MEANT FOR EACH OTHER

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 6, 1995
Author: JOHN DORSCHNER Herald Staff Writer

The astounding odyssey of JoAnne Hatfield began two years ago when she walked into a vet's office in Hendersonville, N.C. The only other person in the small, Spartan waiting room was an elderly woman with a cat. JoAnne had brought two kittens, and naturally the conversation turned to cats.

The gray-haired woman said her cat, Tabitha, had moaned all the way from Chimney Rock, where she lived in a trailer park. But that was just the way some cats were. She said she had had a lot of cats over the years, and loved them all. She mentioned she had a daughter in Miami who loved cats, too.

As the woman talked, JoAnne suddenly had an odd intuition. She had been adopted at birth, 35 years before, and had never met any of her biological relatives. But based on snatches of information she had picked up over the years, she became convinced that she was now talking to a blood relative.

"For whatever reason, I knew it was my grandmother sitting there. It was like being in the twilight zone. Here's a complete stranger to me, and yet the same blood that runs through her runs through me!"

She was so stunned that, at that moment, JoAnne said nothing to the woman about her suspicion. But this chance encounter would transform her life, and the life of the mother she had never met.

An Unexpected Call

JoAnne Hudson Hatfield was not fleeing a wretched childhood. "I had always known that my parents loved me, and that I was adopted . . . The relationship I had with my adoptive mother was incredible. She was my best friend. It was like I was her own, but it was even better than that, because she had picked me."

Ray Hudson was a master electrician who had grown up in Miami Shores. Gene Hudson, named after her father, was a homemaker. They had two children of their own -- a boy and a girl. The girl suffered from cerebral palsy and died young. The Hudsons wanted another child and decided to adopt. They were a strongly religious family, Seventh-day Adventists, and they provided a warm home life in Miami.

One time, her mother left a poem for JoAnne to find in the morning when she woke up:

Always remember

And never forget

That you were not born

From under my heart -- but in it.

Still, at the back of her mind, JoAnne always wondered about her status in the family. "When I misbehaved as a child, I was very afraid of doing something my parents would be disappointed in. I was afraid they'd say, 'No, we've changed our minds. We don't want this child.' "

JoAnne remembers asking Gene: "Why would a mama give up a child if she loved her?" Gene replied that JoAnne's natural mother had given her up because she couldn't provide a good life for her and she wanted her to be raised in a prosperous, stable family. "She gave you up because she loved you so much."

Was that really true? On her birthdays, on Mother's Days, JoAnne's thoughts turned to the mother she had never known. "Is she thinking about me today? Does she miss me? Does she have other children who send her cards?"

When JoAnne was about 6, the family moved to Hendersonville, a town of 35,000 nestled in the mountains of western North Carolina. It was a picturesque spot of gorges, waterfalls, hills and rivers. JoAnne was a tomboy who loved pets and being out-of-doors. Eventually she went off to Southern College in Tennessee for a year, then returned to a series of jobs before she went to work for a nursing home her folks ran.

In 1981, she married Billy Hatfield, a retired Air Force veteran who was a quarter-century older than she. Even then, her relationship to her mother was so close that she warned Billy: "You'll never take me away from this town as long as my mother is alive."

In 1986, Gene Hudson suffered a heart attack. That led to open heart surgery. She died several days later. JoAnne was devastated.

Cindy Dabailbeh, JoAnne's best friend: "She very, very deeply missed that mother-daughter relationship."

Several years later, in 1989, JoAnne received a phone call from a woman who introduced herself as Susan Garland. She said she was the mother of JoAnne's natural mother--JoAnne's biological grandmother--and by coincidence, she had just moved to a trailer park in Chimney Rock, only 30-minutes' drive from Hendersonville.

JoAnne was stunned by the news: She had thought that her adoptive family's identity had been carefully kept from her biological relatives--her father told her that he had even covered up his car license plate when they drove away from the hospital with her--but the grandmother said she had somehow managed to keep track of her whereabouts all along.

The woman said she wanted to meet her granddaughter, and wondered if JoAnne wanted to get to know her natural mother. JoAnne was still grieving for Gene, and she took this overture to mean that, after all these years, the long-missing natural mother wanted to fill Gene's shoes.

