(To read the original story, visit oleantimesherald.com. Published on Mother’s Day, May 13, 2018.)
By DANIELLE GAMBLE, Olean Times Herald
Marian Robarge hated Mother’s Day for quite a while.
It’s not that she’s a Hallmark holiday cynic. It’s just when her kids would bring her gifts and try to celebrate the occasion, Robarge would invariably think back to the woman who raised her in Olean since the day she was born, Thelma Joseph.
Robarge describes her as a tiny woman with a big heart of Lebanese descent. Together, the pair were like Sophia and Dorothy from “The Golden Girls” — Joseph like Estelle Getty at roughly 4’10 in high heels, and the nearly 6-foot-tall Robarge as Bea Arthur.
Joseph passed away 22 years ago, and the loss left Robarge empty.
“There was always a hole in my heart because I couldn’t celebrate Mother’s Day anymore with my mother,” she said. “It reminded me of what I’d lost.”
This year, however, 53-year-old Robarge is in the holiday spirit. After traveling down from near Albany, where she’s lived with her husband for nearly a decade, she’s going to a Mother’s Day tea today in Bradford, Pa.
But first, she has to find out what tea her mother likes — herbal, it turns out. Robarge perfers Earl Grey.
“How do you like your tea?” she asked the woman who gave birth to her, Marguerite Srock, as she sits on the bed at the Pavillion retirement home.
“I like it plain,” Srock responded.
“Me, too!” exclaimed Marian, a big smile on her face.
In the smile, you can sense Robarge’s delight is less in the answer and more about the discovery. Because after more than five decades of waiting to meet her birth mother, learning about food tastes for Robarge is equal parts connecting with family and discovering pieces of herself.
IT WAS A long journey for Robarge to uncover her connection to Srock.
Robarge had known she was adopted since kindergarten, after she asked Joseph about why Robarge had no siblings.
“She explained to me that although they were my mom and dad and they loved me very much, somebody else had given birth to me and they had adopted me as soon as I was born, and that that never changed how they felt about me,” she said.
And that was how it felt for Robarge, whose parents had waited on a list for seven years before the opportunity came to adopt her. She said she had a great childhood with a family that gave her all the love she could want and a good private education at Southern Tier Catholic School and Archbishop Walsh Academy.
But while her adoption was no secret, she remembered the Josephs changing the subject about the topic even when Robarge brought it up. So she learned to not ask about her birth mother.
“I would say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ to my mother, and in my heart, I would always say, ‘And wherever you are, whoever you are, thank you.’ Because the life that this woman gave me by giving me up, it was an incredible life.”
It wasn’t until her father died in 2003 that she discovered her first clue about her birth mother’s identity in a lock box: a pair of adoption papers with the maiden name of her mother and a father “unknown.”
For many years, the idea of finding her birth mother wasn’t a priority for Robarge. Not only was she happy with the life she had, but she didn’t want to do anything that would have made her adoptive parents feel devalued if they had still been alive.
“I kind of put it out of my mind,” she said.
However, after a close call in January of 2016 with blood clots in her legs that prompted several questions about her medical history, Robarge decided to finally look for some answers.
“At that point, I felt extremely lost, I was like, ‘What else might be lurking out there? What else don’t I know?’”
FIRST, ROBARGE SENT an email to the TLC show “Long Lost Family,” which reconnects family members who have never met or have been separated for a long time, and waited for a response. But that summer, after searching her mother’s name in newspapers.com, she got a hit on a 1952 Bradford Era article listing off kindergarten homeroom assignments.
“Once I found the kindergarten listing, I couldn’t go to bed. I was literally up until 5 o’clock in the morning sitting on the computer,” she said. “To me, in my heart, I thought this had to be it.”
Her madcap search pulled up more articles. She read about her mom’s husband who died in a 1974 construction accident in Kane, Pa., after the pair had been married only four years. She found a family obituary that listed her mother as a survivor still living in Bradford.
But her mother had no social media accounts — just a few public addresses.
“I thought, ‘I’m going to write a letter and let’s see what happens,’” Robarge said.
Through the rest of the year, eight letters were sent out. Each came back unread, unanswered after weeks of waiting.
“And every time they would come back to me, I would get more discouraged,” she said.
Robarge had reason to worry — she said the majority of adopted people she’s met have had poor experiences with meeting their birth parents, especially when the child was born from abuse. And because the kindergarten listing put her mother at age 15, Robarge was suspicious about the circumstances surrounding her birth.
So when “Long Lost Family” contacted Robarge, she declined their offer in case their findings embarrassed who she assumed was her mother.
“As much as I wanted to find this for myself, I had to put her ahead of me,” she said.
