March 28, 2019 • 45 mins
While walking her dogs one evening Laura Engel received a life-changing email that transported her back to a home for unwed mothers in New Orleans.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio Baby,
It's Whole Baby, and the dog is just I pointed
(00:21):
out to him where I spent many many in afternoon
sitting out on that slab. Was at the concrete slab
with a cover over it and talking to the girls
listening to this transistor radios. Um what teenagers did back then,
talking about boys, talking about what seventeen year old girls
talk about seventeen magazine at the beach, almost Amazon to Papa's.
(00:46):
The only odd thing was all these teenagers were in
various stages of pregnancy, but we were chest girls. That's
Laura Angle recalling her time at a home for unweed mothers. Today.
Laura is a sixty eight year old mother and grandmother
who lives a full and contented life in San Diego.
(01:07):
She grew up in Boloxi, Mississippi, and describes herself as
an average child and teenager, a teenager who had a secret.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I had a
(01:34):
family that was a very close, nice family. You know,
we were to church, and we did all the things
that normal families do. I was the only daughter. I
was the oldest, had three younger brothers. My mother had
a lot of issues. She was actually a secret in
her family. My mother was what I think. I'm another doctor,
(01:55):
but I think she was bipolar. I just knew instinctively
that just don't talk about mamma's moods and the weeks
that she would lay in bed crying. And I loved
my mother, but I don't think we were close at all.
I always don't like I wasn't enough with my mother
and actually became like the in between between my mother
(02:18):
and my grandmother, who lived next to our my father's mother.
When Laura was fifteen, she felt for a guy who
wasn't exactly the boy next door. He wasn't from Biloxi.
He had long hair, which was fairly new in the
mid nineteen sixties, and he didn't have a Southern accent.
He just said a different than a guy. He played
a guitar, and he and I became boyfriend and girlfriend
(02:41):
and a very young age. I guess it was like fifteen.
So by the time I was the summer that I
was turning seventeen. He and I broke up because he
was going on to college, he said, but he ended
up joining the army pretty soon after that attack. I
can imagine what a must have been like during that long,
hot Mississippi summer ticking by, especially for a girl who
(03:06):
had just turned seventeen. A girl was a troubled mother,
a girl who had a certain longing to get out,
though she might not even have known what that would mean.
Though Laura and her boyfriend had broken up, he kept
coming by the house. Laura was under a spell cast
by her own longing made manifest by the long haired
(03:27):
guitar playing guy from out of town. But that spell
was broken by the slow, very slow, dawning realization that
Laura was pregnant. Actually, my memory of that is that
I was in denial. I couldn't believe it I could
be pregnant. It's just devastating because I didn't know which
(03:50):
way to turn. There was nothing much worse in that
period of time, and to get pregnant, um, except if
a boyfriend didn't want marre you, and that was like
the ultimate. It was ascle back then. It's important to
understand that there was no such thing as sex education,
which my teenaged son has informed me is now called
(04:12):
human development. In the mid nineteen sixties and Biloxi, Mississippi,
it was called family hygiene. Let's take a second to
think about that term family hygiene. It's like a big
antiseptic wipe erasing the messy truth of teenage bodies and desires. Now,
consider that oral contraceptives a k a. The pill were
(04:36):
approved by the FDA in nineteen sixty, but it took
US a Preme Court case in nineteen sixty five to
give married couples the right to use it. For the unmarried,
the pill was like a myth whispered among girls, and
mostly you didn't whisper about such things because that would
mean you were a bad girl. Secret until my mother
(04:59):
cornered me when I was like three and apple once pregnant.
Aaron demanded, now if I was pregnant, and I said,
I'm not sure. I don't think so, because I'm not sick.
And aren't you supposed to be sick when you're pregnant.
Aren't you supposed to throw up when you're pregnant? And
that's why if I was my mother um permitted doctor,
(05:23):
sure enough, I was pregnant. She was horrified, went to
bed for a couple of days. I wouldn't even speak
to me. My father wouldn't speak to me. I thought
it was a very quiet man, that I was his
only daughter, and he and I just adore each other.
It was the apple of his eye, and all of
(05:44):
a sudden he turned away from me. Would speak to me.
In the meantime, he called my old boyfriend's parents, and
no doubt that he had just gone into boot camp
and he wasn't Fort Benning for that. And my father
took me in the car and my moother interrove straight there,
(06:05):
four hundred miles and I thought that he could have
us married there, because if I did get married, that
was like getting on with everyone's problems. Dr bid. They
think I was pregnant and not, you know, married. I
thought we would go to a church there and and
get married, or we'd go to justice in the peace.
And I had this fantasy that it was all going
(06:27):
to work out. Let's just back up for a second.
I just want a little bit more. Those four miles
back and forth between Biloxi and Fort Benning. What was
the atmosphere like in the car between you and your parents.
It's interesting to bring that up. That was torture. Neither
(06:50):
one of my parents said hardly anything, even to each other.
My mother sat in the front seat trying my father
just to a long. I don't even remember him turning
back and looking at me or saying anything. I'm sure
we stopped to go to the the bathroom. Um. It was
horribly I have to tell you, though. I do remember
(07:12):
in the backseat thinking it would all work out that
once my boyfriend saw me, and I honestly thought my
father would just go take him, pick him up at
the dace, that everyone would say. Sure. In the trunk
of that silent car speeding through those four miles between
Biloxi and Fort Benning was a white dress and white shoes.
(07:36):
Laura thought she'd be married in the way. I remember.
It was kind of an Empire style dress, and my
grandma was a seamstress, so I ought to beautiful close
for me. And I don't even know where that dress
came from, but it was nothing. It was not new.
It was a dress in my closet, and I remember
it was clean colored, and I remember taking white cut
(07:58):
like pumps because weren't heels, but they were pomps, you know,
And I just remember packing my battle bag. When we
got to the hotel room, I took a bath. I
remember being in the back and thinking this is all
been working out. I remember getting dressed and my mother
(08:18):
stayed in the room with me, but she and I
didn't we didn't speak that much. But big surprise, things
didn't work out that way. Her dad returned to the
hotel without the boyfriend in tow. The boyfriend's parents had
told him he didn't have to marry Laura. His drill
sergeant told him he didn't have to marry Laura, And
(08:40):
so Laura's father, still not speaking to her, said only
one thing as they packed up and headed back to Biloxi.
He doesn't deserve you, he said, a small high beam
of love, cutting for just a moment through all that
family shame. But not too long after that a plan
(09:04):
was hatched. My father and my grandmother talked to the
minister and he told them about the home over there
as a maternity home for I'm wed mother's and it
had been in New Orleans since like the late eighteen
and it was run by the church. And they assured
(09:25):
me that I would be taken care of and my
mother said to me. She took me aside and said,
if you go over there and have the baby, what
we'll do is we will have you have the baby
over there, and when you come back, I'm going to
say the baby is mine, and you can pretend like
(09:47):
you're the baby's sister. And I'm in love with it,
because I thought, even though I still couldn't even comprehend
a baby, I still thought, you know, at least this way,
I have my baby. And so I've been along with it,
and I said, okay. So as a seventeen year old,
(10:08):
I thought, well, this is going to solve the problem.
I'll go there, all the out of sight, nobody in
my hometown will see me walking around pregnant. Um, I'll
have the baby and then we'll come up. That's father
and mother both droves me over to New Ones in March,
(10:30):
and Um, I remembered it, thinking they're both going to
go in with me. Of course, I was scared to death.
