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Starting family memories

FAMILIES: After 47 years, Garden Grove woman is reunited with her birth mother and two half sisters.

By Richard Stuart Chaplin
The Orange County Reporter

  GARDEN GROVE - Wanda VanderWende always had the feeling that she was different. She would ask her mother if she had been adopted, and her mother always said no. But VanderWende couldn't shake that feeling.

   Two years ago, VanderWende learned she had been adopted: and in November, after an extensive search, found her birth mother and three half sisters.

   VanderWende and two of her four children traveled to Escondido to meet her birth mother, Mary Talley, 67, and two of VanderWende's three new-found sisters.

   "When the door opened, they just started crying and hugged me," said VanderWende, 47.

   VanderWende, a secretary for Scan-Tron in Fullerton, said her adoptive mother, Lorrayne Coates, 82, finally admitted that she had adopted her.

   The Coates kept it a secret because "my (adoptive) dad didn't want me to know I was adopted," VanderWende said. "They were good parents."

   But once people find out they are adopted, "you get these weird, mixed-up feelings," she said.

   VanderWende went to Worldwide Tracers, a San Clemente company that searches for missing persons. She hoped they would locate her birth mother.

   "It was a tough case to crack," said Pat Rutherford, founder of Worldwide Tracers. VanderWende had been told that she had been born in San Antonio, but the trail was almost cold from there, and birth records were hard to obtain, Rutherford said.

   Eventually, Rutherford's contacts in Texas led him on the trail that ended in Escondido.

   "We had been within an hour's drive of each other since I was 14 and didn't know it," VanderWende said.

   VanderWende made the first call.

   "Neither one of us could say anything," Talley said. "Then, once the ice was broken, we started talking. And she started asking questions and I tried to answer them the best I could."

   Talley was 20 when VanderWende was born. She was living with her grandparents who were too old to care for an infant. The child's father wanted nothing to do with her once he learned of the pregnancy, Talley said. "So I didn't have much choice" except adoption, she said.

   "I know that she did what she thought was best," VanderWende said. "She gave me away so that I could have a better life."

   "It was one of the hardest decisions I ever made," Talley said. "There were many times I thought of her and wondered about her and how she was."

   Talley said she didn't want to be an unwelcome intrusion into her daughter's life.

   But VanderWende quickly connected with her half sisters, Liz Sanders, 41, and Marty Imber, 39.

   VanderWende said she still considers Coates her mother. Talley is addressed as Mary.

   The parent is the one who raises a child, Vanderwende said.
"Memories make a family," she said. "And now we're making memories."

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