WILSON: EVERY YEAR I CRY A LITTLE BIT
Pam Gianola wants more. She started searching for her birth mother 30 years ago, placing a classified in The Spec, and is still looking for answers
I’ve just talked to Pam Gianola, who lives near Boulder, Colorado.
It’s our first conversation in nearly 30 years. I met her in the personals.
That column in the classified section of the paper is a shadow of what it once was. But I used to regularly mine the personals for ideas.
The people who placed the little ads were often trying to make contact with somebody. A love from long ago. A pretty girl spotted on the bus. An old friend from high school days. And then there was Pam.
I wrote about her at this time of year in 1989. Her ad: “Baby girl born April 29, 1951, in Washington, D.C. wishes to hear from birth parents/ relatives.”
She included her name and phone number.
I was born in 1951 too. Maybe that made me more curious. I called. Pam was the adopted daughter of Jean and Paul Miller Jr. Dad had been a top Navy test pilot.
She explained that she had always wondered about her birth mother.
“Even when I was a kid, I used to gaze at the stars and try to picture what my mother looked like.”
Pam said she became even more curious after the birth of her first child.
“As soon as I had him, I realized it’s not something you forget. My mother couldn’t have forgotten me.”
She had found some information. The adoption agency provided no names, but said her mother was 16 when she gave birth. And that the father, from Toronto, was 17.
Before the birth, the pregnant Ontario teen went to Washington, had Pam, gave her to the adoption agency and left. Pam had told me she understood all that. “The times were very moral.” So she placed that personal ad in the three largest cities in this province — Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton. The only call she got was mine. I wrote about her search, and that was that.
Now, all these years later, I get an email from a Toronto woman. She references that old column, says she has talked to Pam and asks me to call. No names please, she says, but she’s discovered she is Pam’s aunt.
She says she’s now learned that her much-older half brother, who died six years ago, was Pam’s biological father.
She says her nephew had his DNA done and a top match was an American named Justin Gianola. They looked up Justin on Facebook. There were pictures of his mom, Pam. Her resemblance to the family in Toronto was startling and unmistakable.
The aunt, using a private detective, was able to find some information on the early life of the girl that her half-brother made pregnant. Her name was Carolyn, her father was an investment banker and she went on to attend U of T’s Trinity College.
The aunt believes Carolyn died some 10 years ago. She’s unable — or perhaps reluctant — to say exactly where that information comes from.
I’m on the line with Pam. She says she and the aunt have talked more than once. Pam is still not sure what to make of it, still isn’t ready to accept the aunt’s belief that her birth mother is dead.
“I have no idea what she’s based that on.”
Pam is mother to four grown children. After 32 years together, her husband is leaving. Finances are hard. And to top it off, she is a Democrat deeply distraught that her country is now run by Donald Trump.
So there is much to think about, but she continues to want to know more about her roots. “There are so many of us out there like that from the ’50s and ’60s.”
This month is always the hardest, she says. On Saturday, she turns 66. “Every year on my birthday, I cry a little bit.”
Even when I was a kid, I used to gaze at the stars and try to picture what my mother looked like.