Author · Memoir
The hand I’d felt on my life all along
A fifty-nine-year search for the woman who gave me up — and the voice that finally answered.
I spent most of my life not knowing either of my parents’ full names. Then a change in the law, a DNA test, a box of old yearbooks, and one phone number bought online led me to a living room in Colorado — and to my mother, Nancy, who had kept the secret of me for sixty years.
About
An accountant’s search for his own origins
I’m a vice president of accounting for a publicly traded real estate company, where my work is getting the numbers right and finding what others miss. It’s the same instinct — patient, documentary, allergic to the unverified — that I turned on my own life.
Adopted twice before my first birthday and raised on the outskirts of Chicago, I spent decades assembling the record of where I came from the way I assemble a financial statement: one sourced fact at a time, until the truth was undeniable. What I didn’t know for most of that search was that the man who fathered me had rented a room three blocks away, and taught art at the very high school my mother, my sister, my brother, two of my children, and I would all attend.
Music has run through my whole life, and it still does: at Living Word Lutheran Church in The Woodlands, Texas, I sing with the choir and have been grateful to offer solos that carry God’s Word to the congregation and to those watching online. I live in The Woodlands with my wife, Karlyn, and our family. Is This Nancy? is my first book.
The Book
Is This Nancy?The Voice on the Other End
At fifty-nine, I finally dialed the phone number of the woman who gave me up at birth. A woman in Colorado answered “Hello?” — and the search that had quietly shaped my entire life reached the moment it had been heading toward for six decades.
Is This Nancy? is the true story of that search and what it found: a double adoption, a father hidden three blocks away, five children, a long detour through hard years, a financial catastrophe that nearly cost me my home, and the music and family that carried me through. It is built as a slow accumulation of documented, quietly astonishing facts until they resolve, in the final chapters, into a reunion that exceeds every hope I let myself hold — including the day my mother decided, on the spot, to tell her husband of many years the secret she had kept for sixty years.
A family-and-identity story first and a life story second: about adoption and the ache of the missing half, about the suspicion that nothing is an accident, and about the difference between being given away and being found.
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