Susan Garland backed off. "JoAnne was quite shocked and upset," Susan recalls. "She cried. I said, 'I know you only had one mother. I'm sorry she passed away. Dotty didn't want to be your mother, but she'd like to know you and be your friend.' "

JoAnne said she wasn't ready for that and hung up.

A Special Baby

For several years, the 1989 phone call from her grandmother hovered in JoAnne's mind. One day, in November 1993, when she was out driving, she realized she was near Chimney Rock. Without thinking about it, she sought out the area's only trailer park and stopped beside the road. Briefly, she thought about knocking on her grandmother's door. "I was drawn down there, for some reason. How would I do it? Would I give her a heart attack? After a few minutes, I decided nah, not today. Then, two weeks later, I had the chance meeting in the vet's office. I believe in--whether you call it fate, or call it divine intervention, or just God's timing in my life. I think the Lord was testing the waters."

After JoAnne left the vet's office, she rushed to tell her adoptive father what had happened. He could tell she was excited and thought it would be great if she could meet her biological relatives.

Ray Hudson: "I was really in favor of it. I thought JoAnne was ready for it. The Lord has worked in wondrous ways."

In fact, he was so excited he called Susan Garland: Guess who you were talking to in the vet's office? Susan was astounded to learn she had been chatting with her granddaughter. A few days later, on Thanksgiving, JoAnne visited Susan at Chimney Rock. As soon as she walked through the door, Susan gave her a big hug and called her "granddaughter." They had gotten along well at the vet's office, before either had realized their relationship, and JoAnne felt instantly at home.

Susan explained the family history. Her husband, Bud, had died in 1953 in an auto accident near the family's home in New Hampshire. Seeking to start over, Susan moved herself and her three children to Miami Springs. For the first time in her adult life, Susan had to take a job, working for a doctor in Hialeah. Dotty, the eldest child, had to start working at 15, manning a hospital switchboard while still taking high-school classes.

When Dotty was 18, she briefly dated a young man and became pregnant. There was no way the impoverished Garland family could feed another mouth, and Susan turned to the doctor she worked for: She wanted to place the baby with a "good Christian family" that would be similar to her own.

The doctor found the Hudsons. Susan wasn't supposed to know who the adoptive family was, but shortly after JoAnne was born, Gene Hudson brought her newly adopted baby into the doctor's office. Susan was at work in the front office when the doctor whispered to her that here was a special baby she should see. Susan knew immediately what that meant.

When Susan saw Gene Hudson, she recognized her. She knew the Hudsons slightly--they sometimes went to her Seventh-day Adventist Church--but at the time she mentioned none of this to Dotty. It was best, Susan decided, for her teenage daughter to get on with her life.

Over the years, Susan quietly kept track of the Hudsons, and she knew when they moved to Hendersonville, N.C. In the early '60s, when JoAnne was still in elementary school, Susan traveled with a youth group to Hendersonville, and when she went to the Seventh-day Adventist Church there, she saw the Hudsons. Later that day, she went with other church members to the Hudsons' house. An unknowing JoAnne sat beside her.

For three hours that Thanksgiving evening, JoAnne listened in awe as her grandmother told family stories. But at the end of the evening, when Susan asked if she wanted to meet her mother, JoAnne said she wasn't ready yet.

Unanswered Questions

In Miami, Dotty was following these developments with fear and wonder. A legal secretary at Holland & Knight, she was 20 years into her second marriage, to Irving M. Wolff, a prominent bankruptcy attorney who was two decades older than she. Neither of her husbands had been interested in starting a family with her, and she hadn't pushed it. JoAnne was her only child.

She had blotted out many of the details of her pregnancy, until she wasn't even sure of the exact date of the birth. Still, concern about her daughter's fate remained a nagging angst. When a friend's son adopted a child, she said, "I can only hope and pray that the people who adopted my daughter were as good as your family." Was her daughter OK? Had Dotty done the right thing by giving her up? She says the doubts never vanished.

