Woman Searches for Son
The Civil Rights Movement and second-wave Women’s Liberation marked an era in the 1960s fraught with unrest and protests with the purpose of giving a voice to the oppressed. But there was no voice for 15-year-old Darlene Mason when she lost her son five days after she gave birth to him. There was no funeral. There was no cemetery she could visit and grieve. Instead, there was a room smaller than her bathroom where she had five minutes to say goodbye to him. Nurses told her that her son would be adopted and raised by a married couple, the husband a lawyer. The unmarried Mason would never see her son again.
For more than three decades Mason had no other choice but to accept her son was gone. Then, in 1996 when her kids were grown she began the search for her son. She has been looking ever since.
According to the Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative, founded by Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh, Mason is part of a period from 1940 to 1970 where millions of unmarried women had children given up for adoption to married couples. Many mothers were unaware of their rights, and with little support from their families, they felt as if they had no choice.
Mason also had no support from her father, and her mother died five years ago. Her father physically and sexually abused her. In the spring of 1964 when Mason of Easton, Pennsylvania first found out she was pregnant, her worst fear was telling her father.
“I was scared to death,” said Mason of telling her father. “I knew I was going to get a beating.”
Mason found solace in a friend the night she found out she was pregnant, and decided to stay with her until she gathered the courage to tell him. Her friend persuaded her to call her father.
“I don’t care what she does, just as long as she gets married,” Mason’s father told her friend.
Even though prune juice was the only item in their refrigerator, and Mason and her sisters slept on the floor taking turns sharing the heater, and she wore shoes she found in a dumpster, Mason decided not to marry. Her father decided to put her in a foster home. She stayed there until the last few months of her pregnancy.
Mason went from the foster home to Booth Memorial Hospital, a maternity home no longer in existence that provided services for unwed mothers and was operated by The Salvation Army.
“When I got pregnant, this was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing,” Mason said. “I was the first girl to get pregnant at 15 in Easton.”
On December 19th, Mason gave birth to her son, not realizing she wouldn’t get to keep him.
“I thought we were going to [separate] foster homes,” Mason said. “When you’re in a situation like that and you have no family you worry about today.”
Mason hoped she and her son would eventually stay with her older sister and brother-in-law in Fort Dix, NJ. Instead, her father gave permission for her baby to be adopted.
Two months after the birth, Mason and her father went to court, though Mason wasn’t sure what the court date was for and was unaware of what was going on. She said she wasn’t informed of a revocation period, the six month grace period until the adoption could be legalized and she could reclaim her son.
“I didn’t want to give him up,” Mason said. “I looked at every baby carriage that walked past me.”
Mason wanted to look for her son throughout her life, but was unsure of the situation she would be walking into if she did find him.
“My husband and I every now and then would discuss it,” Mason said. “We felt it wasn’t the right time because the kids were little.”
Mason decided to wait until her children were grown to find her son because if she found him, she didn’t know if their family would be ready to take him in.
Now 61-year-old Darlene Mason lives in a quiet neighborhood next to her daughter, Tammy Fenstermacher.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter,” Mason said.
Mason told Fenstermacher she had another brother when her daughter was 11.
“I didn’t want her to think her mom slept around at 15,” Mason said. “What she thought meant more to me because I didn’t want to hurt her.”
But Fenstermacher hopes to find her brother someday too, and has joined her mother in the search.
Fenstermacher printed a list of everyone born in the U.S. the same day her brother was born in hopes of writing those people. The list was thousands of pages long, so she narrowed the search and printed a list of everyone born in Pennsylvania then. She posted an advertisement in the lost and found section of Craigslist, and joined groups in search of loved ones.
“You’re banging your head against the wall because you don’t know if he was given his real birth date, you don’t know if he knows he’s adopted, or if he’s alive,” said Fenstermacher.
Mason contacted all branches of the military, and got a copy of the voter’s registration for Northampton for everyone who was born the year her son was born. Fenstermacher and Mason would sit at her kitchen table with their coffee and call the names on the registry one by one.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’m trying to find my son,” Mason would say.
They called every name on the list.
Deputy City Solicitor Craig Alston, from the Department of Human Services, said if an adoptee doesn’t know they’re adopted, or doesn’t want to find their biological parents, there is nothing they can do until the adoptee decides to find them.
“[The parents] are sort of fish swimming upstream,” said Alston. “The child, when they become adults, has the right to go back and find out who their parents are, the parents typically don’t.”
In Pennsylvania, adoption files are closed, meaning that both parties have to consent for the file to be opened, something Mason has already consented to.
“He can walk into the courthouse and get the adoption file opened immediately,” Mason said. “He has to be the one to do it.”
But Fenstermacher and Mason continue their search. On December 19 this year, Fenstermacher will even post “Happy Birthday” on Craigslist in hopes that he might find the post. Still, the relentless search is taking a toll on Fenstermacher.
“I honestly believe with all my heart that if I’ve exhausted everything, I’m not sure I’m supposed to find him,” Fenstermacher said.
Mason said one reason she wants to find her son is to let him know her medical history. There is no cure for the hereditary kidney disease prevalent in her family.
If Mason is reunited with her son, she also wants her son to know he wasn’t unwanted.
“I want him to know the truth before I die, that he just wasn’t thrown away,” Mason said. “It’s been 46 years and he’s still in my heart.”
