PeteShort Story: 'Identity Crisis' by P. S. Wall
February 4th 2008 02:58
A Sixteen-year old Doug Baker saw sparrows chirping in a deafening chorus, particles of dust floated surreal in a shaft of light lancing the side-window. He just sat there, mouth agape. He was adopted!
Before him, a picture of refinement in a silk kimono and matching slippers, stood his mother Ellen—the woman he thought was his only mother for the last sixteen years—telling him so. Doug’s pubescent mind went into overload: Who? Why? How? In the end, he burst into tears and run into his bedroom. The world as he knew it was over.
The initial shock of that revelation took about an hour to coalesce into two burning questions: “Why did they wait so long to tell me. Who then are my birth parents?” That’s when Doug left the suffocating space of his room to confront the people no longer/never were flesh and blood. He recalls standing before his adoptive parents with the strangest feeling inside, somehow a different person.
His father John Tomas Baker, successful property developer and executive, was a hard, no-nonsense type. However, his mother answered his first question. “It was for your own good son,” she said, “so you could grow up without the confusion of having two sets of parents.”
Rattled, Doug accepted this peculiar logic, only to analyse it to death later in life. Then the second question was answered and his world shook again.
“Your birth name is Peters,’ his mother continued. “ Twenty years ago both your parents worked for us in a hotel we owned in Sydney. They desperately needed money. We desperately wanted a child.” Then she pointed to an aged and worn document lying on the table before her. “There is your birth certificate.”
Trembling hands held the Certificate that day as Doug read in stunned amazement that he was child nine of ten, with four brothers and five sisters!
Nine months on from that life-changing event, Doug Baker was an emotionally strung-out teenager grappling with a whole new take on life. On the one hand trying to muster the courage to search for his birth family and with any luck, have so many other questions answered. On the other, wishing it was all just a bad dream.
Nevertheless, life went on, and the time arrived, as it does for most teenage boys and girls, to learn to drive a motor vehicle. It was on a drizzling cold day in June after weeks of tuition that Doug headed to the Roads and Traffic Authority in town to take the final test. His recall of the short, balding officer with spectacles, who surveyed him from behind the counter, was clear. He said something close to: ‘I will need to see some ID’.
Doug came prepared, handing over a bank passbook, school report, and birth certificate. The latter displayed a different name than the former two of course, but he naturally thought the legalities of the adoption would be long sorted.
The RTA officer had surveyed the documents with a questioning look.
“I was adopted,” Doug remembers telling him.
The officer glanced back to the documents and scratched his left ear. Then he told Doug to wait while he consulted his supervisor. The problem, Doug came to realise, was that you could tell people until hoarse you are adopted, but without adoption or change-of-name papers, it appeared like you had two names!
This name-anomaly played on Doug’s mind, and by the time he’d returned to the family’s beachside home that day, the absent documents had grown into an issue. ‘They knew I would have needed them, surely?’ He’d fumed, shaking water from his hair in a frustrated arc. The situation blown out of proportion by a nine-month old ball of inexplicable anger lodged in his gut.
Both parents sat reading newspapers in the front room, when their adopted son suddenly appeared before them dripping water onto the wooden floor. No hellos, Doug got straight to the point:
“They asked did I have any adoption or change-of-name papers,” he blurted. “Have you got them?”
His parents looked at each other for a moment, before his father placed the paper on the floor and rose from his cane-wicker chair with a sigh. He then strode toward the office, bidding Doug to follow.
After rattling through file-draws for a couple of minutes, his father scratched his head, saying, “I think I recall the adoption papers being held by our solicitor, Mervyn Farley.”
Months later, Doug was to discover Farley had been dead for some six years or so. Whether the solicitor had lost the papers, didn’t finalise the adoption, or just plain forgot, Doug was to eventually conclude that if there were ever any papers, he would never see them. Nevertheless, a Learner’s Permit was granted that day back in 1986. After making some calls, the RTA supervisor accepted the bank passbook and school report, step one in the creation of a legal ID.
It’s funny how life works. You can bury stuff and carry on, only to have it resurface riding the back of another momentous event. In the years that followed this adoption revelation, it was rarely a problem in everyday life. Doug kept the ball-of-anger locked away; naively thinking it would stay that way.
He was happy to go on as if nothing had ever happened. However, Doug realises now what a numbskull he was, for it is in the momentous events, the ones where a line can be drawn through your life to show the path you’ve taken, do unresolved issues raise their ugly head.
