11.

An End to the Downward Spiral

For much of the next seven years my career, and my family life,

continued to suffer. For a long time the people around me—even those
closest to me—weren’t sure what was causing the problem. But gradually
—through remarks I’d make almost in passing—Holley and my sisters
put the pieces together.
Finally, on an early morning walk on a South Carolina beach during a
family vacation in July 2007, Betsy and Phyllis brought up the topic.
“Have you thought about writing another letter to your birth family?”
Phyllis asked.
“Yes,” Betsy said. “Things might have changed by now, you never
know.” Betsy had recently told us she was thinking of adopting a child
herself, so I wasn’t totally surprised that the topic had come up. But all
the same, my immediate response—mental rather than verbal—was: Oh
no, not again! I remembered the immense chasm that had cracked open
beneath me after the rejection I’d faced seven years earlier. But I knew
Betsy and Phyllis’s hearts were in the right place. They knew I was
suffering, they’d finally figured out why, and they wanted—rightly—for
me to step up and try to fix the problem. They assured me that they would
travel this road with me—that I wouldn’t be taking this journey alone, as
I had done before. We were a team.
So in early August 2007, I wrote an anonymous letter to my birth
sister, the keeper of the gate on the matter, and sent it to Betty at the
Children’s Home Society of North Carolina to forward along:

Dear    Sister,

I   am  interested  in  communicating   with    you,    our brother and our

parents.    After   a   long    talk    with    my  adoptive    family  sisters and

mother  about   this,   their   support and interest    rekindled   my  wanting