Mother and Child Reunion

THE LEADING characters herein do not want to be identified.

Their names are replacement names.

When Amy was 16, and living in a fairly exclusive North Shore community, her parents sent her to a summer camp to work as a junior counselor without revealing that her 61-year-old father had been diagnosed with a fatal disease and was dying.

Later in the summer, when she learned that her father would not be coming on visiting day, Amy strode off into the woods and, using a pen knife, angrily carved an "X" into her left forearm. She does not remember why, but she bears the scar.

Amy's father died that summer.

The following winter, in 1976, Amy became pregnant. She and Adam, the father of her child, determined that they would keep the baby and endure whatever the difficulty. Adam drove her to the hospital in late July. She delivered a boy she named David.

"We thought I was going home," Amy said. "But they put me out with Valium and Demerol. While I was unconscious, my mother and the adoption agency she had contacted came to the hospital and took my baby. The hospital was aware. They let it happen.

"When I woke up and learned what happened, I went to the agency. They said it was too late. The baby already was adopted. The birth father never signed any papers, and neither did I. From what I learned years later, even if you're 16 years old, you still have to sign some kind of paper. I was 17. But, we didn't know. We lived in a town where nobody even talked about divorce, let alone anybody's teenage kid having a child out of wedlock. Even if it happened, it didn't happen, if you know what I mean. They just wanted me to disappear. When I came home, my mother said to me, 'It's over. It's done. Now you can forget about it.'

"I walked out of the house," Amy said, "and I started drinking. My mother had stolen my life. She stole my heart, and she stole my life. I bottomed out for years after that. Adam couldn't stand what was happening to me. We split up. He's around. I tried finding him once. "But in the meantime, I went from the typical suburban teen to the typical-what-I went the low road. I worked in topless bars. I was drinking all the time. I had four suicide attempts. I can clearly remember the last one: In 1988, I slit my wrists and wound up in Mather Memorial Hospital. They sent me to a staff psychiatrist there. Before, everyone I had ever told about my baby told me to forget about him. This one said to me, 'If you continue to self-destruct like this, you'll make sure you'll never find your son or meet him again.' I can't explain why-it seems so simple and common knowledge now-but it had never occurred to me that I might be able to search and find my son. With one statement, one sentence, this staff psychiatrist gave me hope.

"I straightened out, although it took some time. I didn't tell my husband about my son until this past September. I have other children. We've been married 18 years. I met him in one of the bars I worked in. He's an auto-body man. He was always the one who found me and took me to the hospital. He took me to Mather. I was afraid of what he would think of me. After I finally told him, I found out that all the times I went into depression over this, he thought he was the cause. He would walk in the house and say, 'What's the matter?' and I would say, 'Nothing,' and walk away. He was blaming himself. When I told him about my son, he was relieved. He said, 'Now, I understand what you've been going through.'

"Once I straightened out, I guess out of a sense of obligation, I began seeing my mother. I never had met my grandmother, and I wanted my kids to know theirs, no matter what my feelings were. But my mother had never understood me. Three years ago, she finally did, and our relationship totally changed. Before that, she was trying to fit me into her mold, and it just wasn't happening.

She died in February.

"From the time I actually started searching, it took me four years to find my son. I tried the legitimate ways and the private investigators, but I found him through a group of searchers on the Net who help each other. I found him Sept. 2, 1999. It was a telephone call. He had been working and going to SUNY Albany. I thought it was going to go horribly, because when I called and told him who I was, he said, 'That's interesting news.' But, he was at work. He called me back later, and he was just wonderful. We clicked. It was like talking to myself, the way we think, the way we are.

"We exchanged e-mails. I wrote him in late October and said I would back off if he didn't want to meet me, but he wrote back, and we made plans. My husband and I drove up there November 17th and checked into a hotel. At 11 a.m., I walked down to the lobby, and when I saw him and hugged him, everything else in the room disappeared. There was just a magical connection, and it was immediate.

"New Year's Eve, I was with him, just hanging out. He told me that when he was 16, his parents sent him away to summer camp to work as a junior counselor. As it turned out, his father was dying. The father was 61, he said. I got chills. He kept talking. He told me that he got into an altercation with the kitchen help at the camp. He was scratching his arm with a knife, and one of them said something like, 'What, you think you're bad?' His response was to cut himself, to show them. He says to me, 'Look what I did to myself.' And on his upper left forearm is a scar in the shape of an X.

"I got so scared, I ran out of the room. He came after me to finish the story, and I rolled up my sleeve. Same scar, same place, same age, same everything. It was too scary for me."