And besides, she was able to keep her faith with the support and encouragement from her husband, Mark, a journalist who was with the Troy Record.
After a year of searching for addresses and phone numbers, Robarge finally decided to contact her potential half-brother, Scott Srock, on Facebook. She had found profiles for him months back, personal and for his tattoo business in North Carolina, but didn’t want to reach out in case he had never been told about her.
“I didn’t know what he knew about me, if he knew about me, if it might change his relationship with his mother — I had no idea,” she said. “Are you going to go blow somebody’s life apart?”
After an agonizing talk with her husband, she wrote a long message to send to his professional Facebook.
She hit send.
Within an hour, she saw someone had read it.
She waited.
And then, through tears as fresh as the day the message popped on her screen, she described her brother’s response:
“Oh my God, we’ve been looking for you but we didn’t know how to find you,” she cried. “Yes yes yes, you have the right family.”
She said the feeling of not only finding her family, but having them ache for her as much as she had ached for them, created the most powerful emotional release she’d ever had in her life.
“It was like a weight lifted off of my heart,” she said. “I think as you get older, family does become very important. And knowing there was a piece of me missing somewhere, it was a huge relief to make that connection.”
Robarge said her mother had, after a breakdown a few decades before, told Robarge’s half-brother about his long-lost sister. As soon as he was able, he called her.
“We both just sat on the phone crying our eyes out and talking,” she said. “I think we talked for three hours that night.”
It turned out Robarge’s mom was alive and indeed, still living in Bradford. No addresses had been available for her because she had been placed in The Pavillion nursing home due to some physical disabilities, but she was mentally healthy.
FINDING HER MOTHER meant uncovering a truth that Robarge had feared — Srock had become pregnant in the mid-1960s as a result of being a victim of a sexual assault. And worse, Srock said the act had been perpetrated by a non-biological family member she declined to publicly identify.
Srock realized she was pregnant the day before she gave birth to her daughter. She said at 15, she came home from school feeling sick March 30, and after an examination, she was told she was going into labor and was transported to Olean to deliver March 31.
While Srock is thankful her daughter was raised by such a loving family, she can’t help but feel giving Robarge up was the choice made for her, but not by her. And Srock was firm that she has never blamed Robarge for the painful circumstances of her birth.
She said she still remembers holding her baby girl one last time.
“I had to carry her down to the first floor of St. Francis Hospital in Olean,” Srock said. “She was wrapped up in a blanket — I couldn’t see her face — and her adoptive mother and father were there. This was at the back way of St. Francis at the time. I had to hand her from my arms to the arms of her mother. That’s when the emptiness started.
“And she said thank you to me, but I couldn’t say anything because I was on the edge of ready to explode.”
Srock said six weeks later, she was back at school, keeping the abuse secret for most of her life and never again discussing the pregnancy with her own mother.
Thoughts of her daughter would come periodically to Srock, she said, sometimes in her dreams and sometimes as strong memories brought on by the very show Robarge almost went on — “Long Lost Family.” But it wasn’t until her son called her last Easter that Srock, in a daze of discovery, really believed she would meet her daughter again.
“I thought, ‘Why would she want to see me?’” she said.
“I thought the same thing about you,” laughed Robarge.
Within days of connecting with her birth family, Robarge arrived in Bradford to greet her half-brother and her birth mother on Easter weekend.
“I can still see her standing at the door, crying her eyes out,” said Srock with a smile, adding the first thing she noticed was how strong a resemblance the pair share.
Srock was thrilled to find out she was a grandmother to Robarge’s two sons, 29-year-old Jordan and 27-year-old Jared, and a step-grandmother to two 12-year-old twins. And she was a little “flipped,” though equally happy, to find out she was a great-grandmother to a three-year-old girl.
Even though meeting was exciting, Srock said it was hard to get to know each other because she didn’t know what to say to her daughter or how to say it. Robarge compared it to “when you first start dating someone.”
And sometimes, things are still “weird” for the both of them, like when they think about buying gifts. Even though Srock knows Robarge loves royal blue and they both like eggplant, so many tiny details that take a lifetime to collect are missing.
But more importantly, the instinct is there for Srock to express her love for her daughter. And after a year of weekend visits and almost daily phone calls, the two are getting more comfortable playing catch-up.
“(My search) may have started off for medical reasons, but it’s so much more than that,” Robarge said. “I’m glad that I did it.”
And sitting across from her daughter the weekend of their second Mother’s Day together, Srock is just as grateful that her dreams have become reality.
“You were just across the state line this whole time,” she chuckled, shaking her head as her daughter smiled.
(Contact City Editor Danielle Gamble at dgamble@oleantimesherald.com. Follow her on Twitter, @OTHGamble)
Danielle Gamble 