April 29–May 6, 1999

city beat

Mother and Child Reunion

A City Paper article brings together two people separated by adoption 30 years ago.

by Frank Lewis

Last month, Linda Hurd helped two adult adoptees—twin brothers—find their birth father. One of the brothers had sent Hurd an urgent e-mail after reading on a Web site that she was searching for the twin boys she gave up in 1969. These twins were born one day earlier, but they knew that details like date and place of birth are sometimes changed in cases of adoption, presumably to make searches like theirs more difficult.

"They wanted so bad for me to be their mother," recalls Hurd, a Port Richmond resident. "But I knew I wasn't." Soon after the men contacted her, however, she came upon a post on the same Web site from a man looking for twin sons with the same names as the ones who had contacted her. She e-mailed the father, and the three were reunited.

Last week, it was her turn. As a result of agreeing to be interviewed and photographed for City Paper's April 23 cover story, "Who Am I?," Hurd was reunited with one of the sons for whom she has been searching since 1991.

"I got there early," says Hurd of her meeting with her son, Sean Joyce, at Xando coffee shop at Fourth and Chestnut on Friday. "I saw him out on the pavement, and our eyes connected. And we just knew."

Their emotional meeting capped a series of seemingly unrelated events that, in hindsight, look eerily like divine intervention:

February: Joyce moves back to Philadelphia (he was raised in the suburbs) from California.

March 28: Maryland-based adoption activist Ann Wilmer e-mails City Paper and suggests a story on the controversial Uniform Adoption Act, introduced in Pennsylvania earlier this year. When a reporter agrees to look into it, Wilmer puts the word out among friends in Pennsylvania. The next day, e-mails and calls start pouring in from birth parents and adoptees wanting to tell their stories.

April 7: Linda Hurd e-mails City Paper. A word she uses to describe the sealing of adoptees' birth records—"atrocity"—catches the reporter's attention.

April 9: Unavoidable scheduling changes and the unexpected interest in the adoption story factor into City Paper's decision to put it on the cover of the April 23 edition. (The story had been slated for the news section.)

April 23: Though not a regular City Paper reader, Sean Joyce picks up that week's issue because the cover story is about adoption.

The article's first reference to Hurd, which mentioned that she gave up twin boys in 1969, piqued Joyce's interest. The caption under Hurd's photo, which narrowed the date to September of that year, gave him a chill; he was born that month.

	"It's just a miracle," says birth mother Linda Hurd. "It's what I hoped and prayed for for 30 years…

He was audibly shaken when he called City Paper and explained his suspicion. He was told Hurd's boys were born on Sept. 1, 1969, to which he replied, "That's my birthday."

Reached at work minutes later, Hurd sounded excited, but not shocked. "I just knew," she explained later. "Just like I knew those other boys weren't my sons, I knew when you called me that this one was."

Sadly, the reunion was bittersweet. Hurd learned that her other son, Tom, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1990. "That was hard," she says of this news. "I'm immensely happy to have Sean, but at the same time, not to have Tom, that's hard."

Still, she is thrilled beyond words to have met one of the sons for whom she'd been searching since dreaming—also in 1990—that they were calling out to her.

"It's still a bit overwhelming," says Joyce, who'd always wondered about his birth parents but never actively searched. (A call a few years ago to a locator service ended when he was told the packet of search materials would cost several hundred dollars.) He apologized for seeming at a loss for words; when it was suggested that four days probably wasn't enough time to process an utterly unexpected, life-altering experience, he replied, "Exactly!"

Within 24 hours of her reunion, Hurd received 250 congratulatory e-mails from birth mothers across the country who, like her, have been using the Internet to find their children. And it is for them, she says, that she will stay active in adoption issues—specifically, the fight to unseal adoption records.

"After I come down off this adrenaline high," she adds, laughing. "It's just a miracle. It's what I hoped and prayed for for 30 years.… Even if I was not to see him again, I'd be at peace."