Mi Vida Loca aka My Family Story
My sister and I have facts about our family that a lot of other people have - adoption, marriage, affairs, divorce and death but it’s a bit of a crazy combination. It’s an emotional story with lots of ups and downs but here goes. As an FYI, when I say ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ I’m referring to my adopted parents and I refer to my birth parents by their names as that’s just how it’s evolved.
My adoptive parents married in 1962 and after 14 years of trying to have children, they applied with Cincinnati Catholic Social Services to adopt a child in 1976. After a year and a half their phone rang on a Friday morning. It was a case worker from Catholic Social Services saying she had not one, but two babies. 6-week-old twins. They wanted to know if they would be willing to take two babies instead of one. The answer was yes of course, and they spent the weekend running around town, getting everything they would need in order to take us home that very next week.
After our mom passed away I was annoyed with some of the stuff she kept that we found when we cleaned out her house (tax returns from the 80’s?!?) but then I found a TON of stuff related to our adoption - like this. It’s the note she wrote things down on when she got the phone call about us.
My sister and I do not remember when our parents told us we were adopted so I recently asked my Dad and he said it was when we were two. That means at two we were able to understand what it meant, but also young enough to forget the actual conversation. Being adopted became something we just always knew. Our parents told us we were given up because our biological mother loved us and wanted the best for us but knew she couldn’t provide that. Looking back, they did it perfectly. We never felt unloved or had bad feelings toward our birth mother. We had a loving home with our adoptive parents. Our dad ran his own communications business and our mom worked for the business but from home so she could take care of us. We never needed anything and my Dad would agree that our Mom spoiled us.
We always wondered who our birth mother was and knew that was only natural, but we never did anything about it until we were adults. In 2002 our Dad gave us paperwork that he’d had in their safe deposit box that concerned our adoption. The information was very vague but it did have the contact information of where we were adopted through - Catholic Social Services out of Cincinnati. This paperwork sat around our house for awhile until we watched an episode of MTV’s show True Life that was subtitled “I’m Adopted” in February of 2003. The show followed 3 individuals. Two searching for their parents and one woman giving up her baby. The woman giving up her child was beside herself with guilt and grief but knew it was the best thing to do. We wondered - what if our birth mom had feelings like this? And that question is what prompted us to contact the agency in March. To our surprise, they called us back in just a few days - our birth mother had contacted the agency back in 1994! Our adoption was a closed adoption which meant the agency could give no information out until both parties had contacted them. So, since we both now had, they were able to release information. A few days after this news we got an even bigger surprise. After we were put up for adoption, our birth parents, who were not together at the time of our birth, had later reunited and married! We couldn’t believe it. We never in a million years thought we would meet our birth father.
Because we had a closed adoption, this was all the information we had about our birth family growing up. The word ‘alleged’ on this certainly contributed to us thinking that we would never meet our biological father. Also, note the ancestry details on his for later reference.
We traded letters through the agency and found out that our biological parents were currently in the process of moving from Maine to Texas. Our father, Jim, had been married and divorced before he met our mother, Nancy, and had a son from that marriage. Our half-brother was currently living in Texas and about to have his first child. Nancy and Jim were moving to Texas to be closer to him. As they were making the drive they were going to be coming through Cincinnati to visit some of Nancy’s family. This was only a few weeks after this whole thing started so they wanted to know if we were ready to meet them that quickly. Of course we were ready and on April 2, 2003, at age 25, we met our birth parents. It was an experience that seemed both surreal and natural at the same time. A couple of days later we also met our maternal grandmother and an aunt, uncle and cousin on our mom’s side of the family. Nancy is one of six kids and Jim one of eight so our family more than quadrupled overnight. All of our new relatives on both sides of the family have accepted us with open arms. We’ve met a lot of them, traveled with some and even celebrated holidays together. We also found out that twins ran in the family - Jim’s mom was a twin! Despite Jim being one of eight children, he was the only one who had twins! Unfortunately our Grandmas’ twin had already passed away but we did get to meet her and Jim’s father on a visit to Illinois in 2005.
