By Becky Gillette – Vickie Davis Weis, 46, recently went to the Eureka Springs Post Office to send her first-ever Christmas presents to her mother, only to find out the packages she wrapped didn’t fit into any mailing boxes. She got down on the floor, and started rewrapping. People waiting in line were delighted with her story.
After searching for her birth parents for about 35 years, Weis, of Holiday Island, was reunited with her birth mother, Evelyn Marie Davis, a few months ago.
“All the women coming in were giggling,” Weis said. “I said, ‘Oh, it is for my mom. I’ve only met her one time aside from being born. This is our first Christmas.’ I had to get it mailed off in order to get to them in time. Everyone at the post office was cheering me on.”
Weis first started looking for her mother when she was 12. Only someone who is adopted and has yearned for her whole life to know her family can understand what it was like for Weis to run into roadblock after roadblock in searching out her birth family. She reached the end of her research earlier this year when a woman named Robin, who was volunteering to help find her birth parents, found a man she believed to be Weis’s father. But the man was horrified and said it wasn’t possible, that he had never cheated on his wife.
“I realized then that I could hurt someone else with my search, so I told Robin I wanted to give up,” Weis said. “I had a meltdown. But Robin talked me into giving her two more weeks. And after one week, she found my mother.”
It turned out the man that had been found was related to her father, who is now deceased. She was told all her life that her father was 30 when she was born, but he was 21, her mother 14. Weis herself was only about that age when she went into a crisis because she understood why she was so different from her family.
“It hurt terribly,” she said. “I started asking about my mother. I wanted to find my mom. Any time I inquired about finding my family, it was such an insult to my adoptive father. There was resentment towards me because I had the need and desire to find her. I was told, ‘You don’t want to find her’.”
Weis was actually kidnapped by her adoptive father initially. She was placed in a home with four other infants in Tampa, Fla., where her adoptive father was a minister with a television show and political and judicial connections. Their youngest child had died as a baby. He was doing visitation around Tampa and went into the home where she was being cared for and said, ‘I want this red haired baby and I’m going to take this baby home.’ He showed up at home and said to his wife, ‘Would you like to have this baby?” She said, ‘Who wouldn’t want to have this baby?’
“He took me inside, and the next thing you know, the local law enforcement showed up and said, “You’re not allowed to take a baby like this,” Weis said. “They took me back to the home that had me. From there, it took time, but then they were able to adopt me.”
Most of her childhood was spent in the Philippines where her adoptive father was a missionary before the family moved to Oklahoma. At 16, Weis moved to Tampa to live with her adopted sister, Tina.
She spent many hours there trying to find her mother. She did everything she could think of and ended up with mountains of paperwork but no success. In her thirties, she got a computer and started again, running into wall after frustrating wall.
“I kept searching,” Weis said. “I was pretty much dying inside. Then my granddaughter was born blind and I petitioned the court for my non-ID. It means medical records you can get from your birth mother without exposing who she was. I waited quite a while, and six months to a year later got a rejection. They said, ‘No, we will not release anything to you.’ I was devastated. I burnt that letter, it hurt so bad.”
She said she has thought about her mother every night of her life. Her birth memory was of being held by a young woman in a bed before the nurse took her away.
“Birth memories are a rare thing, but they do happen,” Weis said. “It carried me through. But over the years I got so tired of getting nowhere. I reached a point in my life where I was giving up on the inside. It was killing me inside and out. I was on an adoption database, but decided it was not meant for me to know where I came from, my mother, or who I am. Prior to that, I had really cried out for help on the database. I said: ‘Somebody please help me’.”
Robin, also an adoptee, said she would help. She worked in hematology in Jacksonville, Fla., and had conducted her own search with genetic gene pools. But after the experience with contacting the wrong person who Robin thought was Weis’s father, Weis was ready to give up. Robin said to give her just two more weeks. And then she found Weis’s mother.
One irony is Weis learned her aunt had found Weis nine years ago. Weis had petitioned the court around the same time. But by that time, Weis’s email, phone and address had all changed.
On a visit five months ago to Tyler, Texas, Weis met not just her mother, but one of two half sisters, her Uncle Bill, and Grandmother Christine. They met at Uncle Bill’s house and “ate like kings and queens. It was the most beautiful experience. It was like I was never gone. I was home. I was with my family. I’m on top of the world. Life couldn’t be any better.”
It was a little awkward at first with her mother.
“We were both nervous and didn’t know what to expect,” Weis said. “I couldn’t stop squeezing her. I couldn’t believe she was real. Adoptees get infatuated with their mothers. We stare at them. My mom is this beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous person. And for the first time in my whole life, I looked in the mirror and loved myself. I saw me.”
Her mother and both sisters are planning a visit to Eureka Springs in a couple of months.
“Robin is my angel,” Weis said. “If it was not for her, I would have failed. This is all because of Robin and her kind, loving, full understanding she could help another adoptee. I would do anything for her. I am forever indebted to her in all the lives to come including this one!”