Admittedly, he was remiss in attempting marriage before contacting blood relatives. But hey, it was overwhelming, to think you are the biological child of two people for sixteen years only to be told you’re not. With the added realisation, he was not an only child, but has four brothers and five sisters! Anyway, after a twelve-month relationship, Doug asked the lovely Suzie Wilks to marry him. Suzie said ‘yes’ and it was on a cloudless day in November 1992 that they became man and wife. Then, a mere two months down the track after what had developed into a pattern of arguments, Suzie said she would leave him if he didn’t deal with his anger problem. Finally, his days of sidestepping the issue were over.
The search for his biological parents began in the Sydney White Pages. Turns out the name Peters is not that common, and within the hour the telephone number of his elder-brother Richard was one of those Doug called.
After a shock greeting, it happens that Richard had tried to contact Doug years before when his birth mother was still alive, only to be told “that wasn’t the agreement.” You know, to grow up without the confusion of having two sets of parents, only to be blown-out-of-the-water with it as a teenager.
Anyway, after some excited chatter about family matters, Richard had said, “look, everyone will want to meet you of course, you just leave it to me and I’ll get back to you with a plan.” His brother was ex-army, an organiser—and sounded like one.
That was a Tuesday. On the Thursday, Richard called back to say everything was arranged and the family was dying to meet him. He then gave Doug an address and after extracting a promise to attend, said: “see ya on Saturday.”
Words cannot describe the emotion that coursed through Doug over the next two days. First, he told his adoptive parents what was happening, which met an uneasy silence. He then asked would they like to attend. They declined. Doug realised this must be hard on them, but for the life of him didn’t know what else to say.
Then Saturday arrived. Doug or Suzie for that matter will never forget pulling up at the address. “Crikey!” His wife had exclaimed with a vigorous shake of her bobbed, blond hair. “There’s a bloody cricket-team waiting for us!”
Doug just sat in stunned silence, staring at this large group…of total strangers!
Events took on a weird, mirror-dimensional aspect after the initial greeting of hugs and kisses were dispensed, like Doug Baker had somehow led two separate lives and they’d just converged. His unease clearly evident, it wasn’t long before Doug’s biological father came up and whispered in his ear: “Come on, let’s go somewhere where we can talk. You must have a million questions.”
Doug’s brother had arranged for the meeting to take place at the family’s holiday home, a modest blue and red-roofed fibro house near Currajong on the South Coast of New South Wales. His biological father’s name was Alan William Peters. “But call me Al,” he’d said, leading Doug to a patio-area at the rear of the house.
When the two men were seated, either side of a white plastic outdoor-setting, Doug took the time to closely examine the man who was his real father. Around six-feet tall, he noticed Al had the same square-jaw and grey-blue eyes. Yes, the similarities were unmistakable; the question Doug had asked himself for many years in the mirror ‘why don’t I look like my (adoptive) father?’ was now answered.
“Well,” Al scratched his balding head. “Where to begin.”
Doug knew exactly where to begin. He’d made a mental list of the questions closest to his heart over the preceding two days. “How about you start with mum,” he said. The word he’d only ever used to describe his adoptive mother somehow emerging of its own volition.
Al breathed a sigh, for he had waited for this moment with an anxious heart. Then, with a look that spoke volumes of the love he still held for his deceased wife, leant back in the chair and said: “Ah, our darling Joan. She was an amazing woman really. Strong, and yet soft. You know, she had a funny way of showing her affection though,” he said with a chuckle. “Of course, she loved you children very much….”
The last part of that sentence yanked the lid clean off Doug’s buried anger. He remembers the tension, fighting down emotion, then in something like the tone of a gunslinger calling the draw, said: “Well why the hell was I adopted-out then?”
A look of distress shadowed Al’s face, before he regrouped and said, “Well, things were really bad for us before you were born son. You don’t understand what….”
“Understand!” Doug had growled. “What, that I was some sort of commodity sold at market!” He was standing by this time, glaring down on his biological father.
The next few minutes, before calling a taxi and collecting Suzie on the way out, passed in an embarrassing-blur. According to Doug’s observant wife, he made a “total ass” out of himself, saying to his father that he’d wished this had never happened and they had stuffed-up his life.