Left: Our first day meeting Nancy & Jim, Right: Our first visit to Texas and meeting our half-brother and his family
As wonderful and new everything was with our biological family, things weren’t going so great with our adopted family. We were well cared for and well loved but it was obvious as we grew older that our parents didn’t have the ideal relationship. They pretty much did their own things when they were both at home. The only thing they did together was to go to our lake house almost every weekend. But even there they kept to themselves. The year after we met Nancy and Jim we were having Thanksgiving dinner with our biological parents in 2004. Jenn and I wanted to know when we’d get our Christmas tree (something we did as a family every year). For some reason, Dad clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Jenn and I felt that it was odd but my mom said she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. However, one week later Dad came to see Jenn and I and we found out why he was acting weird. He told us that he was leaving our Mom. I wasn’t too surprised with the way things had been going but then he completely caught me off guard. He told us that he was leaving our mom for another woman. Earlier in the year, he had gotten back into contact with his high school sweetheart, Joyce. He said he would be leaving the next day to pick her up and bring her back to Ohio. In May 2005 once my parents divorce was final, they got married. A few months later in September, Jenn and I moved to Florida.
Celebrating separate Christmases on a visit to Ohio from Florida in 2006
Our mom did not handle the divorce well. For our entire lives she had low self esteem and was very overweight. She also dealt with depression which became severe after my dad left. She started seeing a therapist (at our request) and began to make noticeable improvements in her mental and physical health. In 2006 she moved out of our family home which she had been reluctant to leave, into a home of her own. However, it was then she stopped seeing a therapist, allowing the depression to come back in to control. Her physical health began to decline and she was in and out of the hospital a lot. In October 2012 we got a call that our mom was back in the hospital. We actually had plans to visit Ohio the following week so we didn’t rush up there as we assumed this would be like all the times before. However, after we arrived, we realized this trip was not like the others. She was doing worse and despite having a DNR, she had changed her mind about that upon admittance and actually had to be resuscitated. Our trip to Ohio had initially been to bring furniture to Florida in a moving truck which had to be back on a certain day. Mom was stable at that point so we left to get it back on time. We stayed the night in a hotel halfway to Florida. The next morning before we even made it to the interstate we got a call from the doctor that we needed to come back. We anxiously finished the drive back to Florida, dropped everything off and went straight back to the airport to return to Ohio. The doctors had put in a temporary tube to assist her breathing when she was admitted, and due to lack of any improvement, it was time for it to be removed. They removed it and soon after, she passed away. Earlier that year I had met the man who would become my husband. Jenn had met her husband abroad in 2010 and the day after my mom went into the hospital for the last time, she got an email from immigration stating that his resident visa was finally approved. He finally arrived in the states less than two months after our mom passed. She never had the chance to meet either of our husbands in person.
With our husbands , Nick and Shane in 2017
Our Dad is still living in Ohio with Joyce. We love spending time with them and our adopted family, but things have never felt quite the same to Jenn and I since the divorce and my mom passing. So we feel fortunate that we have our biological parents in our lives. They are now living in California and we have a wonderful relationship with them. We’ve spent lots of time with them as well as our half brother, his wife and their two wonderful children. My biological parents and adoptive parents did get to meet once before my mom passed away. While my mom was hesitant as she was over protective of us, she told us that she was glad we had them in our lives after the divorce. Our Dad has always been supportive of the relationship with them and Nancy and Jim even visited him and Joyce when they were on a cross country motorcycle trip. In 2016 when Shane and I got married, I was super happy to have all my parents there and I had both of my Dads walked me down the aisle.
My entire adopted family on the left, with our birth parents on the right.
As crazy as that story is, it doesn’t end there with my biological family. An aunt on Jim’s side has always been into genealogy and was an early adopter of Ancestry.com. Last year one of our uncles (also on Jim’s side) joined Ancestry as well. However when he got his results back, they didn’t match his sister’s. The French from our Grandma matched up but the other side did not (remember the ‘Scotch-French’ descent listed on the statistical information sheet we had on our adoption?!). Jim decided he needed to submit his DNA to compare. He got his results back in early May and to everyone’s surprise they didn’t match either his sister OR his brother. Turn out Jim is half French and half Asian - mainly Chinese. 🤯 Nancy and Jim told us this and then didn’t say anything else about it. However, a couple weeks after finding this out, my husband and I were visiting them in California so once we were there, the questions started. None of Jim’s parents are still alive so this is all conjecture at this point. All we do know is what Nancy and Jim told us - and that is that our grandma’s twin was married to a Chinese man...you can speculate from there. So apparently the grandpa we met back in 2005 wasn’t biologically our grandpa. So even though we may not be Partlow by blood, and I’ve legally never had the Partlow name, Jenn and I are Partlows. I feel it’s easy for me to see this because it’s how I feel about my adopted family - I am definitely not a Wallace by blood but I am, and will always be, a Wallace. But Jeannine Wallace-Partlow-Clifford is too long of a name to have😜
