The Lost Fathers

After my biological dad, Tom, left my mom he married her best friend. That's how my mother told it. Tom and Renee lived in NYC and Renee gave birth to a baby girl they named Sydney. I never met the child but I was told the baby died of Down Syndrome. "That's not something children normally die of," my friend Larry said a few years ago. It made me wonder what had happened all those years ago in 1962.

Tom and Renee had to switch religions and claim they were Presbyterian so they could adopt two infants through a particular agency. They named their new children Nicki and Bill. When the kids were four and seven Tom left them and their mother Renee. He married again for the third time to a woman whom he had known during his marriage to Renee. Tom's third wife had also been married before, twice, and her two children (a boy and a girl) from her first marriage were all grown up. "She never had a father," Tom told me, describing his new daughter Kathy.

Eight years ago I got an e-mail from Nicki. "Are you daughter of Thomas Leonard, and do you have a sister named A?"
"Yes, yes, yes I know who you are, I remember you!"
We made plans to get together after 38 years. Nicki had been in a dream workshop and they had suggested she get in touch with her father. She contacted me to find him. Was he alive?

We got together for lunch and she filled me in on the story of infant baby Sydney. Sydney had been institutionalized and abandoned, and that's how she died. It was a horrible place - understaffed, horrific. Lots of children died there. It was featured on an investigative TV report and the place was shut down in the 80's.

Nicki had also been trying to find her biological parents. She had even hired a private investigator who eventually located her biological mother. Nicki flew out to California to meet her and a half-sister. She still didn't know who her biological father was, and neither did her bio-mom. "It was the 60's dear," is all she told her.