I'd never lived anywhere at a home. Imagine being a
seventeen year old girl who has never lived anywhere other
than your own home with your parents and brothers, and
(10:50):
pulling up to a nondescript red brick building in a
big city full of strangers. Imagine stepping out of that
car knowing that for five months you will live apart
from everyone you know and love. Will you prepare for
one of the biggest moments of your life childbirth. Laura's mother,
who just can't handle it, stays in the car as
(11:12):
her father takes her inside. My father had to do it.
And it was while we were in there that the
lady was admitting me when she said it was a
wonderful thing, but I was doing giving up my child
to be loved by a family that could not have children.
I stopped her and I said, there's a mistake. And
(11:36):
I was not the kind of teenager that would do that,
you know, I didn't make ways with adults. I was
very respectful of adults, of course, And I said, you know,
there's a mistake. I'm not leading the baby here. I'm no, no,
I'm going to keep it. My mom is going to
raise it. And she looked at my father and he
(11:56):
looked at her, and that's when everything changed. She left
the room, and my memory is and it's so traumatic
at that point that my memory is like um savvy
and it's little bits and pieces. For so many years,
I wouldn't even allow myself to go there. He's talking
(12:18):
to me, and he's telling me, you don't want your
mama to raise this baby. And I think he was
trying to protect not just me, the the baby. I
think he had just made up his mind that that
was not gonna work. And he's the one that told
(12:39):
me this is what he wanted. And I remember I
was so glad that he was finally talking to me
and giving me advice. I think I would have done
anything to him, because it killed me what he's stopped
talking to me, and I wanted to make him happy.
And I remember thinking at the same time, I said okay.
(13:03):
I remember thinking I said his fantasy that somehow everything
would work out, he would change his mind and that
I would keep the baby. But I told him. The
Home for Unwed Mothers asked the girls to change their
names while they were there. This stripping away of their
very identities was meant to preserve their anonymity from each other,
(13:27):
from any possibility that their secret might someday be revealed.
Laura was told, you will forget this. Ever happened, it
became like a Mantra repeated to her over and over again.
Within the walls of that red brick building, you will
forget this ever happened. On one side of the building
(13:48):
was where the girls lived, the dormitories upstairs, and we
had a kitchen, an area for um, you know, reading,
and there was a TV room and that type of thing.
And it was a chapel, because that was very important.
So Laura and the other girls would listen to their
transistor radios, call each other by their fake names, and
(14:08):
flipped through the pages of seventeen magazine, while on the
other side of the wall from where they slept each night,
there was a clinic where they would eventually give birth,
and a nursery where babies were kept until they were adopted.
In the meantime, the girls were given jobs. Laura's was
to tend to the children in that nursery. Their belief
(14:31):
was that the girls would be preoccupied working, which is
true we were, and it would give us a sense
of responsibility to have a job to go to every day,
and it also helped the home to run smoother, of course,
And from what I remember, we were all very eager
to do our jobs. I remember doing my job was
(14:53):
important to me, and I wanted to do a good job.
I had never been around new form babies and I
little brothers, but I'd never taken care of newborn babies.
It was life changing for me because the nurse, the age,
the nurses, aids, and the nurses that worked in there
were black. My hometown, I've never had a friend of
(15:16):
any color except light. Biloxi, Mississippi, in nineteen sixty seven
was a tourist town of beaches, nightclubs, and casinos. All
those places were still de facto off limits to African Americans.
It took federal intervention in night after years of protests
to open the beaches of Biloxi to non whites. It
(15:37):
taught me so much. It taught me about me two
so non judgment. It's such a wonderful person, and it
opened my eyes to the real world. And and I
think that changed me tremendously in that time. After five
months in the Home for unweed Mothers slash Nursery, Laura
goes into labor and her labor becomes quickly distressed. Instead
(16:00):
of giving birth at the home as expected, she's taken
to a nearby hospital. My memory is named they're scared
to death in labor on a grey in the hallway,
which seems like for a long time. I have no
idea how long it really was. And then I was
spent in the labor room. The next thing I knew
(16:22):
was my mother came walking in the room. She looked
like she was fun to die when she walked in.
She was just petrified, and I remember crying. I would
just you know, in pain. And I don't know if
they'd given me anything. I don't think they had, and
I was scared. And she stayed for a very short time,
(16:44):
and she told me just to calm down and I
would get through this. And then she left, and I
think she might have been asked to me, but she
did leave. And the next thing I know is they
gave me a shot, and my memories con I'm pretty
sure what they gave me was tilight. The tilight shot.
That is a lot back then where you have no
(17:05):
memory of anything that's happening after the fact, And my
first memory is so distinct. My first memory is waking
up in a ward with six or eight other women,
and it's morning, the sun's coming in the window, and
(17:29):
they've said my dady and I have no memory that
my baby. I don't know if it's a boy. I
don't know if it's a girl, and do nothing. They
do know that all the women in this room, and
we're all facing each other. It's like they had our beds,
like in a circle, is the only way I can
describe it. And they're all talking about their babies and
(17:49):
their husbands and their other children. And I'm eavesdropping, but
I'm very sigh and I'm scared to death and petrislight
is that day are going to know that I'm an
unwit mother. That is my biggest fear. This she name
of being an unwit mother. So I don't talk to anybody.
(18:10):
The nurses command and I asked the nurse about my baby.
If she said over, I'll be bringing him into you
when I bring the others. And that's my first inclination
that my first knew I had the baby and it's
a boy. And I'm thrilled because I'm thinking I'm going
(18:32):
to see my baby and hold it, and at the
same terman petrifide because I don't want them to know
that I'm one of those women and unwit mother and
that that memory is very strong. But I remember when
they're broughting in. It was just it was beautiful and
(18:56):
it was so painful because I knew that this baby,
it's not going to be my baby, and he was.
He was part of me for the minute I helped came,
he was part of me. And that's that's when it
all began as far as my when I really realized
(19:16):
the impact of what this is just going to do.
How much time did you spend with him before you
didn't see him again? Actually, I held him and I
said to get a little bottle to give him, and
I knew what to right foot to do because I
had been working in a nursery and I said him
(19:37):
and I held him and I unwrapped him, and the
whole time trying to be strong because I don't want
anyone to know what I'm really thinking. And the nursing
man it took him from me, and it just told
me not to make a scene because I didn't want
or taken from me. She took him from me. And
my next memories and I don't even when I got there.
(20:01):
My next memory is going back to the home and
I was put into a clinics right because when she
had your baby didn't you known gold the theater girls?
And you know kind of like your getting ready to
be it, you know, sit out of there. During her
time caring for infants in the nursery, Laura had instinctively
(20:23):
learned a great deal about attachment. She's a naturally empathic,
compassionate person, and even as a petrified seventeen year old,
she's thought of those babies, not just her son, to
whom she gave the crib name of Jamie, but all
of the babies. How long would it take for them
to be adopted, how would they be held and cared for?
(20:45):
How would they attach without a mother to attach to?
How would the time in the nursery, in the Home
for the unwed mothers impact them. She longed to spend
as much time with Jamie as she could, because it's
so obvious to me. As they got older, their faces
was right up. I can see their faces now. They
(21:07):
were a few that were very important to me, and
they've they've stayed with me all these years. They are
little staces. You can see your eyes and see there's
the lives light up. When you bent over to pick
them up out of their crew. Um, it was something
inside me up I think I've always been maternal. Being
(21:28):
a mother has been the most important thing in my life,
and my children have meant more to me than I
always say. They are my arms and life. They are
part of me. I have all sons. They are me
and I am there. I knew that even then. The
first time I held Day, they knew that he he
(21:52):
was me be hungus him. I actually got to hold
my son again because the nurse who I had become
so close to day afternoon, she was alone in the
nurse week. She let me hope my son was three
weeks old. So Dad is one of the most was
one of the most beautiful, beautiful memories I had the
(22:14):
fact that I got to hold my shirt again. And
he was adopted at five weeks, so two weeks later
he was gone from the home. You were repeatedly told
by everyone, you will forget this ever happened. Was there
ever a moment where you forgot that this ever happened?
