FIGHTING FOR MY TRUTH
Sadly, my birth mother also never told my birth father I existed. This means that he had no choice in her relinquishing me for adoption. He didn't sign any paperwork, nor did I. I fought the world for my truth, spending the first 36 years of my life looking for him. Finally, one day in 2010, after confirming his identity from several of my birth mother's friends & family, I drove across the country and showed up at his door unannounced. Seeing his face for the first time has been a pivotal piece of my story. I share many layers of this experience by writing about it at www.pamelakaranova.com.
My birth father expressed he knew nothing about me, but he remembered my birth mother, her family, and being a pall barrier at my grandfather's funeral. He said, "She was the only woman I ever danced with, and I didn't have to bend over and dance with her!" I was 6ft tall, and she was tall like me. He was also tall and stood 6'3. Finally, I know where I got my height from.
We visited for about 45 minutes, and one thing about our conversation stood out to me. He said, "If I would have known about you, I would have kept you! But I didn't know anything about you!" This piece of my puzzle creates a highlighted reality that many times, birth fathers' rights are entirely ignored, with no decision-making in the adoption plan. The birth mothers, adoptive parents, and agencies co-sign for this and make it easy for birth mothers to bypass getting consent from the fathers, which I have a massive problem with.
For Father's Day, I highlight all the Fathers who have had their rights stolen from them because of adoption. Birth fathers often may not even be aware they have a child until after adoption, if ever. I see and hear you for the fathers who have had their rights stolen. I am sorry for your pain. This wrongdoing is more common than anyone knows in adoption.
As the story continues, I met my birth father two times in my lifetime, and the cards were stacked against us from day one. While we shared DNA, we had no history, which complicated things. I drove to Iowa the second time to visit him in the country in Leon, Iowa. In 2021 the population of Leon was 1806 people. I learned over time that my birth father and his whole family were gamers and hunters. They lived in the country, at times, off the land.
SCARED STRAIGHT
He escorted me to his gun shed and slaughter shed and asked me to have a seat. He had promised to take me to meet my only living biological grandmother, which was the most significant part of why I made the ten-hour drive from Kentucky to Leon, IA. But when I arrived, he said he changed his mind. He wasn't taking me to meet her because he thought it would “kill her.” My heart immediately dropped. He confronted me in a stark way that he heard I was married to a "ni**er" and that if I ever brought my "ni**er kids" anywhere on his property, they would get shot!
My heart dropped even more. I had to correct him and let him know I have never been married, which made him more proud, I'm sure! I expressed no plans to bring my bi-racial kids anywhere near him, nor was I looking for a grandfather for them or a father for myself. That ship had fucking sailed.
I remember sitting in his slaughter/gun shed, and a baby kitty came out of nowhere, which was a breath of fresh air. I put my hand down to pet the kitty, and my birth father said, "I would blow its brains out if you weren't here!" I put my head down and couldn't believe what I was experiencing. At this point, I was traumatized by this experience and in tears. After he gave me a talking, he invited me to eat, which was beyond difficult, and he eventually said, "I changed my mind. I want you to bring your kids so I can teach them how to fish!"
That entire thought was dead. I left that day in 2012 and never saw my birth father again. He never accepted me into his life, nor did I have a relationship with him. This experience helped me understand more layers of why my birth mother gave me up for adoption. Every little clue helps; even when it hurts, I must know my truth.
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
Here is a photo of my birth parents and me all at 18 years old. Pictures for many adoptees are worth more than gold because the memories have been stolen for many of us, but the pictures are a piece of the puzzle that makes us feel authentic. I can finally see this and say, "WOW, I look like someone! These are the people that made me!"
I spent years contemplating visiting my paternal grandmother once she went to a nursing home because I didn't need my birth father's permission. 2017 I drove back to Iowa to meet my biological grandmother, Iowa "Fern" Pansy Jones. A dream come true. I was determined to take back what adoption had stolen from me. A ten-hour drive for a 45-minute visit was worth it. Not long after, a few weeks shy of her 99th birthday, she passed away. This was one of the most incredible memories of my lifetime, but it, too, came with some deep emotional grieving I wasn’t prepared for.