It took weeks for Doug to ring up and apologise, the search for answers had delivered more questions than he could handle and it took time to digest the enormity of it all. It was acceptance that proved the key to dissolving his anger---what’s done is done.
In the end, Doug realised that a birth certificate can only define where he came from, not who he is. Only he can do that.
Before him, a picture of refinement in a silk kimono and matching slippers, stood his mother Ellen—the woman he thought was his only mother for the last sixteen years—telling him so. Doug’s pubescent mind went into overload: Who? Why? How? In the end, he burst into tears and run into his bedroom. The world as he knew it was over.
The initial shock of that revelation took about an hour to coalesce into two burning questions: “Why did they wait so long to tell me. Who then are my birth parents?” That’s when Doug left the suffocating space of his room to confront the people no longer/never were flesh and blood. He recalls standing before his adoptive parents with the strangest feeling inside, somehow a different person.
Rattled, Doug accepted this peculiar logic, only to analyse it to death later in life. Then the second question was answered and his world shook again.
“Your birth name is Peters,’ his mother continued. “ Twenty years ago both your parents worked for us in a hotel we owned in Sydney. They desperately needed money. We desperately wanted a child.” Then she pointed to an aged and worn document lying on the table before her. “There is your birth certificate.”
Trembling hands held the Certificate that day as Doug read in stunned amazement that he was child nine of ten, with four brothers and five sisters!
Nine months on from that life-changing event, Doug Baker was an emotionally strung-out teenager grappling with a whole new take on life. On the one hand trying to muster the courage to search for his birth family and with any luck, have so many other questions answered. On the other, wishing it was all just a bad dream.
Nevertheless, life went on, and the time arrived, as it does for most teenage boys and girls, to learn to drive a motor vehicle. It was on a drizzling cold day in June after weeks of tuition that Doug headed to the Roads and Traffic Authority in town to take the final test. His recall of the short, balding officer with spectacles, who surveyed him from behind the counter, was clear. He said something close to: ‘I will need to see some ID’.
Doug came prepared, handing over a bank passbook, school report, and birth certificate. The latter displayed a different name than the former two of course, but he naturally thought the legalities of the adoption would be long sorted.
The RTA officer had surveyed the documents with a questioning look.
“I was adopted,” Doug remembers telling him.
The officer glanced back to the documents and scratched his left ear. Then he told Doug to wait while he consulted his supervisor. The problem, Doug came to realise, was that you could tell people until hoarse you are adopted, but without adoption or change-of-name papers, it appeared like you had two names!
This name-anomaly played on Doug’s mind, and by the time he’d returned to the family’s beachside home that day, the absent documents had grown into an issue. ‘They knew I would have needed them, surely?’ He’d fumed, shaking water from his hair in a frustrated arc. The situation blown out of proportion by a nine-month old ball of inexplicable anger lodged in his gut.
Both parents sat reading newspapers in the front room, when their adopted son suddenly appeared before them dripping water onto the wooden floor. No hellos, Doug got straight to the point:
“They asked did I have any adoption or change-of-name papers,” he blurted. “Have you got them?”
His parents looked at each other for a moment, before his father placed the paper on the floor and rose from his cane-wicker chair with a sigh. He then strode toward the office, bidding Doug to follow.
After rattling through file-draws for a couple of minutes, his father scratched his head, saying, “I think I recall the adoption papers being held by our solicitor, Mervyn Farley.”
Months later, Doug was to discover Farley had been dead for some six years or so. Whether the solicitor had lost the papers, didn’t finalise the adoption, or just plain forgot, Doug was to eventually conclude that if there were ever any papers, he would never see them. Nevertheless, a Learner’s Permit was granted that day back in 1986. After making some calls, the RTA supervisor accepted the bank passbook and school report, step one in the creation of a legal ID.
It’s funny how life works. You can bury stuff and carry on, only to have it resurface riding the back of another momentous event. In the years that followed this adoption revelation, it was rarely a problem in everyday life. Doug kept the ball-of-anger locked away; naively thinking it would stay that way.
He was happy to go on as if nothing had ever happened. However, Doug realises now what a numbskull he was, for it is in the momentous events, the ones where a line can be drawn through your life to show the path you’ve taken, do unresolved issues raise their ugly head.
