What’s In a Name?

What's your name? Simple question. For some, there’s no simple answer. I just happen to be one of those people.

I was adopted. I’ve always known I was adopted. My parents never made a secret of it; they’d told me so, and declared how lucky I’d been to have been loved enough to have been chosen. After Dean was born, they wanted more children, but didn’t want a repeat of what had happened, so they looked to adoption for an answer.

Karen came first. I followed 23 months later. Not exactly; my parents collected me at 3 months, after all the paperwork had been finalized. My Great Aunt went along for the ride. Once she heard what my parents were about, when passing through North Bay, she dropped everything, told Frank where she was going, and tagged along. She was one of the first in my family to hold me, and always doted on me, evermore, always a wonderful sensation, that sort of embracing love. Everyone in my greater family knew, knows, and it had never been an issue for anyone, so far as I knew. I’m David: son, brother, grandchild, nephew, cousin, and now uncle and husband.

So, I’ve always known, and never thought twice about it. I had a home, parents, family. I never once felt the need to go in search of my birth parents

One day my parents, my mother specifically, came to the conclusion that the house on Hart Street was too big for them. It had served them well for years, and had even been added to, constructing a sizable living room out back, replete with an almost wall width stone fireplace. I loved that fireplace.

Especially at Christmastime, logs crackling, before cable TV had made real fires irrelevant.

But Karen had long since moved on, and although I was still in residence, waiting year by year for the axe of the economic downturn that never seemed to fall, my father had not been so lucky. Dad had been laid off from Caterpillar Equipment while I was still at school and it had taken him some time to find further suitable employment, before finding it with Cambrian Welding Supplies. The years of economic disparity had taken its toll, and Mom said that they were getting older, the house was too big for three people, too big for her to clean, and it was costing them too much. It was time to move somewhere smaller and more affordable.

House hunting began. Packing began, as well, not terrible quickly, at first. There were yard sales, open houses.

I mentioned that it was probably time for me to move out and get my own place now that they too were making a change, but they convinced me that it would be good for me to move with them, to continue to save my money, that I might lose everything were I to be laid off, that they still had need of my rent, and a host of other reasons. Inertia took hold and I didn’t leave. I ought to have, but I didn’t. I’d grown too comfortable, and too complacent since moving back in with my parents. Food prepared for me, laundry done for me; a few chores here and there. Aside from arrested development, it seemed a sweet deal at the time.

There wasn’t any rush at first. But once the new house was found, and an offer tendered, packing began in earnest. I found my parents in quiet, but intense discussion over a large brown business envelope on the dining room table.

“They’re his,” my father was saying. “He should have them.”

My mother was not as convinced as he was of that fact.

My father called me over. He pointed to the envelope on the table. “These are yours,” he said.
My adoption papers. I gazed at the old envelope for what seemed ages but was actually only mere seconds.

My father opened the envelope for me and began to spread the papers out on the table.
I sat and leafed through them, noting specific points, names, and dates, here and there.
Birth records: born Grace Hospital in Ottawa, December 19, 1964 to a young woman, age 21, single, a girl, actually. No father given.

I was stunned. I really didn’t know what to say. 

The rest was important and inconsequential. Baptismal records, medical history, church records. I leafed through them again, and carefully set them back in the envelope when I was done.
I saw trepidation in my parent’s faces.

“Well,” was all I could think of to say at first.

They told me what I’d heard hundreds of times before, that I was loved, that I was lucky, and that I’d been chosen, that I had parents. All true.

I told them not to worry, that I knew all that.

But it was the first time I’d actually seen the birth records, and adoption records. It was the first time I’d ever seen my birth name, and my birth mother’s name. Those new old names had somehow unsettled my identity. Who was I? Where did I come from? How did I come to be? Was I missed? Did anyone wonder about me? Had anyone tried to find me? Was it worth my trying to find them? Would they want me to? Those unvoiced questioned rose up and were immediately pushed aside by the next in sequence. I was trying to process; not successfully, I might add.

I was still in a bit of a funk when I entered Casey’s that Friday night. I must have looked distracted and vacant, because Janice Kauffman and Cathy Walli asked me what was wrong, so I told them.

“I just saw my ‘real’ name,” I said. “My mother’s name was Gloria.”

I paused for a moment. They didn’t interrupt me.

“Apparently, I’m David Gary Kilmartin.”

I had no idea what that meant. Was it supposed to mean anything at all?