Finding a family lost in adoption

Kristyn Capelli wears her adoption with pride. The 21-year-old Southeast Missouri State University senior from Manchester, Mo., grew up with loving adoptive parents who told her early on that she was adopted. They told her she was special. "I was proud of it. I told everyone," she said.

But something was still missing in her life. She longed to find her biological parents.

"It is like a void you have to fill," she said. "If I did nothing I would be wondering, 'What if?'"

Capelli has started her quest, filling out a formal application to Catholic Services for Children and Youth in St. Louis -- the agency that handled her adoption -- to initiate the search.

The search process isn't free.

Capelli had to pay $425 to the agency. Only $75 of that goes to the adoption agency. The rest will pay a search consultant who does the legwork, tracking down the birth parents and notifying them of the adoptee's desire to meet them.

At a surprise candlelight ceremony late last year, her sorority sisters at Southeast's Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority gave Capelli $500 in $5 bills to pay the search cost.

She has wanted to find her biological parents since high school. But under Missouri law, adoptees can't ask the adoption agency to conduct a search until they are 21 years old. The law doesn't allow birth parents to initiate a search.

Then there is the cost involved.

When she turned 21 last July, Capelli was ready to submit the paperwork, but she didn't have the money needed for the search, and she didn't want to ask her adoptive parents, Mark and Mary Jo Capelli, for the money. Both had lost their jobs when American Airlines downsized.

"I didn't want to burden them," she said. "I just pretty much dropped it."

She figured she would wait until she graduated from college this May to start searching for her biological parents. But that was before her sorority sisters donated the money. Over Christmas break, Capelli filled out the search application.

In January, she met a post-adoption counselor with the Catholic agency in St. Louis. "She prepared me for all the options," Capelli said.

She learned the search could take 90 days. As a result, she said, it could be April before she hears back from the agency.

Meanwhile, she plays out the various possibilities in her mind and in countless conversations with her finance, Jon Noory, a Southeast senior from the St. Louis area.

Noory understands Capelli's desire to know about her birth parents.

"There is a part of her she doesn't know about," he said.

When she was adopted in 1983, it was standard procedure for the identity of the birth parents to be kept secret from the adoptive parents and the children at the time of adoption.

Under Missouri law, both the adoptive parents and the birth parents have to give permission before the adoption records can be opened under a court order.

Parental support

Capelli's adoptive parents support their daughter's desire to know more about the birth parents. But she knows both her birth father and birth mother will have to give their permission if she is ever to learn their identities. Permission is needed from both birth parents for the identities to be disclosed under state law.

In high school, her adoptive mother showed her a form from the adoption agency that provided limited information about her biological parents, but no names or addresses.

Kristyn Capelli was born on July 12, 1983, at St. John's Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis County. "My mother was 24. My father was 42," Capelli said.

He was divorced. She was married, but separated. Her birth was the result of an office romance.

"My birth mother had brown hair and brown eyes. My birth father had blond hair and blue eyes," Capelli said.

The brief report provided at the time of the adoption also indicated that her birth father was interested in music and the arts. Everything else, she said, is a mystery.

Adoptive mother Mary Jo Capelli remembers when her then high-school-age daughter started talking about a post-adoption search.

"Initially when she told me it was just like a bomb dropped," she recalled. "It's like your daughter saying she wanted to move out of the house."

Mary Jo Capelli said there followed a little soul searching on her part.

"As time went on, I realized this was very important to her," she said. "I also realized that I would want to do the same thing."

A former flight attendant who now works for an Italian restaurant, Mary Jo Capelli said her daughter was about 4 months old when placed in her home. At the time, she was in the middle of a divorce from her first husband.

"I was able to keep her through the courts," the mother said. "It wasn't easy."

The adoption was completed in May 1985. "It took awhile because I was a single parent," she said.

Mary Jo Capelli told Kristyn about the adoption when she was 3 or 4 years old. She said the adoption agency encouraged such openness. "I think it made her comfortable with it," said Mary Jo Capelli.

She married Mark Capelli in 1990. He adopted Kristyn a year later. "I am the only dad she has ever known," he said.

The couple also have an 11-year-old son, Andrew.

Kristyn said her brother supports her quest to contact her biological parents. "When I told him about the search, he was just so excited," she said.

She made it clear to Andrew that she wasn't abandoning her adoptive family.

Since 1997, Missouri has allowed open adoptions where adoptive parents and biological parents can interact from the start. But even then the extent of the interaction depends on the participants.

Birth parents still can have their identities kept confidential, said Mary Ann Hoeynck, director of adoptions for St. Louis-based Catholic Services for Children and Youth.

"The majority of our adoptions are semi-open," she said. The adoptive and birth parents have met each other. They exchange first names and send letters to the agency at least once a year to exchange information.

But fewer and fewer children are put up for adoption in the St. Louis area. Last year, the agency placed only 13 babies. The majority of birth mothers ultimately decide to keep their babies rather than put them up for adoption, Hoeynck said. Being a single mother isn't frowned upon by society the way it was decades ago, she said.

The agency handled nine full fledged post-adoption searches last year. Others inquired about searches but didn't go forward with them. "Sometimes, they just get scared," she said of adoptees.

Finding birth parents is the easy part, said Marilyn Graham, a St. Louis-area social worker who is hired by adoption agencies to do the searches and try to convince birth parents to meet with the child they gave up for adoption. But it doesn't end with having a reunion, she said.

Adoptees and their birth parents must cope with a new relationship, she said. Adoptees must wrestle with how they fit into two families when before they had just one, she said.

Across the nation, support groups are rare, said Graham, who helps coordinate Uniting Hearts, a support group for birth parents, adoptive parents and adoptees in the St. Louis area.

Their monthly meetings draw from five to 25 people.

She has done hundreds of searches since 1986. "More than half are successful reunions," she said.

Still, Graham said, there's no guarantee that adoptees and birth parents will get along.

"My recommendation is that it be a very slow process," Graham said.

She suggests that adoptees and birth parents first make contact by phone or by letter. When or if they do meet, she said, it should be a private reunion.

Said Graham, "It can't be a big party."

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123