CL Pauwels at Large

Next in my journey through the theme of family (namely the broken, dysfunctional, non-traditional ones) in my novels is adoption.

Unwelcome Ties, the third book in my “Toledo Trilogy,” is actually a prequel to the first two, and the first novel I ever finished. It started in NaNoWriMo 2005, was heavily rewritten as my master’s thesis in 2010, and revised/rewritten since then more times than I can count. The kernel of the story remains, but hopefully I’ve learned more about character development and story structure than I knew in 2005. Looking back, I know where the theme came from, even if I didn’t fully realize it at the time.

The core of that family story is adoption, although the MC, Toni, doesn’t know that at first. As the book opens, she’s a recently-orphaned only child searching for any remaining family. I won’t say more than that here (spoilers!), but she has a tangled – and dangerous – history to sort through.

My own adoption journey wasn’t quite so fraught, but it was certainly odd. As detailed in earlier posts, my parents divorced when I was very young and my birth father wasn’t a part of my life until I was an adult. Mom’s third (and longest-present) husband adopted me when I was 10. At the time, I was thrilled because (in my grade-school mind), now I had a real daddy like all the other kids, and I gained the same last name as the rest of the family – no more being different!

The childish joy didn’t last long (story for another time…maybe), and Mom divorced again when I was a 17-year-old high school senior. But I was stuck with the last name of a man no longer a part of my life (thankfully), and it rankled, especially after I became reacquainted with my birth father. Because of the vagaries of adoption law (at least in Ohio), the no-longer-relevant stepfather was listed on my birth certificate as my natural father; Dad’s name didn’t appear anywhere.

I tried once, in the mid/late-1980s, to find a way to correct that, but couldn’t. When our son started law school almost twenty years later, I tasked him with figuring all that out once he passed the bar.

Good son that he is, that’s what he did. Oddly enough, the only way to correct my birth certificate and to return it to its original, truthful, state, was for Dad to adopt me as an adult!  With our son’s guidance and Dad’s eager assistance, we were finally able to make that happen in 2022. I flew to Florida to be at Dad’s side for the court hearing even though it was a video call due to COVID, and we both cried when the judge finalized the adoption. It took more red-tape wrangling to get my birth certificate correct, but I now have a copy – duly filed with the State of Ohio – showing both my real birth parents as it should.

In one more quirk of the universe, that former stepfather – who took the whole adult adoption as a personal affront even though we had had no relationship at all in over 40 years – died at almost the exact hour the judge made the pronouncement.

If for nothing other than for the loss my half-sibs experienced, I wish I could say I mourned. But it is interesting to see how life feeds my fiction.