I never forgot for a minute. I thought of him
(22:37):
every day from that day forward, and I don't think
a day went by that he didn't flicker through my
bind or something. I'd look at one of my other sons.
You know, and I'd always wonder where is he? How
is he? When I sent spif home? He was a
miss I was Besides, I was furious. I felt like
(23:02):
I had been betrayed. I felt like, okay, I'm they
think I'm so bad, I'll be bad. I remember drinking
alcohol in my bedroom. A girlfriend brought it to me.
I mean, I was not the person would be in
my bed room drinking, you know, podcast And I started
smoking cigarettes and I had started smoking at the home,
(23:26):
and I thought, Okay, they say I'm dead, I'll be bad.
But at the same time, I think that was just,
you know, my rebellion. What had happened to me. We're
going to pause for a moment. Six months after she's
(23:47):
back home, Laura's brother convinces her to go to a party,
and it's there she meets a guy in the Air
Force who's from California. In short order, she marries him
and moves to California, away from the place it holds
so many painful memories and secrets. Except we all know
what happens when we run away from secrets. We take
(24:07):
them with us wherever we go. Do you think, I mean,
it's impossible really to answer this question, But do you
think that had this not been your experience, had you
not had a child that you were forced to give
up for adoption, and yet everything else remained the same,
and you still were at that party that evening that
(24:30):
your brother talked to you into going and you met
this man, do you think that you would have married him? Yeah?
I think I would have been in a totally different
space in my life. I know that having my son
is having to give him a for adoption, changed my
whole direction of my life. I would probably have stayed
(24:50):
in Mississippi. Um, maybe not, but I would have gone
on to college. I would have had a totally different life. Ever,
in my wildest dreams, would I have gotten married. That's
quickly to somebody. I was able to admit to myself
as I got older and raiser, that I used him.
(25:15):
I I can't say that I'm this perfect angel. I
used him to leave a bad situation. My parents would
not even talk to me about that it happened. My grandmother,
who I adored and who loved me more than anything,
would not talk to me about what happened. I was
(25:36):
mourning that home time for a baby. That it was
as if he had died, but you can't talk about it.
It's a secret. Nobody is supposed to know that you
did this, and God forbid as they do, what they're
going to think of you? And what are they going
to think of the family. Laura and her husband have
three boys together, but the marriage isn't a particularly happy one.
(25:59):
After about a decade together, they split up. When we
were finally divorced. I had met my second husband on
a soccer field where oldest boys were playing against each other,
and they were just very good friends who became very
very close friends, and it just evolved into love, and
three years later I married him. We've been married thirty
(26:21):
eight years. Now. Did you tell your first husband about Jamie? Yes?
I told him before we got married because I felt
like he needed to know. I felt like he needed
to know what I really who I really was, because
in my mind I was damaged and I couldn't not
(26:44):
tell him. I told him, and he um, he said
to me. We sat. He was shocked, and then he
said to me, don't Azra ever say anything about that again.
I don't ever anything to my parents about that. Promise
me you won't. And he said, and another thing, or
(27:05):
you gonna love me as much as you love this Jamie.
And I said, court because I was trying in this
spar and I said, of course, and and if we
have children. I loved him as much. But that was
his you know, his period on it. Years and years later,
before my husband who got married to now and I
(27:27):
got married, I told him, Remember, we had gone out
and we were sitting in a booth in a restaurant,
and I said, there's something I need to tell you
that I've done, and I hope we won't think less
of me, And of course he was, how could I
think less of you? He's known me four years A
couple of years now, hut. And we said I I
(27:50):
gave a baby for adoption, and he was like what,
And after I told him the story, put his arms
around me and he said, I'm so sorry you had
to go through that, and do you want me to
help you find him? Right then there I got wow,
it's almost like a marriage test. Laura and her second husband, Jean,
(28:16):
who have now been married for thirty eight years, raised
their gang of five kids together in San Diego. Then,
with their kids grown, Laura begins to focus on genealogy.
I wanted to buy a family history for my children,
and I was having so much fun doing this genealogy.
(28:36):
It's probably about ten years and I knew that DNA
was kids were available. During the thirty years in Jane
and I had been married. We very seldom talked about
Jamie either because I would change the subject and we
would try to bring it up. And I couldn't even
spun to terms with the fact that I might never
see my son again. And I mean to was the
(29:00):
one who said to me, honey, let's do this be
an a kid thing, And I said, you, it might
be fun. But part of me knew that if my
son did this, we'd get connected. All her life, Laura
had dreamt of a time she might meet her first son.
At times she imagined letters, other times a blond man
(29:23):
in a red car pulling up to her house and
embracing her. Why was the man blonde? Why was the car? Read?
She didn't know. Our fantasies don't have to make sense.
That night was October nine, I don't remember forever, and
(29:44):
we not to walk our dogs in my cell phone kings,
I looked down and said answers Tom, and I thought,
oh my gosh, another you know, cousin from you know,
fourteen hundreds or whatever, you know, And I was just
kind of guy, I'm not even gonna look at that.
I want to go. I wanted to go to bed read.
I was reading a really good book and I just
wanted to go and read until I fell asleep. But
(30:07):
something inside of me said, just look at it. So
I opened it up on my phone and there it
said parent child Match, and there was an email and
within my private email, and it said I just received
my DNA profile and ancestry dot Com says we are
(30:29):
a parent child match. I was adopted and I'm looking
for more information. Well I heard this saying they fell
to their knees. I know what that means. Now. My
knees buckled. I had the most gigantic physical reaction to
(30:54):
that email that they think I've ever had when reading something.
My body started trembling. I couldn't talk. I was like
I could not speak. I was like petrified. I was petrified.
I was terrilyzed. I just ran through my house. My
(31:14):
husband thought the dogs. I was so stricken when I
ran in the house, and so he went on out
to get the dogs and get the whole time you think,
what is it? What is it? And I couldn't talk.
I ran to my office, my home office, looked at
the computer lockd inting a Tissot dot com. We read
that over and over and my thought was it sounds
(31:38):
so business like. It was just very direct, you know.
And at the same time, the other side of me
was just I just knew, I knew, and I do
want to scare him. I was so emotional. I didn't
stop crying. My husband started crying when he came in
the room, and he said to I think that's really him?
And I said, from us, could it be? And he's crying,
(32:02):
I'm crying, And I decided that what I'm going to
do is right a very calm email back, and so
he said, can you please tell me where you were
born and when? And maybe you know I can give
you some information? Well right away? He right away, he
(32:30):
writes to me and says, I can't be talking to
my eighth N seven the Orleans, Sluisiana, and that I
knew it it was him. And here's what I wrote back,
(32:50):
Dahn and here's exact email. Do you go with it?
Says I'm overcome, Please bear with me. I knew it
in the heart when I read your first message, I
am your birth mother. Please let's connect. My email is
and I get my email and I said, do you
want my phone number or me to call you. I
(33:10):
never thought this day with Tom, that I always prayed
you okay, and that you had a good life, and
that some day, this day with Tom, and repeating myself,
I am so grateful your birthday is sketched in my heart.