Throughout JoAnne's childhood, Dotty's mother continued to keep what she knew a secret. But at some point in the '80s, when JoAnne was a grown woman, Susan told Dotty the story: seeing the baby in the doctor's office, meeting her on the North Carolina church retreat. She said JoAnne seemed happy, ensconced in a good family.

That all made Dotty feel a little better. Still, there were so many unanswered questions. When Susan told her about the 1989 phone call, Dotty was disappointed at JoAnne's apparent lack of interest, but didn't want to push a relationship with her. "What will be will be," she decided.

Then, after the meeting at the vet's office and the Thanksgiving encounter between her mother and her daughter, Dotty says, "I was filled with an incredible excitement, which never went away." Even if JoAnne wasn't ready to meet her, Dotty made reservations to fly up to North Carolina for Christmas.

Breathless

A few days after that Thanksgiving, on Dec. 4, JoAnne celebrated her 36th birthday. Susan Garland took her picture. Knowing the photo would be sent to her mother, JoAnne made a cross-armed, defiant pose: Here I am, for better or worse. The photo showed a hefty woman, perhaps 50 pounds overweight, with a permed, short-around-the-ears-long-in-back hairstyle that Grandma Garland calls "the North Carolina hairdo."

It was the first picture Dotty had ever seen of her daughter, and she didn't care about her appearance: "I was real excited. I wanted to go up right then. But my mother said, 'You have to take it slow.' "

When Dotty flew up three weeks later, she felt caught in the vortex of a whirlwind: "I didn't know what was going to happen. I was thinking: I don't know how to be a mother. Will she like me? Will she hate me? But I knew I had to see her."

JoAnne decided to meet Dotty when her plane landed at the Asheville airport. It was neutral ground, and if the meeting was a disaster, they could part quickly, saying they would meet later at someone's house.

Her head was swimming with questions. "Whatever human emotion there was, I felt it. Whatever question I could think of, I asked it. Is she going to like me? How am I going to feel? There was anger. How could she have given me up? I want to see her, but why do I want to see her? Do I shake her hand? Do I hug her?"

The airport was engulfed in a snowstorm. The plane was a half-hour late.

JoAnne: "The anticipation was driving me crazy. I'm dancing from one foot to the other, smoking one cigarette after another. . . . When the wheels of that plane touched the ground, my knees buckled."

Susan Garland and JoAnne's friend, Cindy Dabailbeh, reached out for her, thinking she was about to pass out. "She wanted a bond there," says Cindy. "She needed a bond. But she wasn't certain what she would find."

Dotty walked into the terminal wearing a denim shirt, jeans and a pair of blue cowboy boots. JoAnne felt instant identification: She, too, loved to wear jeans and cowboy boots.

But more telling than the boots was the eye contact. She looked into Dotty's eyes and was reminded of her adoptive mother, Gene: "I realized I had seen that same love before. It was a different pair of eyes, but it was the same love. . . . Before that, she wasn't my mother. My mother was the one who bandaged my knee when I fell and scraped it, and tucked me in at night, and let me get in bed with her when I was scared -- but that one look, that's how long it took to make me realize, that was my mother there."

The two women rushed to each other and hugged.

Dotty: "I don't remember seeing my mother, or anybody else -- it was really like we were the only two people in that airport. . . . and it was like that cord had never been cut."

The hug lasted a long time.

JoAnne: "We didn't speak, just hugged. And then I said something like, 'Is she breathing?' "

That brought a laugh. JoAnne's mind was brimming with questions, but she asked only one: "When was the last time you saw me?"

That's how she recalls saying it. Dotty remembers something with a little more attitude: "So Grandma last saw me when I was 5; when was the last time you saw me?"

Dotty told her that this was the very first time: At birth, the baby had been whisked from the delivery room before she had a chance to see it.

"Somehow," says JoAnne, "that made me feel better. If she'd seen me and then given me up, that would have been hard to take."

That evening, Dotty and her mom went to JoAnne's house for a Christmas Eve dinner. JoAnne prepared a buffet: sliced turkey for sandwiches, chicken wings, celery and carrot sticks.

JoAnne and Dotty played with kittens on the floor. JoAnne showed Dotty photos of the pets she had owned and her wedding pictures, but she withheld the photos of herself as a child. "I wasn't sure she was ready for that."

