As an 18-year old, Mary Ann Geiger found herself pregnant and the father was no longer in the picture. She had decided to keep the child, and felt it best to keep her pregnancy to herself for as long as possible. Fortunately, it was the 1970's and wearing a poncho all winter long (to hide any visible signs of pregnancy) didn't seem suspicious. After she was 6-months along she finally told her parents about the situation. Her father wanted to keep the matter quiet so it wouldn't hurt his career with the FAA, so he sent Mary Ann off to a "unwed mothers" home in Memphis. A few months later, on July 8th, I was born. She never got to see me as a baby. The name "John Geiger" that I mentioned in a previous blog entry was actually given to me by the State of Tennessee (kind of a "John Doe" situation). She had a name chosen, but I'm keeping that to myself for now. :)
Six weeks later, Mary Ann went to court to sign the adoption papers, legally giving custody to the Hunters. Harold and Marilyn Hunter picked me up at the Tennessee Baptist Children's Home around the same time. She never knew who was taking custody and the Hunters never knew who had given birth to their new child. But she knew I had a good home and, after some time, made some degree of peace with the situation, but always hoped we would get to meet someday. She had no other children, so there are no siblings for me to meet.
When Mary Ann was 20, her parents divorced and her mother remarried to a man named Michael who became a true father to Mary Ann. Some years later she met and married Gunner Beery and they have been a happily married couple ever since, with their (currently) nine dogs. They have traveled the world and have the photos to prove it! They seem to be a genuinely happy couple and currently live in Longs, SC.
Mary Ann was able to give me some good news about the family medical history, namely that there are no serious inheritable medical conditions to speak of with the exception of the thyroid condition with which I had already been diagnosed.
One of the unexpected things I have discovered as a side effect of my searching out this information and getting in touch with Mary Ann has been a more sure sense of self. I was talking to my friend David Price the other day about how I feel more "comfortable in my own skin" (for lack of a better phrase) since I started this process. In talking, we came to the conclusion that adopted kids have an inherent fear of rejection just because of their past. I think this is true even when you have a healthy home life growing up and good relationships with other peers. It's just something that nags at you under the surface. Now that the veil has been lifted on everything, I've felt a certain weight lift... a weight I'm not sure I even knew was there before.
So, for me, I'm finding this to be a very healthy experience, and I feel like I pursued this at just the right time too. God is good, and His timing is perfect.
So I guess the question is, what's next? Well, we continue to share emails and photos and, at some point meet up. I hope that can happen sometime in the next year, but we'll have to see how things pan out. Next year is going to be a big year for us and traveling might be hard, but that's for another blog post. I'll close out this post with a few photos of Mary Ann over the years. Thanks again to my friends for all the prayers and support as I go through this process.
-chadley
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