And then this man who had told me you know
that he was so keeping it together, says I'm also
(33:34):
over time. I do have a wonderful life. After getting
the results last night, my wife and I found you
on Facebook. You that's already have a wonderful life as well.
I lived in Baton Rouge. I'm happily married. You have
three healthy and happy children. I grew up in Alexandria.
I'm rambling. I didn't expect it, okay, I didn't expect
(33:58):
to be this emotional. I would like to connect, and
that's when the emails take off, and it would America.
It was wonderful. Well, I'm crying too. You can't see
that because we're not in the same room. And I
(34:18):
know you're a mother and I get your books, and
I know any anybody who's ever ever had a child,
even if they knew they couldn't keep them, and even
if they chose not to keep them themselves, it's just
such a it's such a tie there. It's like you
(34:39):
can't ever your heart will never forget that person, that child, never.
And here he was, in a flesh and blood riting
to me, and he had found me. And it weren't
driving up to my parents house in a red car.
It was through the Internet and its DNA, which seven
(35:00):
none of us would have ever dreamed could even be possible.
It was raculous, and I'm not kidding. I cried for
and they were happy here, of course, for a good
solid three months. I mean I couldn't. I couldn't get
through a day without just breaking down. All those years
(35:22):
holding in that secret just started unraveling. It was insane
and it was dutiful. We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be back in a moment. Jamie, whose name given
(35:44):
to him by his adoptive parents is Ray, and Laura
make a plan to speak by phone that evening, after
he's put his children to bed. At seven on the dot,
he calls Laura. He says, I don't know why or how,
but I know his voice, and his voice is different
than my other son's. My other son John had a
paper voice. Of course, he has a southern accent to
(36:08):
my other son. S don't this voice. I knew it.
I wouldn't know it anywhere. It resonated with me like
I can't even explain. And he he laughed and said,
you're just saying that because I'm saying Dtor were laughing,
We're laughing. We were crying in eight after four hours.
(36:33):
It was great speaking of Laura's other sons. A kind
of amazing thing had happened, which is that, in a
couple of years leading up to Jamie finding Laura online,
Laura had begun to loosen her hold on her secrets.
She revealed the truth about having given up a child
for adoption one day while she and Jean were meeting
(36:53):
with their attorney to discuss their wills. Shortly thereafter, she
told two out of three of her sons, the ones
who lived nearby. She didn't want to risk the chance
that one day they might find out after she was gone.
She also blurted out the story to one of her
best friends as they were taking a long walk in
San Diego. It reminds me of a favorite quote from
(37:15):
the Scottish explorer W. H. Murray. When you are committed,
the universe moves too. Now. She tells all three sons
about Jamie that they're in touch. Each of them has
a slightly different reaction, though ultimately all are supportive. Laura
begins to tell her inner circle of friends, and with
each telling there's a burst of energy and joy, a celebration,
(37:39):
a liberation and unburdening of a secret shame carried for
a lifetime. And once she shares her secret, the floodgates
of memories start opening up. I started in the middle
of the night, but remember the names of the girls,
(38:00):
were sitting outside with my book or my magazine. I
would remember sitting in the guy we're eating with them,
and all the you know things we did. We were
allowed to walk around the neighborhood, they were allowed to
My parents came over a few times and took me
(38:20):
for the afternoon, and things like that began to just
like flood my memory. I could see him. I would
always imagine him the way I would see him in
my memory. But I would think about him. It was
always a baby, of course, and all of a sudden
I could remember holding him. I could remember the weight
(38:42):
of his body, um, this little body in my arms.
And that's something. I felt so happy when I tell
this story, because I want people to know that it's okay.
It's okay that we remember these things. It's anything, it's
it's the best thing in the room for us to
be able to talk about it, because then it actually
(39:04):
makes us understand ourselves. And and I found a forgiveness
for that girl that I didn't even realize I was
holding this all against her. And it's like all of
a sudden, I understood myself by finding him, for him
finding me, I hustled down myself. And then Jamie tells
(39:25):
Laura that he wants to meet her. That will come
the next day, fly from New Orleans to San Diego.
I wasn't nervous wreck because when I said when I'm coming,
he said tomorrow. I am a fellow here. I was
at ance for the girlfriend one of my deart's friends,
telling her she's crying. I'm telling her the story, and
he texts me. I jumped up from the launch and
(39:48):
I go, you know what I have to get to
the home. I drun by Trader Joe's. I have to
get stuff hooked cooked. Um, I gotta clean the house.
I mean, there's got here over the but you know,
I'm just and she's like, calmed down, He's not coming
till tomorrow, and I said, no, no, we have to leave.
I text my husband he's with fishing buddies, and I'm like,
he's coming tomorrow. And he said, oh my god, okay,
I'm leaving right now. I don't know what we thought
(40:10):
we're gonna do. But I rushed home. You know, just
make sure everything's say before him in the guest room
and I give a sign saying alcophone way waited. I
don't think anything. So ever, then that expruciating and it
was really long driveway. I hear this supercar coming up
the driveway. I'm trying to be at calm, like I'm
(40:32):
gonna be like hi. So when he walks in the
depart I run out the door and run towards him,
and he of course stopped in his tracks and puts
his arms around me. And it was beautiful. It was
like hugging any of my signs. The way he stopped
(40:56):
the way he just did which me, and there was
no shyness. It was like we had known each other forever.
It was like any of my son's coming home, and
it was wonderful. We came in the house, we were
like glue to each other, jeans crying, kind of crying.
(41:17):
We sat and we talked, and we've never left each
other's side. I never cooked anything in the way that
two days he was here. Six months before the evening
when her email pinned and she looked down to see
the words a parent child match. Laura had written a
(41:40):
letter to her seventeen year old self, that lost, shamed, shunned,
pregnant girl who wasn't even supposed to reveal her own name.
The letter was meant to be a reckoning with the past,
but it has since taken on a life of its own,
becoming a talisman, a wish and agreement between Laura and
(42:01):
the universe that somehow exists in the past, present, and
future all at once. This letter is both an ending
to Laura's story and the beginning. April twenty there, Zaura,
I know that you're facing one of the worst chapters
in your life, and I have come back to you
(42:22):
from the future to let You know, my dear girl,
that this two shill paths you are a survivor. Hold
your head. I you have nothing to be ashamed. That
you are a dutiful spirit and give to human being.
It's so much to give. I know that your dreams
are still possible and that your life ahead will be
(42:42):
fulfilling beyond your wildest dreams. Although today you think you
are unworthy, Soon you will move away. You will move
across the country and reinvent yourself. You will become the
mother's three more amazing son and too marvelous extra children
through an incredible marriage to the love of your life,
your knight and shine the armor, your soul mate. Eventually
(43:06):
will become from the eatistics of our grandchildren. There will
be the backbone that a good mother and a grandmother
is for her family. Some of the lovely surprises will
come your way, and it's time softens like you are
going through right now. You will one day forgive and
love your parents again. You will come to terms the
(43:27):
way this loss of your son happened. You will understand
the grief and loss that they too endured. Yes, you
will always born your secret son. Not a day will
pass that you do not. But one day you will
be able to talk about him and write his and
your story, and then you will say that yes, you
(43:48):
are still loved and most importantly, you will learn to
love yourself again. You deserve this. I adore you, your
older self, Laura bar I'd like to thank my guest
(44:13):
Laura Angle for sharing her story with us today. You
can find out more about Laura at Laura l Angle
dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production.
Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. Also a special thanks to producer Derek Clements
(44:35):
on this episode. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam
Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod. For more about my
(44:55):
book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. Boy you gonna
bed my baby? Whisper A little wrap on me, my
baby
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio Baby,
It's Whole Baby, and the dog is just I pointed
(00:21):
out to him where I spent many many in afternoon
sitting out on that slab. Was at the concrete slab
with a cover over it and talking to the girls
listening to this transistor radios. Um what teenagers did back then,
talking about boys, talking about what seventeen year old girls
talk about seventeen magazine at the beach, almost Amazon to Papa's.
(00:46):
The only odd thing was all these teenagers were in
various stages of pregnancy, but we were chest girls. That's
Laura Angle recalling her time at a home for unweed mothers. Today.
Laura is a sixty eight year old mother and grandmother
who lives a full and contented life in San Diego.
(01:07):
She grew up in Boloxi, Mississippi, and describes herself as
an average child and teenager, a teenager who had a secret.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. I had a
(01:34):
family that was a very close, nice family. You know,
we were to church, and we did all the things
that normal families do. I was the only daughter. I
was the oldest, had three younger brothers. My mother had
a lot of issues. She was actually a secret in
her family. My mother was what I think. I'm another doctor,
(01:55):
but I think she was bipolar. I just knew instinctively
that just don't talk about mamma's moods and the weeks
that she would lay in bed crying. And I loved
my mother, but I don't think we were close at all.
I always don't like I wasn't enough with my mother
and actually became like the in between between my mother
(02:18):
and my grandmother, who lived next to our my father's mother.
When Laura was fifteen, she felt for a guy who
wasn't exactly the boy next door. He wasn't from Biloxi.
He had long hair, which was fairly new in the
mid nineteen sixties, and he didn't have a Southern accent.
He just said a different than a guy. He played
a guitar, and he and I became boyfriend and girlfriend
(02:41):
and a very young age. I guess it was like fifteen.
So by the time I was the summer that I
was turning seventeen. He and I broke up because he
was going on to college, he said, but he ended
up joining the army pretty soon after that attack. I
can imagine what a must have been like during that long,
hot Mississippi summer ticking by, especially for a girl who
(03:06):
had just turned seventeen. A girl was a troubled mother,
a girl who had a certain longing to get out,
though she might not even have known what that would mean.
Though Laura and her boyfriend had broken up, he kept
coming by the house. Laura was under a spell cast
by her own longing made manifest by the long haired
(03:27):
guitar playing guy from out of town. But that spell
was broken by the slow, very slow, dawning realization that
Laura was pregnant. Actually, my memory of that is that
I was in denial. I couldn't believe it I could
be pregnant. It's just devastating because I didn't know which
(03:50):
way to turn. There was nothing much worse in that
period of time, and to get pregnant, um, except if
a boyfriend didn't want marre you, and that was like
the ultimate. It was ascle back then. It's important to
understand that there was no such thing as sex education,
which my teenaged son has informed me is now called
(04:12):
human development. In the mid nineteen sixties and Biloxi, Mississippi,
it was called family hygiene. Let's take a second to
think about that term family hygiene. It's like a big
antiseptic wipe erasing the messy truth of teenage bodies and desires. Now,
consider that oral contraceptives a k a. The pill were
(04:36):
approved by the FDA in nineteen sixty, but it took
US a Preme Court case in nineteen sixty five to
give married couples the right to use it. For the unmarried,
the pill was like a myth whispered among girls, and
mostly you didn't whisper about such things because that would
mean you were a bad girl. Secret until my mother
(04:59):
cornered me when I was like three and apple once pregnant.
Aaron demanded, now if I was pregnant, and I said,
I'm not sure. I don't think so, because I'm not sick.
And aren't you supposed to be sick when you're pregnant.
Aren't you supposed to throw up when you're pregnant? And
that's why if I was my mother um permitted doctor,
(05:23):
sure enough, I was pregnant. She was horrified, went to
bed for a couple of days. I wouldn't even speak
to me. My father wouldn't speak to me. I thought
it was a very quiet man, that I was his
only daughter, and he and I just adore each other.
It was the apple of his eye, and all of
(05:44):
a sudden he turned away from me. Would speak to me.
In the meantime, he called my old boyfriend's parents, and
no doubt that he had just gone into boot camp
and he wasn't Fort Benning for that. And my father
took me in the car and my moother interrove straight there,
(06:05):
four hundred miles and I thought that he could have
us married there, because if I did get married, that
was like getting on with everyone's problems. Dr bid. They
think I was pregnant and not, you know, married. I
thought we would go to a church there and and
get married, or we'd go to justice in the peace.
And I had this fantasy that it was all going
(06:27):
to work out. Let's just back up for a second.
I just want a little bit more. Those four miles
back and forth between Biloxi and Fort Benning. What was
the atmosphere like in the car between you and your parents.
It's interesting to bring that up. That was torture. Neither
(06:50):
one of my parents said hardly anything, even to each other.
My mother sat in the front seat trying my father
just to a long. I don't even remember him turning
back and looking at me or saying anything. I'm sure
we stopped to go to the the bathroom. Um. It was
horribly I have to tell you, though. I do remember
(07:12):
in the backseat thinking it would all work out that
once my boyfriend saw me, and I honestly thought my
father would just go take him, pick him up at
the dace, that everyone would say. Sure. In the trunk
of that silent car speeding through those four miles between
Biloxi and Fort Benning was a white dress and white shoes.
(07:36):
Laura thought she'd be married in the way. I remember.
It was kind of an Empire style dress, and my
grandma was a seamstress, so I ought to beautiful close
for me. And I don't even know where that dress
came from, but it was nothing. It was not new.
It was a dress in my closet, and I remember
it was clean colored, and I remember taking white cut
(07:58):
like pumps because weren't heels, but they were pomps, you know,
And I just remember packing my battle bag. When we
got to the hotel room, I took a bath. I
remember being in the back and thinking this is all
been working out. I remember getting dressed and my mother
(08:18):
stayed in the room with me, but she and I
didn't we didn't speak that much. But big surprise, things
didn't work out that way. Her dad returned to the
hotel without the boyfriend in tow. The boyfriend's parents had
told him he didn't have to marry Laura. His drill
sergeant told him he didn't have to marry Laura, And
(08:40):
so Laura's father, still not speaking to her, said only
one thing as they packed up and headed back to Biloxi.
He doesn't deserve you, he said, a small high beam
of love, cutting for just a moment through all that
family shame. But not too long after that a plan
(09:04):
was hatched. My father and my grandmother talked to the
minister and he told them about the home over there
as a maternity home for I'm wed mother's and it
had been in New Orleans since like the late eighteen
and it was run by the church. And they assured
(09:25):
me that I would be taken care of and my
mother said to me. She took me aside and said,
if you go over there and have the baby, what
we'll do is we will have you have the baby
over there, and when you come back, I'm going to
say the baby is mine, and you can pretend like
(09:47):
you're the baby's sister. And I'm in love with it,
because I thought, even though I still couldn't even comprehend
a baby, I still thought, you know, at least this way,
I have my baby. And so I've been along with it,
and I said, okay. So as a seventeen year old,
(10:08):
I thought, well, this is going to solve the problem.
I'll go there, all the out of sight, nobody in
my hometown will see me walking around pregnant. Um, I'll
have the baby and then we'll come up. That's father
and mother both droves me over to New Ones in March,
(10:30):
and Um, I remembered it, thinking they're both going to
go in with me. Of course, I was scared to death.
