Patti Antonio made the first call in October. She had rehearsed what she was going to say, practicing with her husband and son. She wanted to be careful, polite.
Antonio had a list of four names, three brothers and their sister. She reached one of the brothers first, a man named Jay Peterson of Elbert County.
A call like this isn’t placed without knowing a person can only prepare so much and after that all bets are off. It isn’t undertaken without understanding it will have consequences and that what is sought may be beyond the reach of anyone to give.
“I’ve been doing some genealogy research, and I think I found a link to your family. Is your mother Patricia Davis?” Antonio asked Peterson.
“Yes,” he said.
“I think she’s my birth mother.”
She told him what she knew about Davis.
“No,” he kept saying. “It’s not possible.”
We seek to understand our own natures. How much of me is the sum of my experience? How much is passed through blood, imprinted upon cells, out of reach of circumstance?
Patti Antonio had known since childhood she was adopted. She loved her parents and they loved her, and so it was not the desire for another maternal relationship, some fantasy of a joyful reunion that first compelled her to search for her birth mother. It was 1982, and she and her husband were planning their family.
“I believe my birth mother made a hard choice and gave me the life she thought was best for me,” Antonio says. “But I felt a real strong urge then. I wanted to know my heritage and my genetic background. I wanted to know who gave birth to me.”
Denver Juvenile Court’s adoption division gave her certain “non-identifying information.”
Her biological mother was 24 and of German, Irish and English descent. She was Protestant and had had one year of college. She had curly auburn hair (ah! Antonio thought, so that’s where mine comes from). Her birth mother was 5 feet 4 inches and inclined to freckle, a dental technician who liked to read good fiction.
It was a curious mix of details, but it brought Antonio no closer to finding her birth mother.
Fast-forward 27 years. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled this past April that adoptees born between 1951 and 1967 should be allowed direct access to their birth certificates and adoption files. Antonio was born in January 1956.
With her birth certificate information, she scoured databases to discover her birth mother died in 1988 at 57. (She had asthma, which Antonio also has.) Her biological father had also died. Antonio doesn’t know if he even knew about her.
Antonio learned she was born between her birth mother’s two marriages. She learned that out of those marriages, her mother had four other children, Antonio’s half siblings.
“Was your grandfather a professional cattle showman?” Antonio asked Peterson. “Was your mother a dental tech?”
Yes, yes, Jay Peterson said. “But it’s just not possible.”
“Please think about it,” Antonio said.
Peterson called his sister, Carolina Hermes.
“The timeline is such that there’d only be a year and half between me and her,” Hermes recounts. “So, I didn’t think it could be true either.”
But as the siblings talked, they realized it could be true. Peterson called Antonio back, and Antonio remembers his voice shook. “It is possible, and if you are our sister, we want to welcome you into our family. And if you’re not, we’ll help you find your birth mother.”
Several days later, their older brother compared signatures on their birth certificates. They matched.
Their mother had put a daughter up for adoption and told no one. She kept a secret for 33 years. “For about 10 days, I couldn’t have a coherent thought,” Hermes said. “You know the expression, ‘You can’t put your mind around something.’ Well, this is one of those things.”
Hermes found herself remembering how her mother seemed so sad at times. Was this why? “My mother was a wonderful person,” she says. “I’m sure it almost killed her to give the baby up. But when I think about it, she was already a single mother in the ’50s and to come up having another baby . . . in my mind, it really only made sense that this is what she’d do. She thought she was doing what was best. You have to believe that’s what it was.”
The newfound siblings met recently. They searched one another’s faces for traces of their mother. They shared pictures. “I was prepared for rejection, and I was received with open arms,” Antonio says. “I could not have asked for more welcoming people.”
Hermes says she and her siblings wish Antonio could have known their mother’s warmth and graciousness. They welcome Antonio, she says, because that’s how their mother would have wanted it. That’s the kind of people she raised them to be.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