A DISHEARTENING TWIST
Unfortunately, while he is legally my parent on paper, my adoptive dad and I never had a father/daughter relationship. He married my adoptive mom, adopted two daughters, divorced her a year later because she couldn't be a wife or a mother, and split. He knew she couldn't care for us but left us with her anyway. He moved over an hour away, remarried, and raised three sons as his own. We saw him on weekends and for vacations in the summer, but each time I visited, my oldest stepbrother was molesting me, so by the age of twelve, I stopped going.
I never built a relationship with him during my time with him, and sadly, I don't know much about him. I never remember any lessons learned or heartfelt conversations. There were no father-daughter dates about boys or life. He was never there for school activities, games, concerts, or when the home was in turmoil with my adoptive mom almost daily. He died on January 3, 2023, six months after my birth father did. Most people have no idea both of my fathers died six months apart within the last year because I haven't made a public skeptical about it. The paradox is too weird.
We hadn't spoken in years at the end of my adoptive dad's life. Sadly, he chose to protect my oldest stepbrother, who has proven to be a child molester and a pedophile inside and outside their family. In my heart, I decided to save myself, and I divorced them and emotionally annulled the adoption I had never signed up for.
RECLAIMING WHAT WAS STOLEN
In 2005, I moved across the country away from everyone, adopted or biological, which was the hardest thing ever, especially with three small children and being a single parent. I changed my name and will spend the rest of my life recovering from the aftermath adoption has caused me.
Father's Day doesn't feel like much to me because the wound from relinquishment trauma has always been more significant, overshadowing my feelings about my two absent fathers. I sometimes wonder how someone has two fathers yet misses out on healthy, caring, loving relationships with either of them. I never had relationships with them, so what did I lose? I will never know.
The relationships with my "mothers" were similar. As an adoptee, I have struggled far more with my mother wounds than my father wounds. On a scale of more pain, the primal wound has been far more profound and more challenging to heal. The more I have worked on it, the easier things have become. Sadly, many adoptees share similar sentiments.
One thing is sure about adoption; it's complicated, emotional, and messy. Before every adoption occurs, the adoptee first experiences a deep, profound loss. I sometimes think about my birth father and adoptive father; they cross my mind on Father's Day, but I will never know what I lost because I never had it. How has this impacted me? I've never felt a father's love, support, or encouragement. It's null and void and always has been. It's all I know.
KNOWING MY TRUTH
Now I know who I am, who I'm not, and where I come from. Learning all these pieces of the puzzle has helped me feel authentic. I know my back story, and it's been crucial that no matter how messy and awful it is, it's mine, and I deserve to know it like every other adoptee in the world.
Learning my truth has helped me accept it, heal and move forward with my life. There is no healing from secrecy, lies, and half-truths.
While my sentiments on Father's Day have many unique twists and turns, I save space for the adoptees with their own unique stories, like my friend Jack Rocco.
Jacks Sentiments on Father’s Day 2023:
About Jack: Jack Rocco, M.D., has more than thirty years as a practicing orthopedic surgeon. His work has taken him to many countries and cultures, including to Japan, where he served in the U.S. Air Force, and to Madagascar, where, through a nonprofit organization he established, he treated children suffering primarily from clubfoot. He has served on the board at Shriners Hospital for Children in Philadelphia. Recycled, his first book chronicles the behind-the-scenes, reluctant, and subconscious journey exploring the impact of being relinquished and adopted during the baby-scoop era of the mid-sixties. As he eventually finds his birth families, he also finds himself. He lives outside Charlotte, North Carolina.
What’s your name? Who’s your daddy?
This key line in The Zombies hit Time of the Season is not just a catchy little phrase in a 1968 rock song. For millions of children around the world, it’s reality and a question they can’t answer.
I was one of those children.
