April Martin holds a photo of her reunion with her son, Steven Lape, at her home in Wooster, Ohio. Martin gave up her son for adoption in 1968 and reunited with him with the help of a birthmother's support network. (Michael Chritton/Akron Beacon Journal/MCT)

After a life of pain and regret over giving her baby up for adoption in 1968, April Martin hoped for healing as she attended a Birthmother’s Day ceremony three years ago.

The event, sponsored by Adoption Network Cleveland each year on the day before Mother’s Day, invites area women and their loved ones to light candles, listen to music and poetry, and celebrate the “ripple effect” of their children’s lives by stirring glitter into water.

As she participated in that ritual in 2009, Martin said a silent prayer that one of three letters she had sent to old addresses somehow would find its way to the 41-year-old son she had not seen since birth.

The next day, Martin played a message left on the answering machine in her Wooster, Ohio, home. The words she heard are burned into her memory.

“My name is Steven Lape. I’m looking for April Martin. I believe I’m calling to wish her a happy Mother’s Day.”

Betsie Norris of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who founded Adoption Network Cleveland in 1988 after her own successful search for her birth parents, said she patterned the Birthmother’s Day ceremony after one started in Seattle in 1990.

“Through the process of my search and starting the organization, my heart grew for the journey of birth mothers, whose lives were forever changed by placing or losing their child. Many had no choice. Many were told to never speak of it again and to get on with their lives,” Norris said.

The 32 birth moms registered to participate in the event range in age from their early 20s to their mid-70s.

Many, Norris said, have stories similar to Martin’s: woeful tales of women who never wanted to give their children up but felt coerced by a culture of shame.

Martin was living in Tallmadge, Ohio, when she became pregnant in 1967. She was 20 years old, and though she was engaged to a soldier serving in Vietnam, her mom was opposed to the union.

“To keep her off my back, I let her think we weren’t together and I started dating other people on and off,” Martin said. One of her dates “wouldn’t take no for an answer,” she said, and she was too meek and inexperienced to fend him off. She ended up pregnant.

Martin had a support system of exactly two: her father and a kind gynecologist named Dr. Charles Sinder, “who was so good to me when other people just looked on me as a bad girl,” she said.

But her mother was so ashamed, Martin said, she was admitted to an Akron home for unwed girls. She was made to use the name Susan Hall and wear a wig so she wouldn’t be recognized on the street.

Her mother told friends and family that April was working at the Pentagon as a receptionist. A home for unwed mothers in Washington, D.C., participated in the ruse, collecting letters and postcards from April to family and friends and mailing them back to Ohio with a D.C. postmark.

Painful goodbye

Martin lived in the home on Market Street for five months until the birth of her baby.

She had asked nurses not to tell her the sex of the child, but an unwitting volunteer who fills out birth certificates cheerfully walked into her room “asking for the name of my baby boy.”

“Right then, I wanted to die. It made him so real,” Martin said.

When she finally was set to return home, Martin’s parents stopped by an agency so she could sign final adoption papers. She tried one last time to convince her parents to let her bring the baby home.

“I said, ‘I’ll do anything if you let me keep my child,’” Martin said. But she said her mother threatened her with court action and the adoption agency representative “made it seem I didn’t have any right to keep him,” so she tearfully signed the papers.

Ten years passed, and Martin was overcome with the need to know her son was doing OK.

“I made a call to the adoption agency and asked if I could just know how he was, and I was told, ‘You gave up that right and you are not permitted to know,’” Martin said.

“So I just suffered. And every year on his birthday, Feb. 7, I’d have my own private celebration,” she said.

Martin married and had two daughters, but there was a void that could never be filled.

Emotional discovery

On her son’s 41st birthday three years ago, Martin reached out to Adoption Network Cleveland. Eventually armed with information they found and some unexplainable hunches Martin can only attribute to divine guidance, she ended up at a library in Bellville, south of Mansfield, Ohio, looking through a high school yearbook.

There she found him: Steven Lape.

“The friend who was with me said my face went white, and I dropped the book. I knew that was my son because I was looking at my face,” Martin said.

After Martin returned his Mother’s Day phone call — two days later because she was too overcome with emotion to speak — she arranged to fly to Tampa, Fla., to meet Steven.

“I thought I would cry or have a meltdown, but I just looked at him and hugged him and from that moment on, we’ve had a wonderful relationship,” she said.

Martin, now 65, said for the first time in her life she’s eager to tell her story in the hopes it will help bring other girls who were shamed into silence out of the shadows.

“I paid dearly for my mistake, but I am no longer ashamed,” she said.

That’s Betsie Norris’ hope for all the birth moms and adopted children who turn to her organization for assistance.

Network of support

Norris had a happy ending herself. She had a successful reunion with her birth parents, who married 18 months after she was born and subsequently raised three sons.

But she recalled how her own search was “a very isolating process at the time. There was nowhere to go locally for support.”

After launching the network, Norris continued working as a registered nurse in adolescent medicine and child psychiatry at the Cleveland Clinic while also pursuing a certificate in nonprofit management from Case Western Reserve University.

In 1995, the board of the network she founded hired Norris as a full-time executive director. She oversees a staff of 17 and a budget of $1.2 million.

The network assists others with their searches, promotes openness in adoption and often has to dispel “secrets and lies” surrounding many adoption stories.

“Through the years, the deep secrets brought shame to them and misunderstandings in the wider community of who they are,” Norris said.

The group partners with Cuyahoga County’s Department of Children and Family Services to help get foster children adopted and created a mentoring program for children in foster care.

And for 20 years, it has hosted Birthmother’s Day.

“Some birth mothers tell me that they have known about the ceremony for years but were scared to come,” Norris said. Some thought the ceremony was a celebration of a painful experience, but Norris said it’s really just a time for unity, acknowledgement and healing.

Some have also commented that they don’t like Birthmother’s Day being held separately from Mother’s Day, but Norris said “we believe that their journey is unique and important and is worthy of its own day.”

Source: heraldextra.com