08:21:00
Teresa Stinson said she
had spent her whole life wondering who her birth mother was and why she was
given up for adoption 47 years ago.
But what she didn’t know
until recently was that her birth mother had been searching for her for
decades.
Christine “Chris” Shirley,
now 66 years old, had often wondered what had happened to her baby girl.
“I gave up hope as the
years went on, because I thought, ‘well, when she was in her 30s surely she
would want to know ... who her birth parents were,’” Shirley told ABC News'
“Nightline.” “And in her 40s ... I was giving up hope.”
But it was her daughter,
Teresa, who found her first.
In December 2013, a bill
was passed in Ohio that opened adoption records between 1964 and 1995, allowing
400,000 adoptees born in the state a chance to request their birth certificate
for the first time ever.
The new bill made Ohio the
newest state to allow adoptees to have access to their original birth
certificates.
Birth parents were given a
one year period to request that their name be redacted from the birth
certificate. Once the period expired, adoptees could request their birth
certificates. Currently, only 12 states have open adoption records laws.
Betsie Norris of the Adoption Network Cleveland fought for over two decades to unseal
the adoption records in Ohio.
“It’s been surreal,”
Norris told “Nightline.” “When the bill finally passed after it having so many
times that it went down in flames ... it finally sunk in that this is actually
really, really, really happening.”
Two of those adoptees were
Teresa Stinson, 47, and her sister Vanessa Navis, 44, who were both adopted by
the same couple and grew up in Middlebranch, Ohio.
Both came from different
birth parents and said they had a happy childhood, but always knew they were
adopted and had questions.
“Just millions of
questions,” Teresa said. “Where did I come from? Did my birth mother ever think
about me?”
When her adopted mother
told Teresa that her birth mother loved her but couldn’t take care of her,
Teresa said it was difficult for her to take in.
“Even as a young child ...
I so internalized that and it became a point that I had a really bad
self-image, and I was never good enough,” she said.
But it wasn’t until last
month after the new law in Ohio went into effect that she had the first
opportunity to find her birth mother because the records were sealed before.
Teresa, now married with
two kids, also never thought that her birth mother would be looking for her all
these years.
“It was easier for me to
believe that I wasn’t good enough,” she said. “It would almost be too painful
for me to hope, to have that hope that, ‘gosh, she might be out there looking
for me.’”
When the law passed,
Teresa applied for her original birth certificate -- she was issued a new one
when she was adopted that included her birth date but not who her birth parents
were.
Meanwhile, her sister
Vanessa started looking online and found the first clue to Teresa’s past in a
post on an adoption registry website for birth mothers looking for daughter
given up for adoption.
“I came across this
adoption registry website and I thought ... ‘I’ll type in Teresa’s birth
date,’” Vanessa said. “And then on that registry was her birth mother’s name
and that she had registered in 2001. ... I just said, ‘hey, I think I found
your birth mother,’ and she’s like, ‘what?’”
The post revealed that Teresa’s
birth mother had attended Lake High School more than 40 years ago -- the same
school where Teresa’s son was now a student.
So, Teresa and her husband
went to Lake High School to look through old yearbooks from 1964 to 1967,
hoping to find an old portrait of her birth mother.
“The first thing I wanted
to do is look at pictures and see kind of what their lives were like in high
school and see if I can glean anything from that, see if I was maybe really ...
like her, if we had anything in common,” Teresa said.
But until she had her
birth certificate and a name, Teresa couldn’t confirm that the photos she was
seeing in the faded black-and-white pages of the old yearbooks showed her birth
mother.
When she did finally
receive her birth certificate, Teresa chose to wait and open it while attending
a support group meeting for adoptees.
Seeing her original birth
certificate for the first time, tears started rolling down Teresa’s face.
She learned she had been
named Teresa, pronounced "Ter-ESS-a," by her adoptive parents, and
her birth mother, then Christina Lewis, whose name she was also learning for
the first time, had named her Teresa Lynn, pronounced "Ter-EESE-a,"
but with the same spelling.
