Latest News...
Please take a look at my latest reunion story which will be broadcast on VH1 on Saturday February 25th at 9/8c PM.

http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/vh1_rock_docs/99240/episode_about.jhtml
http://www.me-dmc.com/

Truth's Painful Possibilities
[NASSAU AND SUFFOLK Edition]
Ed Lowe. Newsday. (Combined editions). Long Island, N.Y.: Feb 12, 1999. pg. A.08

I refuse to write about promotional events or to write stories that promote specific businesses. Having said that, I'm breaking my own rules, here. 

Pamela Slaton grew up in College Point, Queens, in what she refers to as an absolutely wonderful family. Not only did she always know she was adopted, she vividly remembers thinking of herself as special because of it. She pictured her adoptive parents as having viewed a conveyor belt filled with available babies and then having selected her, specifically.

"I wore my adoption as a badge," she said. "I figured parents had to keep their own children, but mine had picked me." However, she also was curious. An aunt recently told her that when she was 4 or 5 years old, she told the aunt that one day she was going to find "that lady," referring to her birth mother. Slayton doesn't remember saying it, but she also doesn't remember not being curious. At 17, she visited the Spence Chapin adoption agency in Manhattan to get what information she could.

"They patted me on my little head and told me to come back when I was 18," she said. "So, on my 18th birthday, a friend took me to the city, bought me a teddy bear, and we went together to Spence Chapin, where I learned as much as I could about the circumstances of my adoption.I searched on and off for 13 years. It was very hard, and, like all adoptees, you pick it up, put it down, pick it back up, put it back down.

There were many dead ends. My birth mother hadn't been raised by her own family, either. She had been raised by cousins, and she had used the cousins' name as her own, without legally changing her name.So it got very confusing."

It also got very ugly With all the hundreds of reunion stories Slaton now has heard in her work as a genealogist ("Eighty-five percent of them reasonably joyful stories, by the way," she says), her own still is the worst. After first trying to deny the documented fact that she was Slayton's mother, the woman then told Slayton that she never once had thought about her and didn't care about her now. When Slayton inquired about her birth father, her birth mother delivered a cruel lie. "You want to know who your father is?" she bellowed into the telephone receiver. "I'll tell you who your father is! Your father is my father!" 

Slaton had just had a baby and was scheduled for gall bladder surgery the next morning. It took hours to get her heart rate down to a normal range. Further investigation eventually would prove it was a lie, and Slaton eventually would meet her birth father in the Bronx, but there would be no explanation for her birth mother's venomous outburst. Slayton simply would have to get over it. "Had I been educated in these things," she said yesterday, "I would have better prepared myself. You get locked up in a fantasy, and it's important to be ready for both the worst and the best. That's what we try to do for people who are searching."

"We" includes two other Long Island women - one from Massapequa Park and another from Garden City, both adopted - who are Slayton's partners in a work-from-home service called The People Finders of New York. Slayton met them in the aftermath of her awful reunion while seeking advice from an encounter group of adoptee searchers. They helped her find her birth mother's sister and, ultimately, her biological father and grandmother. Then, taking note of her enthusiasm and skills at searching, they gave her an assignment. 

"As bad as my own reunion was," Slaton said, "if I could do it again 100 times, I would, because I just had to know. And I learned a great deal more than I expected, too. I think all of us believe that a good portion of who we are is genetic, but I learned that you have to give your parents credit for who you have become. The strength that I had during that period was because I was raised by a very strong mother who taught me how to prevail. I am more like her than I am like my birth mother. It look me a long time to appreciate that."

So, this morning, between 6:30 and 10 a.m., Slaton and her partners are to stage a few surprise reunions at Manhattan's Tavern on the Green, live, on air, for the morning show on radio station WKTU (103.5FM), as a promotional gimmick for their business. One of the stories involves three adult Long Island siblings who live within 20 minutes of each other and never have met.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.