I was conceived somewhere on the campus of Mansfield College in 1965 in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. My birth parents weren’t married, and marriage wasn’t an option for them. As was common at the time, my mother was sent away to Erie, Pennsylvania—a five-hour drive from her school, so that she could “have” me and then give me away.
That’s a funny phrase: “have me,” given the fact that she never “had” me for more than fifteen minutes after I was born. For many reasons, neither of my birth parents felt they had much of a choice in the matter.
This is all a part of my adoption story. I didn’t begin to understand any of that fully, and much more, until I dug into writing my memoir, Recycled, coming out on Father’s Day, 2023.
Overview of Recycled: Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack's identity was built around his Italian heritage and while he knew the story of his "Gotday," he didn't know the story of his birth day. His was a closed adoption, and he only knew that his birth parents were a young couple-an Italian father and a German Irish mother-who couldn't afford a child.
Recycled takes you along on Jack's journey of discovering his true but hidden identity. On a first date, Jack learns she was also adopted. As she describes finding and meeting her birth mother, Jack discovers that his belief about closed adoptions-that there's no way to obtain details-and the birth story he's been told may not be accurate. He becomes obsessed, devouring books about adoption and adoption trauma. He tries to follow long and twisted tentacles of nurture, nature, and free will-which parts of him were due to genetics? The nurturing environment of his adoptive home? And which parts did he actually have control over?
As some of the puzzle pieces of his life click into place, others remain disconnected and swirling out of reach. And then, he makes a discovery that shatters his very self-identity.
It was Jack's grandfather who coined the term "recycled children." Recycled is for those directly involved in adoption-adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents-and also for anybody wanting insight into the impact that early maternal and cultural separation has on a child. It is also for those coming to terms with mixed-race identity.
It's one of the most thrilling, shocking, yet hopeful books about hidden identity and adoption that you'll read this year and may help you during your own identity inquiry.
I’ve been asked by more than a few people why I decided to release my book on Father’s Day. I’m only disappointed, but not surprised, that more people didn’t ask me that question. Father’s Day isn’t always the best holiday, especially for those like me who didn’t always know how to answer the question posed by The Zombies.
Here’s the answer as to why I chose Father’s Day. Some of it was just timing. It was rushed to get it out, and June was about the best we could do with that. BUT it could have been any day in June. Why Father’s Day?
Well, that became more obvious as we all lived through 2022, including my mother, who almost didn’t.
In the process of my mother spending months in the hospital and my father being alone for the first time in over 62 years, he, despite his own health issues, somehow rose to the occasion and re-established himself in his role as the bedrock of the family.
I didn’t want to tell him that I’d written this book. I didn’t want to tell him it was soon going to be published. I thought he was going to be pissed; I thought he was going to get angry; I thought he’d get anxious and yell.
Instead, he calmly hit me with a barrage of questions.
“Did you talk about your grandparents? Your cousins? Fishing and the picnics in the backyard and your grandmother sending you clams to Philly so you could make her sauce?”
“Yes, I did,” I replied.
And then he responded in a way that I never thought was possible.
“Well then, that’s gonna be a good book. I think it’s going to be a bestseller,” he said.
I swear, my head exploded. That was the last reply I expected. In fact, I should have known he would love it because, ultimately, the book is about the family and the stories of the people and the times that we both loved so much. It was OUR story and OUR life, not just mine.
Now, he asks me about the book all the time. Now, we’re much more honest about how we feel about things, and we call to check up on each other much more frequently than ever. Now, we say “I love you” when we say goodbye.
My father came from a different generation and time. The world has changed, and in many ways, he hasn’t and shouldn’t. But in some very important ways, he has.
I wasn’t his “real” son, and he was hard on me, and we didn’t always get along, and in many ways, we couldn’t be more different. But he stayed. And He provided for us, and he is still here, providing me lessons on life and how I should be a better man than I am. I hope I have, in turn, provided him with some of the same joy. Because he is my father.
What’s my name? Who’s my Daddy?