Hold That Tiger!

The next day, Christmas, they got together at Susan's house. Dotty had put a lot of thought into giving her new-found daughter a Christmas present. It would be tacky, even awful, to hand her an expensive piece of jewelry or a lot of little presents. So instead, she presented JoAnne with what was in a way her most prized possession: a stuffed, somewhat faded tiger that she had had since childhood.

A story went with the tiger, the story of JoAnne's birth. "It's been a lot of years. I've blotted a lot of stuff out," Dotty told her daughter. She was 18, just finishing high school. The young man was in college. "I guess in a way that impressed me. It was a short romance. But I was pregnant."

She recalls no discussion of marriage. Her family was religious, and the shame of an unwed pregnancy overwhelmed her. Even more overwhelming was what a baby might mean to her own life. Accompanied by a co-worker, Dotty went to an abortion doctor on Tamiami Trail.

A woman said, "Take a seat." She did. The room was cheap, tiny, with an aura that hinted at the illegal abortions and rusting coat hangers of that era. "I was so scared. I don't think I gave it a whole lot of deep thought. I just realized, 'I can't do this.' It was a sleazy place." Within moments, she ran out the door.

JoAnne was astounded when Dotty told this story: "As a child, I never imagined this scenario. I don't know why. I thought she gave up me for good reasons, or she gave me up for selfish reasons, but I never thought of an abortion. When I heard she got to that point, I thought woooooh! That I almost wasn't here, that was a realization."

Dotty said that when she began to feel the baby kicking inside her womb she sometimes wondered how she could give the child up. But then came the opposite thought: How could she not? She was 18, with no security and no sense of her future. Better that the baby be brought up by a decent, prosperous family.

When Dotty went to give birth at North Shore Hospital, she brought along a stuffed tiger from her childhood. Her only distinct memory of the ordeal was clutching the tiger. Afterward, "they were taking me to my room, on a gurney, and the tiger fell on the floor. My mother picked it up and put it on the gurney. And then I was in the room alone with the tiger. I cried on that tiger a lot that night."

JoAnne was thrilled to get the tiger. That Christmas evening was perfection -- until JoAnne was ready to leave and Dotty walked over to her and patted her back. "She said, 'Now listen, it's snowy. So it's going to take a little longer to get home than normal.' And she looked me right in the eye -- I'm 36 years old now, and I've known this woman less than 24 hours -- and she says, 'Do you have to pee before you go back up the mountain?'

"And I went, 'EXCUUUUUUUZ me?' "

As she tells this story, she turns to Dotty. Both are laughing at the memory. "You took to mothering real quick," JoAnne tells her.

Says Dotty apologetically: "That's what my mother would have said to me!"

The roads were indeed slippery with ice and snow, and Dotty asked her to call when she got home. JoAnne did, hung up, then a short time later called her back to say that she loved her.

When the call came, Dotty had been washing her face in the bathroom. She was so overwhelmed by the message that she began crying. In the bathroom, the water kept running, flooding the place. Dotty didn't care.

Two days later, JoAnne asked if she could call her mom. Dotty said, "I have never heard anything so sweet."

'I'm Sorry'

Dotty flew back to Miami a few days after Christmas, but life did not return to normal. Mother and daughter began running up huge phone bills. In January, Dotty flew back to North Carolina for another visit.

JoAnne: "We had missed all this time together. We've got to catch up. Of course, we could never catch up, but each time we parted, the separation was so utterly painful -- it was like that fear of losing her all over again. . . . The feeling was so intense. . . . We're talking about 36 years of longing for each other."

At first, Dotty was always apologizing. "I'm sorry," she kept saying, and JoAnne kept telling her: There was nothing to be sorry for; she had experienced a great childhood.

"Finally, I sat her down and told her, 'Listen, because of you, I've had a lifetime that's been filled with a lot of happiness. I had parents who believed in me and tried to bring out the best in me. . . . and now you've given me a second chance, with another lifetime of love. How can you see anything to be sorry for?' "

After that, Dotty stopped saying she was sorry, but intense emotions always roiled below the surface. After much insistence, JoAnne finally brought out her baby pictures. The first showed a beaming Gene Hudson holding up JoAnne when she was just a few days old. To JoAnne, this photo showed how much love she had received as a child, but Dotty recoiled: It seemed as if Gene were reproaching her. How could anyone have given up this lovely baby?

