Some Magic

Wishes and Dreams

Jan 05, 2026

Hello friends, Welcome back to Roots & Branches

I’m glad you’re here! My sincere wishes for a lighter, brighter 2026.

Three lighted stars on a pole in front of a tree

Thank you for listening to an adoptee’s voice in my piece about magical thinking and memory.

SOME MAGIC: WISHES AND DREAMS
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
The “primal wound” theory suggests that a newborn is imprinted with her mother’s scent, her touch, her heartbeat, and her voice, and that their separation at birth causes harm to both. Each carries the loss, and the longing to reunite, to love someone they cannot know.
I suppose the sisters at St. Francis Hospital, and foundling home offered what gentle comfort they could. Severance was the sensation. Adoption was the whisper. You are safe. Someone will come for you and bring you home. The murmur may have broken through the confusion, the noise of want.

When language began to bloom, I knew the word ‘adoption,’ but not what it would reveal or conceal. That would come much later. Until then, all was magic. Quiet play. Nursery rhymes and post-war tunes. I learned to guide the needle into the groove, releasing endless hours of music pressed into yellow plastic. I was surrounded by books with golden bindings, both soft and vivid illustrations, intact memories of The Cat and the Fiddle, Old Mother Hubbard, There Was a Crooked Man, My Book House, Richard Scarry, Grimm, Aesop, Andersen, and Disney. Fairy tales depicted good and evil, although the fairy folk wielded an amoral magic. Princes and witches, stepmothers and godmothers, danger and rescue coexisted in Enchanted Forests. Stars were summoned for wishing. “Makes no difference who you are,” love and happiness will come. Time teaches otherwise.

Transfers and transitions began at two months when they found her, and she signed the papers. They transported me across the state, where I lived three months in a crowded foundling home nursery. I met the military couple, and the adoption was finalized at the end of one year. Trains, planes, and cars. An often-absent military father. A highly strung, anxious adoptive mother. His Air Force career meant uprooting an already uprooted infant. Friends were temporary. Places dissolved. Wishing no longer worked. Disappointment set in.

I was six when the story came from my parents. Adoption. Now the word was solid. Had edges and corners. It was a puzzle of questions I didn’t know how to ask. Where are they, the missing ones? The lost ones? Who do I look like? Would my Air Force father come back this time? Some important people had left me, and my body learned fear early. I countered with magical thinking, with wishing and willfulness. Belief offered agency, trust frayed to anger, when I realized I had no control, that there were things unknown. Unsaid. Secrets.

By adolescence, magical thinking had faded as a useful survival tool. Fantasy had offered control. An irrational belief in immunity convinced me of native luck, masked risky behavior, and untreated distress. Longing did not disappear. It sharpened. My struggle went unnamed until at forty, a diagnosis gave shape to anxiety, depression, panic, dissociation, and collapse. I was urged to search. And I did.

Adoption was still a whisper in 1993, when my first mother, then in her seventies, and I laid eyes on each other, perhaps for the first time. I traveled to Greenville many times to be with her during the last year of her life. “Momma” had lived in hard places for decades; she endured thirty-seven years in Texas with abuse and the loss by drowning of her sixteen-year-old daughter. Sad years and several brief marriages in South Carolina. My maternal half-sister had rushed to her aid in Texas and brought her home to Greenville.

That was the moment I found the phone number. For two years, I’d written and called from my Pennsylvania home, pre-internet and DNA testing, with my Selectric and landline phone. Catholic Charities, as required by my birth state, released only “non-identifying information,” height, weight, age, and the general vicinity of my mother’s parents’ rural home, a cabin on a field they didn’t own at the time of my surrender in 1951; the home where my half sister was left as a toddler. The grandparents weren’t able to take another infant.

A lifelong wish came true two years into my search, when an adoptee advocate slipped my mother’s name and the name she gave me at relinquishment. A local historian combed congregations and ancestral churchyards, and I found someone I trusted to be my second cousin. It seemed neither my mother nor I was entitled to the full truth. Adoption records were falsified to protect all parties. My birth and adoption records were sealed by the State until 2023. She told me she had always wondered. I know she had wandered. So had I, but the State seal on adoptee birth records made reunion unlikely. It took some magic.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?