Unfortunately, many do not know the answer to that simple question. Unfortunately, I sometimes struggled over the years trying to answer that question myself.
In writing Recycled, I truly have found my father. He was here all the time, and his name is Jack Henry Rocco from Erie, Pennsylvania.
And so my book is published on Father’s Day, 2023, and dedicated to him.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
My friend Jack Rocco’s book, Recycled, A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature and Free Will, will be available soon! Pre-order your copy today or buy it on June 18th!
In the Afterward to Recycled, Jack mentions the book The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, which chronicles the experiences of women who kept their pregnancies secret and then gave their children up for adoption—because they were not married.
Check Jack’s thoughts out in Psychology Today! - Our Stories Define Who We Are.
Review By Kirkus - Recycled: An enlightening personal look at the emotional challenges often faced by adopted children.
A Personal Perspective: What happens when the stories change? - “My biological father, it turned out, had passed away about a year earlier. But finding out about him came with a huge surprise: His grandfather had been Black. My father had struggled with his racial identity, being “too white for the Blacks and too Black for the whites,” as my newfound aunt told me. He had possibly drunk himself to death. This new knowledge about where I came from rocked my identity. Before, I had my story that I used to explain who I was. Even if it wasn’t technically my story, I still saw myself as the Italian kid from a blue-collar immigrant family who had worked his way to becoming a surgeon. But now, I seemed to have three different stories of three different ships.”
Q & A
For my fellow adoptees, how does Father’s Day impact you?
Can you relate to my story or Jack’s? If so, how so?
What’s your relationship been like with your adoptive & biological fathers?
Have you written any sentiments you would like to share about Father’s Day?
Drop your comments below!
I see you; I feel your pain for all the adoptees who feel forgotten, lost, and alone. Please don’t give up, and know you aren’t alone in feeling like you do.
I have compiled a list of recommended resources for adoptees and advocates. You can find it here: Recommended Resources for Adult Adoptees and Adoption Advocates.
Thank you for reading.
Understanding is Love,
Pamela A. Karanova
Hi Pamela!
Our stories are very similar when it comes to birth fathers. My birth mom got pregnant by a “family friend”, who also happened to be her drug supplier. He was known in my birth family to be a good man who took care of my birth mom. At the time I was conceived, he was 65 (my birth mom was 28), and was married to a woman whom he had two older sons with. Once I was born, the courts made him do a DNA test because my birth mom was going back and fourth on who my biological dad was. Once the test confirmed he was in fact my father, the courts asked him if he wanted custody of me, and he said absolutely not. I don’t think he even saw a picture of me. Because he did not want custody and the courts had already taken me away from my birth mom, I stayed in foster care until I was adopted right before my 4th birthday.
Father’s Day has always been kind of a numbing holiday for me. My adoptive dad is amazing and we have had a great relationship my whole life. I always told myself I would never want to find my birth dad. Even though my birth mom had her own struggles and demons, she fought for me for almost 4 years. My birth father didn’t even want to give me a chance. So why should I ever give him one? As I got older, I decided I wanted to find him to at least ask why and to see what he looked like. It’s so strange looking into a mirror not knowing where you got half of your DNA from. Once I turned 18, I found my birth family. I asked about him and was told he had passed away when I was 13. His ashes had been spread in Mexico so there’s not even a grave to stand over and ask the questions I have even though I know I’ll never get an answer. I found out with time I have a younger sister who is 9 months younger than me from him. I connected with her and found out he would visit her regularly up until he passed away. I also got to see the one photo she had of him. I look nothing like him and I’m very much OK with that.
With Father’s Day approaching, I still feel numb to my feelings towards him but I feel even more grateful for the dad I was blessed to be raised by in my adoptive family. Especially now that he’s a father figure to my own two kids who’s dad is absent in their lives. This holiday brings up many emotions for all of us now and lots of difficult questions.
Thank you for sharing your story. It brings comfort knowing I am not alone in my journey to healing 💕