Admittedly, he was remiss in attempting marriage before contacting blood relatives. But hey, it was overwhelming, to think you are the biological child of two people for sixteen years only to be told you’re not. With the added realisation, he was not an only child, but has four brothers and five sisters! Anyway, after a twelve-month relationship, Doug asked the lovely Suzie Wilks to marry him. Suzie said ‘yes’ and it was on a cloudless day in November 1992 that they became man and wife. Then, a mere two months down the track after what had developed into a pattern of arguments, Suzie said she would leave him if he didn’t deal with his anger problem. Finally, his days of sidestepping the issue were over.
The search for his biological parents began in the Sydney White Pages. Turns out the name Peters is not that common, and within the hour the telephone number of his elder-brother Richard was one of those Doug called.
After a shock greeting, it happens that Richard had tried to contact Doug years before when his birth mother was still alive, only to be told “that wasn’t the agreement.” You know, to grow up without the confusion of having two sets of parents, only to be blown-out-of-the-water with it as a teenager.
Anyway, after some excited chatter about family matters, Richard had said, “look, everyone will want to meet you of course, you just leave it to me and I’ll get back to you with a plan.” His brother was ex-army, an organiser—and sounded like one.
That was a Tuesday. On the Thursday, Richard called back to say everything was arranged and the family was dying to meet him. He then gave Doug an address and after extracting a promise to attend, said: “see ya on Saturday.”
Words cannot describe the emotion that coursed through Doug over the next two days. First, he told his adoptive parents what was happening, which met an uneasy silence. He then asked would they like to attend. They declined. Doug realised this must be hard on them, but for the life of him didn’t know what else to say.
Then Saturday arrived. Doug or Suzie for that matter will never forget pulling up at the address. “Crikey!” His wife had exclaimed with a vigorous shake of her bobbed, blond hair. “There’s a bloody cricket-team waiting for us!”
Doug just sat in stunned silence, staring at this large group…of total strangers!
Events took on a weird, mirror-dimensional aspect after the initial greeting of hugs and kisses were dispensed, like Doug Baker had somehow led two separate lives and they’d just converged. His unease clearly evident, it wasn’t long before Doug’s biological father came up and whispered in his ear: “Come on, let’s go somewhere where we can talk. You must have a million questions.”
Doug’s brother had arranged for the meeting to take place at the family’s holiday home, a modest blue and red-roofed fibro house near Currajong on the South Coast of New South Wales. His biological father’s name was Alan William Peters. “But call me Al,” he’d said, leading Doug to a patio-area at the rear of the house.
When the two men were seated, either side of a white plastic outdoor-setting, Doug took the time to closely examine the man who was his real father. Around six-feet tall, he noticed Al had the same square-jaw and grey-blue eyes. Yes, the similarities were unmistakable; the question Doug had asked himself for many years in the mirror ‘why don’t I look like my (adoptive) father?’ was now answered.
“Well,” Al scratched his balding head. “Where to begin.”
Doug knew exactly where to begin. He’d made a mental list of the questions closest to his heart over the preceding two days. “How about you start with mum,” he said. The word he’d only ever used to describe his adoptive mother somehow emerging of its own volition.
Al breathed a sigh, for he had waited for this moment with an anxious heart. Then, with a look that spoke volumes of the love he still held for his deceased wife, leant back in the chair and said: “Ah, our darling Joan. She was an amazing woman really. Strong, and yet soft. You know, she had a funny way of showing her affection though,” he said with a chuckle. “Of course, she loved you children very much….”
The last part of that sentence yanked the lid clean off Doug’s buried anger. He remembers the tension, fighting down emotion, then in something like the tone of a gunslinger calling the draw, said: “Well why the hell was I adopted-out then?”
A look of distress shadowed Al’s face, before he regrouped and said, “Well, things were really bad for us before you were born son. You don’t understand what….”
“Understand!” Doug had growled. “What, that I was some sort of commodity sold at market!” He was standing by this time, glaring down on his biological father.
The next few minutes, before calling a taxi and collecting Suzie on the way out, passed in an embarrassing-blur. According to Doug’s observant wife, he made a “total ass” out of himself, saying to his father that he’d wished this had never happened and they had stuffed-up his life.
It took weeks for Doug to ring up and apologise, the search for answers had delivered more questions than he could handle and it took time to digest the enormity of it all. It was acceptance that proved the key to dissolving his anger---what’s done is done.
In the end, Doug realised that a birth certificate can only define where he came from, not who he is. Only he can do that.
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