I Write the Checks

When they were apart, the marathon phone sessions continued. "That upset everybody," JoAnne says. By "everybody" she means the two husbands.

Billy Hatfield in North Carolina was not used to having large phone bills, but his complaints were mild compared with those of Irving Wolff in Miami, who says he saw his long- distance expenses shoot up to $500 a month.

Irving Wolff is a legend in the Miami legal community, where he has practiced bankruptcy law for almost half a century. Several times he has been listed in the book Best Lawyers in America. Herald stories have described him as a "cantankerous maverick" and "the aging lion of Miami's bankruptcy bar."

In one Herald interview, Irving acknowledged that, as a contentious lawyer, he was not widely admired. "Ain't no one gonna build a monument to me," he told a reporter. "I can assure you that."

Irving complained that Dotty had never told him that she had a child, and he didn't like all the time that his wife was devoting to JoAnne. "I was sick, I needed peace and quiet," he says, and he thought Dotty should be devoting more time to him, not this stranger she was suddenly embracing.

Irving's complaints didn't stop the two women. "I'd call her at home, at work," recalls JoAnne. "I needed to know what her life was all about. It drove me crazy not having a mental picture of where she worked, who she worked with, the people at the beauty shop she went to. I needed to know what her life was all about, what made her her."

In February, JoAnne flew down to visit Dotty in Florida. Because Irving was so angry, the two women spent a week together in an apartment. They met Irving in a restaurant. All agree that it was a volatile meeting. Irving says that JoAnne warned him not to treat her mother badly. He says he responded, "Where I come from, the guy who writes the checks comes first."

The Breakfast Club

Dotty says that her marriage had been rocky for some time, and finding JoAnne simply focused the problems. Irving soon gave her an ultimatum: Choose him or JoAnne.

Dotty: "I was forced to make some very hard decisions very fast. I gave up JoAnne once, and I would not do it again. . . . He never thought I would leave him."

Despite the argument with Irving, JoAnne's trip to Miami went fabulously well. She was enthralled by everything: the causeways to Miami Beach, the 31-story office building on Brickell where Dotty worked, the market where she bought her vegetables. "It made me feel I knew her that much better. I'm trying to put down another root."

JoAnne went with her mother to Dotty's "breakfast club," a group of professional women who gathered every Saturday morning to get their nails done and swap stories at a beauty shop called Super Shears in North Miami Beach. The women had been following every development in the Dotty-JoAnne saga as if it were a soap opera, and they were surprised the first time they saw JoAnne. "She was tons lighter than the photograph we saw of her from around Thanksgiving," says Dawn Goldman, a Burdines advertising specialist. "Maybe 50 pounds."

JoAnne acknowledges that in the first several months after meeting Dotty she lost at least 40 pounds. "We were talking on the phone so much, we didn't have a chance to eat," she jokes. "And then after we saw the phone bills, we didn't have the money to eat."

But she admits that there was something more complicated going on in her head. "I was feeling a lot better about myself. I had a new identity, a meaning in life."

At Super Shears, for the first time in her life, JoAnne had her nails done by a manicurist. Then she told the stylist she wanted to change what Grandma Garland called her "North Carolina hairdo." JoAnne: "It was all a part of a realization that my possibilities were limitless. I wanted change. I needed change."

She told Dotty's stylist to do whatever he wanted. He chose a short style, much like Dotty's.

The Boot Gene

The two women kept discovering similarities between them. Once, Dotty was driving JoAnne around Miami. They were at a red light, and when the light turned green, the car in front of them didn't move. Dotty blurted: "What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation?"

JoAnne thought: "Oh my Lord! I've been saying that for years!"

There were plenty of other things: They both drove sporty blue General Motors cars (Dotty a blue Firebird, JoAnne a blue Camaro). They both smoke mentholated cigarettes. They both began their work careers as legal secretaries (Dotty stuck with it; JoAnne went on to work in a nursing home). They both married much older men who weren't interested in having children with them. They both liked country music (particularly Billy Ray Cyrus' Achy Breaky Heart). They both loved wearing cowboy boots.