I'd never lived anywhere at a home. Imagine being a
seventeen year old girl who has never lived anywhere other
than your own home with your parents and brothers, and
(10:50):
pulling up to a nondescript red brick building in a
big city full of strangers. Imagine stepping out of that
car knowing that for five months you will live apart
from everyone you know and love. Will you prepare for
one of the biggest moments of your life childbirth. Laura's mother,
who just can't handle it, stays in the car as
(11:12):
her father takes her inside. My father had to do it.
And it was while we were in there that the
lady was admitting me when she said it was a
wonderful thing, but I was doing giving up my child
to be loved by a family that could not have children.
I stopped her and I said, there's a mistake. And
(11:36):
I was not the kind of teenager that would do that,
you know, I didn't make ways with adults. I was
very respectful of adults, of course, And I said, you know,
there's a mistake. I'm not leading the baby here. I'm no, no,
I'm going to keep it. My mom is going to
raise it. And she looked at my father and he
(11:56):
looked at her, and that's when everything changed. She left
the room, and my memory is and it's so traumatic
at that point that my memory is like um savvy
and it's little bits and pieces. For so many years,
I wouldn't even allow myself to go there. He's talking
(12:18):
to me, and he's telling me, you don't want your
mama to raise this baby. And I think he was
trying to protect not just me, the the baby. I
think he had just made up his mind that that
was not gonna work. And he's the one that told
(12:39):
me this is what he wanted. And I remember I
was so glad that he was finally talking to me
and giving me advice. I think I would have done
anything to him, because it killed me what he's stopped
talking to me, and I wanted to make him happy.
And I remember thinking at the same time, I said okay.
(13:03):
I remember thinking I said his fantasy that somehow everything
would work out, he would change his mind and that
I would keep the baby. But I told him. The
Home for Unwed Mothers asked the girls to change their
names while they were there. This stripping away of their
very identities was meant to preserve their anonymity from each other,
(13:27):
from any possibility that their secret might someday be revealed.
Laura was told, you will forget this. Ever happened, it
became like a Mantra repeated to her over and over again.
Within the walls of that red brick building, you will
forget this ever happened. On one side of the building
(13:48):
was where the girls lived, the dormitories upstairs, and we
had a kitchen, an area for um, you know, reading,
and there was a TV room and that type of thing.
And it was a chapel, because that was very important.
So Laura and the other girls would listen to their
transistor radios, call each other by their fake names, and
(14:08):
flipped through the pages of seventeen magazine, while on the
other side of the wall from where they slept each night,
there was a clinic where they would eventually give birth,
and a nursery where babies were kept until they were adopted.
In the meantime, the girls were given jobs. Laura's was
to tend to the children in that nursery. Their belief
(14:31):
was that the girls would be preoccupied working, which is
true we were, and it would give us a sense
of responsibility to have a job to go to every day,
and it also helped the home to run smoother, of course,
And from what I remember, we were all very eager
to do our jobs. I remember doing my job was
(14:53):
important to me, and I wanted to do a good job.
I had never been around new form babies and I
little brothers, but I'd never taken care of newborn babies.
It was life changing for me because the nurse, the age,
the nurses, aids, and the nurses that worked in there
were black. My hometown, I've never had a friend of
(15:16):
any color except light. Biloxi, Mississippi, in nineteen sixty seven
was a tourist town of beaches, nightclubs, and casinos. All
those places were still de facto off limits to African Americans.
It took federal intervention in night after years of protests
to open the beaches of Biloxi to non whites. It
(15:37):
taught me so much. It taught me about me two
so non judgment. It's such a wonderful person, and it
opened my eyes to the real world. And and I
think that changed me tremendously in that time. After five
months in the Home for unweed Mothers slash Nursery, Laura
goes into labor and her labor becomes quickly distressed. Instead
(16:00):
of giving birth at the home as expected, she's taken
to a nearby hospital. My memory is named they're scared
to death in labor on a grey in the hallway,
which seems like for a long time. I have no
idea how long it really was. And then I was
spent in the labor room. The next thing I knew
(16:22):
was my mother came walking in the room. She looked
like she was fun to die when she walked in.
She was just petrified, and I remember crying. I would
just you know, in pain. And I don't know if
they'd given me anything. I don't think they had, and
I was scared. And she stayed for a very short time,
(16:44):
and she told me just to calm down and I
would get through this. And then she left, and I
think she might have been asked to me, but she
did leave. And the next thing I know is they
gave me a shot, and my memories con I'm pretty
sure what they gave me was tilight. The tilight shot.
That is a lot back then where you have no
(17:05):
memory of anything that's happening after the fact, And my
first memory is so distinct. My first memory is waking
up in a ward with six or eight other women,
and it's morning, the sun's coming in the window, and
(17:29):
they've said my dady and I have no memory that
my baby. I don't know if it's a boy. I
don't know if it's a girl, and do nothing. They
do know that all the women in this room, and
we're all facing each other. It's like they had our beds,
like in a circle, is the only way I can
describe it. And they're all talking about their babies and
(17:49):
their husbands and their other children. And I'm eavesdropping, but
I'm very sigh and I'm scared to death and petrislight
is that day are going to know that I'm an
unwit mother. That is my biggest fear. This she name
of being an unwit mother. So I don't talk to anybody.
(18:10):
The nurses command and I asked the nurse about my baby.
If she said over, I'll be bringing him into you
when I bring the others. And that's my first inclination
that my first knew I had the baby and it's
a boy. And I'm thrilled because I'm thinking I'm going
(18:32):
to see my baby and hold it, and at the
same terman petrifide because I don't want them to know
that I'm one of those women and unwit mother and
that that memory is very strong. But I remember when
they're broughting in. It was just it was beautiful and
(18:56):
it was so painful because I knew that this baby,
it's not going to be my baby, and he was.
He was part of me for the minute I helped came,
he was part of me. And that's that's when it
all began as far as my when I really realized
(19:16):
the impact of what this is just going to do.
How much time did you spend with him before you
didn't see him again? Actually, I held him and I
said to get a little bottle to give him, and
I knew what to right foot to do because I
had been working in a nursery and I said him
(19:37):
and I held him and I unwrapped him, and the
whole time trying to be strong because I don't want
anyone to know what I'm really thinking. And the nursing
man it took him from me, and it just told
me not to make a scene because I didn't want
or taken from me. She took him from me. And
my next memories and I don't even when I got there.
(20:01):
My next memory is going back to the home and
I was put into a clinics right because when she
had your baby didn't you known gold the theater girls?
And you know kind of like your getting ready to
be it, you know, sit out of there. During her
time caring for infants in the nursery, Laura had instinctively
(20:23):
learned a great deal about attachment. She's a naturally empathic,
compassionate person, and even as a petrified seventeen year old,
she's thought of those babies, not just her son, to
whom she gave the crib name of Jamie, but all
of the babies. How long would it take for them
to be adopted, how would they be held and cared for?
(20:45):
How would they attach without a mother to attach to?
How would the time in the nursery, in the Home
for the unwed mothers impact them. She longed to spend
as much time with Jamie as she could, because it's
so obvious to me. As they got older, their faces
was right up. I can see their faces now. They
(21:07):
were a few that were very important to me, and
they've they've stayed with me all these years. They are
little staces. You can see your eyes and see there's
the lives light up. When you bent over to pick
them up out of their crew. Um, it was something
inside me up I think I've always been maternal. Being
(21:28):
a mother has been the most important thing in my life,
and my children have meant more to me than I
always say. They are my arms and life. They are
part of me. I have all sons. They are me
and I am there. I knew that even then. The
first time I held Day, they knew that he he
(21:52):
was me be hungus him. I actually got to hold
my son again because the nurse who I had become
so close to day afternoon, she was alone in the
nurse week. She let me hope my son was three
weeks old. So Dad is one of the most was
one of the most beautiful, beautiful memories I had the
(22:14):
fact that I got to hold my shirt again. And
he was adopted at five weeks, so two weeks later
he was gone from the home. You were repeatedly told
by everyone, you will forget this ever happened. Was there
ever a moment where you forgot that this ever happened?
