SISTERS TRY TO WRITE HAPPY ENDINGS FOR OTHERS GIVEN UP FOR ADOPTION
Their license plates tell their story. NO DOPE 3 is Pam Quinn’s, words of advice from someone who’s been there, done it and almost didn’t live to tell the story. SRCHN 4 belongs to Babe Lentini, who found Quinn, her half sister, after they had been conducting parallel but unconnected searches to find their birth mother.
The license abbreviations, however, don’t reveal the depth and emotion behind the stories of lives unraveled and put back together, of families torn apart and reunited, of drug addiction and recovery. For Quinn and Lentini, the story’s happy ending is their creation of Search Consultants Unlimited, a business formed a few months ago to reunite people in the hope that they will have happy endings of their own.
Quinn, who is in the process of moving from Lombard to Villa Park and is now a rehabilitation counselor at GlenOaks Hospital in Glendale Heights, has a story beginning in Hillside, where, despite a stable upbringing by her adoptive parents, she spent her teen years, as she puts it, “walking in the front door of high school and walking right out the back.” Her truancy, drinking and wild behavior masked the pain she felt of not knowing why she’d been given up for adoption. Her adoptive parents, Harvey and Eleanor Schulz, supported her efforts to try to get herself together by finding her birth mother, but for 19 years those searches came to nothing.
Quinn started drinking in 6th grade. Her downward spiral included cocaine and heroin addiction, a bad marriage, loss of custody of her two children and frequent moves around the country. “I kept trying geographic cures,” Quinn said, “but wherever I went, I took me with me, so that didn’t work.” What ultimately did work was getting into rehab six years ago.
“I was sitting on a barstool,” she said, “and I decided to kill myself because I couldn’t stop shooting heroin and cocaine, and all of a sudden a loud thought came to my head: `Well, you haven’t tried treatment.’ “
Quinn decided to delay her suicide for 30 days to give treatment a fair chance. “I decided I’d kill myself if it didn’t work,” she said with a detached voice. “In effect, I had my own gun to my head. I’m one of the lucky ones. Most people who’ve been through what I’ve been through are dead, so every day I have is like a new lease on life.”
While putting her life back together and regaining custody of her sons, Quinn renewed efforts to find her birth mother. “It’s always there,” she said. “It’s always in the back of your mind, and it’s unsettling. You feel like you were dropped from an airplane, wondering, `Where are your roots?’ “
Meanwhile, Lentini, who grew up in Chicago and lives in Des Plaines, had been making what she now calls feeble efforts to locate the woman who had gone off to marry another man, leaving behind Lentini, Lentini’s father, older brother and sister. One day six years ago at her job, a colleague who ran credit checks told Lentini about a new computer access program she’d gotten that could track someone down from only a first name and Social Security number.
As Lentini told the story calmly, she occasionally waved her hand in front of her face to hold back the welling tears. “I gave her Shirley’s Social Security number,” she recalled, “and a few minutes later she called me back and said, `I found your mother.’ “
Shirley, who prefers that her past not be publicly acknowledged, was pleased to hear from Lentini and told her about leaving Lentini’s father because she was pregnant and wanted to marry the father of that baby. She had two children by that marriage.
“I don’t know what I had turned her into in my head,” Lentini said, “but I couldn’t get over that she sounded just like a normal person.” What Shirley didn’t tell Lentini was that she later left that husband when she became pregnant with a baby she gave up for adoption.
Last August, Quinn got a call from a search consultant she had hired. He had found her mother. Quinn called Shirley, asking if she might be the woman Quinn was looking for. Shirley responded, “I might be; I’ll call you back.” Instead, Shirley’s husband called her back and said, “I have to tell you something.”
“I thought he’d tell me to leave her alone and not call,” Quinn said, “but what he told me is, `I’m your father.’ ” Two years after giving Quinn up for adoption, Shirley had married Quinn’s biological father, Ray. After Quinn’s call, Shirley wrote letters to her five other children and told them about Quinn’s existence.
When Quinn and Lentini met, they hit it off immediately. “The day I found my family, it was like someone had flipped on a light,” said Quinn, who often tells her story when speaking to rehab groups. “People who heard our story kept coming up to us and asking us to help them.”
The two opened Search Consultants because they knew how to go about searching, felt the need to help those who were conducting searches and wanted to help at the lowest cost possible.
“One time a girl called me at home at lunch time,” Lentini said, “and she said she’d have the consultant fee to me at 5 p.m. When she came, she handed me the $75 fee, and I handed her her sister’s name, address and phone number and told her that her sister was waiting for her call.”
Although long-term searches cost more than the basic fee, what Search Consultants also offers is the kind of empathetic counseling that only those who’ve been through a search can provide.
“Pam was concerned about my expectations,” said Charles Cook of Elmwood Park, who was searching for his mother, “but I didn’t have any expectations. She started the search and would update me every couple of days and ask how I felt about it. She even went through yearbooks at the Rockford library. She was real hyped up on it herself.”
Quinn had traced Cook’s mother from Rockford to Virginia, then found her in Kansas two months after starting the search. “She called me and said my mother would call me in 15 minutes,” Cook said. “My mother was real happy to know about me. She had given me up for adoption when she was 15.”
Quinn and Lentini said such reunions can heal wounds for both birth parents and adoptees. In less than a year, they have found 20 people and have four cases still open.
“It’s a sense of closure, a feeling of wholeness,” Quinn said, describing her clients’ experiences and her own.
“It’s that feeling of getting a birthday card from your mother where you’ve never had that before in your life,” Lentini concluded.
To contact Search Consultants Unlimited, phone 708-390-6149.