Cowboy boots? When a writer points out to JoAnne that no scientist has ever discovered a gene that compels a human being to wear cowboy boots, JoAnne shrugs.

"Oh I know! . . . But then how do you explain the similarities?"

JoAnne says she knew she was on an odyssey, a search for "roots, for identity. For a new lease on life. I want people to know my story because I want them to know it's OK to go looking for your past."

Because of her finding Dotty, she says, her thoughts about heredity versus environment have "changed some, because of all the similarities between me and my mother." Meaning Dotty. But she admits that her two families did share many things -- the religious background, the family values. And the love of cowboy boots and sporty cars runs deep through a lot of families in America, after all.

"There are a lot of similarities between my mothers," JoAnne admits. "Part of the reason I feel so blessed is that I've gotten the best out of two mothers. Not too many kids can say that."

Realigning Planets

The visit to Miami was a watershed. When JoAnne returned to North Carolina, neither woman was happy.

Dotty: "It was just that we had to be with each other. I was experiencing motherhood for the first time. . . . We had a ball together!" It was Dotty who first broached the subject: "Living 1,000 miles apart isn't going to work."

JoAnne agreed. After some discussion, she decided to move to Miami: "She had a good job here. I didn't want her to give it up. And I was ready for a career change."

Finding Dotty had made JoAnne realize that she was tired of her job -- and her marriage of 12 years wasn't working. She says that when she sat down to talk to Billy about a separation, he blamed Dotty, but JoAnne told him it wasn't her mother's fault. It took a lot of talking, but eventually, JoAnne says, she persuaded her husband it was true. If she hadn't found her mother, she may not have moved out so soon, but she would have moved out some day. Finding Dotty just speeded things up. "It was like a rebirth," she says. "I realized, I don't have to be in a relationship that's dragging me down. There's more to life than this."

Billy, a Southern gentleman, insists he's not angry: "I miss her, but she had to do what she had to do. I'm happy for her."

Eye of the Tiger

In April, less than four months after they had found each other, the two women moved into a Miami apartment. The changes had come so swiftly that even friends and relatives were shocked.

"I can't explain it," says JoAnne's friend, Cindy Dabailbeh. "I know JoAnne felt a very strong need to be closer to her mother."

Her grandmother, Susan Garland: "We thought they were so quick to live together and they don't know each other. It really surprises me."

In her first months in Miami, JoAnne's blue Camaro was stolen. She bought a blue Firebird, the same brand and color as her mother's. Dotty changed her brand of cigarettes -- she now smokes Misty 120 menthols, as JoAnne does.

Through the classifieds, JoAnne found a job as program director of Riverside House, a halfway house for people leaving the prison system. Instead of dealing with Hendersonville's geriatric population, she's now dealing with convicted drug dealers. "It's more interesting," she says, with considerable understatement.

They now live in a penthouse apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay. Their favorite activity is watching a sunset from their balcony. Dotty calls it a terrace. JoAnne calls it a porch. They both listen to KISS on the stereo.

Both insist that they have never had a fight. "There has never really been a bad moment," says JoAnne, who is the more talkative and outgoing of the two.

Dotty: "I don't nag."

JoAnne: "Sometimes I have actually to ask her -- 'I need some mother's advice here.' And then she doesn't give me advice, she just makes me think in a different way."

Does JoAnne ever think she will go searching for her biological father? "He made his choice the day he found out she was pregnant, and his choice was he didn't want anything to do with me . . . If by some chance he came knocking on my door and said, 'Guess who I am,' I wouldn't slam the door in his face, but at this point in my life, I have no desire to go looking for him. I'll put it that way."

These days, the toy tiger travels with JoAnne everywhere. The weekend trip she took to Tampa with the other administrators of Riverside House was no exception.

"Are we not a little old for stuffed animals?" one of her colleagues asked archly.

"So I told them the story, and they said, 'How sweet,' but they did rag me the rest of the week about that tiger."

Section: TROPIC
Copyright (c) 1995 The Miami Herald