I never forgot for a minute. I thought of him
(22:37):
every day from that day forward, and I don't think
a day went by that he didn't flicker through my
bind or something. I'd look at one of my other sons.
You know, and I'd always wonder where is he? How
is he? When I sent spif home? He was a
miss I was Besides, I was furious. I felt like
(23:02):
I had been betrayed. I felt like, okay, I'm they
think I'm so bad, I'll be bad. I remember drinking
alcohol in my bedroom. A girlfriend brought it to me.
I mean, I was not the person would be in
my bed room drinking, you know, podcast And I started
smoking cigarettes and I had started smoking at the home,
(23:26):
and I thought, Okay, they say I'm dead, I'll be bad.
But at the same time, I think that was just,
you know, my rebellion. What had happened to me. We're
going to pause for a moment. Six months after she's
(23:47):
back home, Laura's brother convinces her to go to a party,
and it's there she meets a guy in the Air
Force who's from California. In short order, she marries him
and moves to California, away from the place it holds
so many painful memories and secrets. Except we all know
what happens when we run away from secrets. We take
(24:07):
them with us wherever we go. Do you think, I mean,
it's impossible really to answer this question, But do you
think that had this not been your experience, had you
not had a child that you were forced to give
up for adoption, and yet everything else remained the same,
and you still were at that party that evening that
(24:30):
your brother talked to you into going and you met
this man, do you think that you would have married him? Yeah?
I think I would have been in a totally different
space in my life. I know that having my son
is having to give him a for adoption, changed my
whole direction of my life. I would probably have stayed
(24:50):
in Mississippi. Um, maybe not, but I would have gone
on to college. I would have had a totally different life. Ever,
in my wildest dreams, would I have gotten married. That's
quickly to somebody. I was able to admit to myself
as I got older and raiser, that I used him.
(25:15):
I I can't say that I'm this perfect angel. I
used him to leave a bad situation. My parents would
not even talk to me about that it happened. My grandmother,
who I adored and who loved me more than anything,
would not talk to me about what happened. I was
(25:36):
mourning that home time for a baby. That it was
as if he had died, but you can't talk about it.
It's a secret. Nobody is supposed to know that you
did this, and God forbid as they do, what they're
going to think of you? And what are they going
to think of the family. Laura and her husband have
three boys together, but the marriage isn't a particularly happy one.
(25:59):
After about a decade together, they split up. When we
were finally divorced. I had met my second husband on
a soccer field where oldest boys were playing against each other,
and they were just very good friends who became very
very close friends, and it just evolved into love, and
three years later I married him. We've been married thirty
(26:21):
eight years. Now. Did you tell your first husband about Jamie? Yes?
I told him before we got married because I felt
like he needed to know. I felt like he needed
to know what I really who I really was, because
in my mind I was damaged and I couldn't not
(26:44):
tell him. I told him, and he um, he said
to me. We sat. He was shocked, and then he
said to me, don't Azra ever say anything about that again.
I don't ever anything to my parents about that. Promise
me you won't. And he said, and another thing, or
(27:05):
you gonna love me as much as you love this Jamie.
And I said, court because I was trying in this
spar and I said, of course, and and if we
have children. I loved him as much. But that was
his you know, his period on it. Years and years later,
before my husband who got married to now and I
(27:27):
got married, I told him, Remember, we had gone out
and we were sitting in a booth in a restaurant,
and I said, there's something I need to tell you
that I've done, and I hope we won't think less
of me, And of course he was, how could I
think less of you? He's known me four years A
couple of years now, hut. And we said I I
(27:50):
gave a baby for adoption, and he was like what,
And after I told him the story, put his arms
around me and he said, I'm so sorry you had
to go through that, and do you want me to
help you find him? Right then there I got wow,
it's almost like a marriage test. Laura and her second husband, Jean,
(28:16):
who have now been married for thirty eight years, raised
their gang of five kids together in San Diego. Then,
with their kids grown, Laura begins to focus on genealogy.
I wanted to buy a family history for my children,
and I was having so much fun doing this genealogy.
(28:36):
It's probably about ten years and I knew that DNA
was kids were available. During the thirty years in Jane
and I had been married. We very seldom talked about
Jamie either because I would change the subject and we
would try to bring it up. And I couldn't even
spun to terms with the fact that I might never
see my son again. And I mean to was the
(29:00):
one who said to me, honey, let's do this be
an a kid thing, And I said, you, it might
be fun. But part of me knew that if my
son did this, we'd get connected. All her life, Laura
had dreamt of a time she might meet her first son.
At times she imagined letters, other times a blond man
(29:23):
in a red car pulling up to her house and
embracing her. Why was the man blonde? Why was the car? Read?
She didn't know. Our fantasies don't have to make sense.
That night was October nine, I don't remember forever, and
(29:44):
we not to walk our dogs in my cell phone kings,
I looked down and said answers Tom, and I thought,
oh my gosh, another you know, cousin from you know,
fourteen hundreds or whatever, you know, And I was just
kind of guy, I'm not even gonna look at that.
I want to go. I wanted to go to bed read.
I was reading a really good book and I just
wanted to go and read until I fell asleep. But
(30:07):
something inside of me said, just look at it. So
I opened it up on my phone and there it
said parent child Match, and there was an email and
within my private email, and it said I just received
my DNA profile and ancestry dot Com says we are
(30:29):
a parent child match. I was adopted and I'm looking
for more information. Well I heard this saying they fell
to their knees. I know what that means. Now. My
knees buckled. I had the most gigantic physical reaction to
(30:54):
that email that they think I've ever had when reading something.
My body started trembling. I couldn't talk. I was like
I could not speak. I was like petrified. I was petrified.
I was terrilyzed. I just ran through my house. My
(31:14):
husband thought the dogs. I was so stricken when I
ran in the house, and so he went on out
to get the dogs and get the whole time you think,
what is it? What is it? And I couldn't talk.
I ran to my office, my home office, looked at
the computer lockd inting a Tissot dot com. We read
that over and over and my thought was it sounds
(31:38):
so business like. It was just very direct, you know.
And at the same time, the other side of me
was just I just knew, I knew, and I do
want to scare him. I was so emotional. I didn't
stop crying. My husband started crying when he came in
the room, and he said to I think that's really him?
And I said, from us, could it be? And he's crying,
(32:02):
I'm crying, And I decided that what I'm going to
do is right a very calm email back, and so
he said, can you please tell me where you were
born and when? And maybe you know I can give
you some information? Well right away? He right away, he
(32:30):
writes to me and says, I can't be talking to
my eighth N seven the Orleans, Sluisiana, and that I
knew it it was him. And here's what I wrote back,
(32:50):
Dahn and here's exact email. Do you go with it?
Says I'm overcome, Please bear with me. I knew it
in the heart when I read your first message, I
am your birth mother. Please let's connect. My email is
and I get my email and I said, do you
want my phone number or me to call you. I
(33:10):
never thought this day with Tom, that I always prayed
you okay, and that you had a good life, and
that some day, this day with Tom, and repeating myself,
I am so grateful your birthday is sketched in my heart.
And then this man who had told me you know
that he was so keeping it together, says I'm also
(33:34):
over time. I do have a wonderful life. After getting
the results last night, my wife and I found you
on Facebook. You that's already have a wonderful life as well.