Teresa said her adoptive
parents had no idea what name her birth mother had given her.
In seeing her birth name
for the first time, Teresa said, “I’m a person of faith and I think this is
totally God’s plan, that, I feel like it’s a little wink from him and he’s
saying, ‘listen, I have a plan for your life and I’m just going to show you
this has been your name all along.’”
And, she added, “It
confirmed that I knew my birth mother’s name, which is great. It’s proof that
I’m real.”
Knowing her birth mother’s
name, Teresa was able to track down her phone number and called her the day
after opening her birth certificate. Her birth mother was now Chris Shirley,
and she had been waiting for this phone call for 47 years.
“I talked to her for about
15 minutes. She told me that she never wanted to give me up,” Teresa said.
“That was really cool to hear that.”
Shortly after that first
phone call, Teresa and Chris, who now lived in Orlando, arranged to meet for
the first time at Chris’s house. Both were incredibly nervous.
“The last time I saw her,
I looked through a glass window and I saw her little fingers and part of her
head,” Chris said. “The last thing I said to her was, ‘I love you baby girl,’
and I walked away and that was it. ... I feel a lot of guilt because I wish I
had kept her no matter what, no matter how hard it had been, but it didn’t work
out that way.”
Upon seeing each other for
the first time, Teresa and Chris shared silence more than words at first,
hugging for what never seemed like long enough.
Although more than 40
years had passed, for Chris, 1967 has always played strongly in her mind. She
said she and Teresa’s birth father were childhood sweethearts. He was her
escort on the homecoming court.
She was just 17 years old
when she found out she was pregnant.
“[I] wanted to get
married. It didn’t work out,” Chris said. “I didn’t want to give her up. I just
didn’t want to.”
Back then, it was very
shameful for a teenager to be unwed and pregnant, and Chris said she was sent
to a home for unwed mothers and stayed there for five months until she gave birth.
But she still remembered the day she went into labor on Oct. 17, 1967.
“I was by myself,” Chris
said. “I remember waking up at one point and having about 12 nurses at the
bottom of my feet watching the delivery for educational purposes, I guess, but
I do remember afterwards, my dad came in and kissed me on the forehead, but
during actual labor, nobody was with me.”
Afterwards, Chris said she
wasn’t allowed to hold her new baby.
“I don’t know why,” she
said. “I guess they didn’t want that bonding between the mother and a child.”
Chris went on to later
marry and have more children, two sons and a daughter, but she said not a day
went by that she didn’t think about Teresa.
Chris has now been married
for 45 years and said she told her husband from the beginning that she always
wanted to find the daughter she had given up.
“[The family] all knew
about it,” she said. “But I never stopped thinking about her, even though I had
three children of my own.”
When Chris was pregnant
with one of her sons, she said was due to give birth around the same time that
Teresa had been born, so she said she asked the doctor to induce early so that
her son’s birthday would be different than Teresa’s.
Jimmy was born on Oct. 15,
Chris said. “I didn’t want it [to be] the same date. ... I just felt like I
wanted to save that date special for her. ... I wanted it to be her day.”
“I felt guilt all the
time, even though I had another daughter,” she continued. “I felt like God
blessed me with three children, but I left one behind.”
Hearing Chris’ story was
emotional for both women, and their reunion now was bittersweet, joyous to have
finally found each other and be together again, but hard to relive the years of
pain of leaving Teresa behind. But, Teresa said for the first time, she finally
felt “complete.”
“This is really funny
because I feel validation for my personality, I see where I got my
personality,” Teresa said. “It’s weird, same mannerisms.”
Mother and daughter would
also learn that they shared a lot in common. They both like the same foods and
blue flowers. They both are claustrophobic and enjoy gardening.
“When we met, it was like
she was never gone,” Teresa said.
ABC News reached Teresa's
birth father and when asked for comment, he said that he was happy she connected
and that his family has been thinking about her for years.
As Teresa and her birth
mother start this new chapter, Teresa’s sister Vanessa was inspired to search
for her own birth mother and has started researching her past.
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