I lived in Baton Rouge. I'm happily married. You have
three healthy and happy children. I grew up in Alexandria.
I'm rambling. I didn't expect it, okay, I didn't expect
(33:58):
to be this emotional. I would like to connect, and
that's when the emails take off, and it would America.
It was wonderful. Well, I'm crying too. You can't see
that because we're not in the same room. And I
(34:18):
know you're a mother and I get your books, and
I know any anybody who's ever ever had a child,
even if they knew they couldn't keep them, and even
if they chose not to keep them themselves, it's just
such a it's such a tie there. It's like you
(34:39):
can't ever your heart will never forget that person, that child, never.
And here he was, in a flesh and blood riting
to me, and he had found me. And it weren't
driving up to my parents house in a red car.
It was through the Internet and its DNA, which seven
(35:00):
none of us would have ever dreamed could even be possible.
It was raculous, and I'm not kidding. I cried for
and they were happy here, of course, for a good
solid three months. I mean I couldn't. I couldn't get
through a day without just breaking down. All those years
(35:22):
holding in that secret just started unraveling. It was insane
and it was dutiful. We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be back in a moment. Jamie, whose name given
(35:44):
to him by his adoptive parents is Ray, and Laura
make a plan to speak by phone that evening, after
he's put his children to bed. At seven on the dot,
he calls Laura. He says, I don't know why or how,
but I know his voice, and his voice is different
than my other son's. My other son John had a
paper voice. Of course, he has a southern accent to
(36:08):
my other son. S don't this voice. I knew it.
I wouldn't know it anywhere. It resonated with me like
I can't even explain. And he he laughed and said,
you're just saying that because I'm saying Dtor were laughing,
We're laughing. We were crying in eight after four hours.
(36:33):
It was great speaking of Laura's other sons. A kind
of amazing thing had happened, which is that, in a
couple of years leading up to Jamie finding Laura online,
Laura had begun to loosen her hold on her secrets.
She revealed the truth about having given up a child
for adoption one day while she and Jean were meeting
(36:53):
with their attorney to discuss their wills. Shortly thereafter, she
told two out of three of her sons, the ones
who lived nearby. She didn't want to risk the chance
that one day they might find out after she was gone.
She also blurted out the story to one of her
best friends as they were taking a long walk in
San Diego. It reminds me of a favorite quote from
(37:15):
the Scottish explorer W. H. Murray. When you are committed,
the universe moves too. Now. She tells all three sons
about Jamie that they're in touch. Each of them has
a slightly different reaction, though ultimately all are supportive. Laura
begins to tell her inner circle of friends, and with
each telling there's a burst of energy and joy, a celebration,
(37:39):
a liberation and unburdening of a secret shame carried for
a lifetime. And once she shares her secret, the floodgates
of memories start opening up. I started in the middle
of the night, but remember the names of the girls,
(38:00):
were sitting outside with my book or my magazine. I
would remember sitting in the guy we're eating with them,
and all the you know things we did. We were
allowed to walk around the neighborhood, they were allowed to
My parents came over a few times and took me
(38:20):
for the afternoon, and things like that began to just
like flood my memory. I could see him. I would
always imagine him the way I would see him in
my memory. But I would think about him. It was
always a baby, of course, and all of a sudden
I could remember holding him. I could remember the weight
(38:42):
of his body, um, this little body in my arms.
And that's something. I felt so happy when I tell
this story, because I want people to know that it's okay.
It's okay that we remember these things. It's anything, it's
it's the best thing in the room for us to
be able to talk about it, because then it actually
(39:04):
makes us understand ourselves. And and I found a forgiveness
for that girl that I didn't even realize I was
holding this all against her. And it's like all of
a sudden, I understood myself by finding him, for him
finding me, I hustled down myself. And then Jamie tells
(39:25):
Laura that he wants to meet her. That will come
the next day, fly from New Orleans to San Diego.
I wasn't nervous wreck because when I said when I'm coming,
he said tomorrow. I am a fellow here. I was
at ance for the girlfriend one of my deart's friends,
telling her she's crying. I'm telling her the story, and
he texts me. I jumped up from the launch and
(39:48):
I go, you know what I have to get to
the home. I drun by Trader Joe's. I have to
get stuff hooked cooked. Um, I gotta clean the house.
I mean, there's got here over the but you know,
I'm just and she's like, calmed down, He's not coming
till tomorrow, and I said, no, no, we have to leave.
I text my husband he's with fishing buddies, and I'm like,
he's coming tomorrow. And he said, oh my god, okay,
I'm leaving right now. I don't know what we thought
(40:10):
we're gonna do. But I rushed home. You know, just
make sure everything's say before him in the guest room
and I give a sign saying alcophone way waited. I
don't think anything. So ever, then that expruciating and it
was really long driveway. I hear this supercar coming up
the driveway. I'm trying to be at calm, like I'm
(40:32):
gonna be like hi. So when he walks in the
depart I run out the door and run towards him,
and he of course stopped in his tracks and puts
his arms around me. And it was beautiful. It was
like hugging any of my signs. The way he stopped
(40:56):
the way he just did which me, and there was
no shyness. It was like we had known each other forever.
It was like any of my son's coming home, and
it was wonderful. We came in the house, we were
like glue to each other, jeans crying, kind of crying.
(41:17):
We sat and we talked, and we've never left each
other's side. I never cooked anything in the way that
two days he was here. Six months before the evening
when her email pinned and she looked down to see
the words a parent child match. Laura had written a
(41:40):
letter to her seventeen year old self, that lost, shamed, shunned,
pregnant girl who wasn't even supposed to reveal her own name.
The letter was meant to be a reckoning with the past,
but it has since taken on a life of its own,
becoming a talisman, a wish and agreement between Laura and
(42:01):
the universe that somehow exists in the past, present, and
future all at once. This letter is both an ending
to Laura's story and the beginning. April twenty there, Zaura,
I know that you're facing one of the worst chapters
in your life, and I have come back to you
(42:22):
from the future to let You know, my dear girl,
that this two shill paths you are a survivor. Hold
your head. I you have nothing to be ashamed. That
you are a dutiful spirit and give to human being.
It's so much to give. I know that your dreams
are still possible and that your life ahead will be
(42:42):
fulfilling beyond your wildest dreams. Although today you think you
are unworthy, Soon you will move away. You will move
across the country and reinvent yourself. You will become the
mother's three more amazing son and too marvelous extra children
through an incredible marriage to the love of your life,
your knight and shine the armor, your soul mate. Eventually
(43:06):
will become from the eatistics of our grandchildren. There will
be the backbone that a good mother and a grandmother
is for her family. Some of the lovely surprises will
come your way, and it's time softens like you are
going through right now. You will one day forgive and
love your parents again. You will come to terms the
(43:27):
way this loss of your son happened. You will understand
the grief and loss that they too endured. Yes, you
will always born your secret son. Not a day will
pass that you do not. But one day you will
be able to talk about him and write his and
your story, and then you will say that yes, you
(43:48):
are still loved and most importantly, you will learn to
love yourself again. You deserve this. I adore you, your
older self, Laura bar I'd like to thank my guest
(44:13):
Laura Angle for sharing her story with us today. You
can find out more about Laura at Laura l Angle
dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production.
Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. Also a special thanks to producer Derek Clements
(44:35):
on this episode. If you have a family secret you'd
like to share, you can get in touch with us
at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and
you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fam
Secrets Pod. That's fam Secrets Pod. For more about my
(44:55):
book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. Boy you gonna
bed my baby? Whisper A little wrap on me, my
baby
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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