THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605120140
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
It was a day like any mother and daughter might spend together.
The daughter's first-time trip to the circus. The mother tucking her exhausted child in that night. Making sure the stuffed tiger they bought that day was just so in the girl's arms.
Except in this case, the daughter was 26 years old, and the mother was tucking her in for the first time in her life.
Maryan O'Neil and Michelle McWhorter were not the typical mother-daughter duo. They were related only in the biological sense.
Maryan had given up Michelle for adoption 26 years earlier when she was a teenager and Michelle was a newborn.
I wanted to tell you about Maryan this week as a way of paying tribute to mothers of every stripe. To celebrate the stay-at-home mothers and the working ones, the birth mothers and adoptive ones, the single mothers and married mothers and divorced mothers.
To declare a truce on the war between moms, on the debate over who's the best mom, who's got the best kid, who made the right and wrong choice, who most deserves the title ``mother.''
To honor that instinct inside a mother that survives no matter the time apart from a child.
I wrote about Maryan in a Mother's Day column two years ago. She didn't want her name used at that time. She had told only two people she had given up a baby.
Maryan had been 17 years old at the time. Her parents had sent her to a home for unwed mothers, and told friends Maryan was on a European vacation.
After the baby was born, Maryan held the girl in her arms for 15 minutes. She never forgot those brief moments of her life, even though she went on to marry and have two other children.
Every year on the girl's birthday Maryan would relive that quarter hour as she went through a shoebox of mementos. She'd reread the letter she'd written the social worker a few days after the birth saying she'd changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby. And the letter she got back ignoring her request.
A few days after the column about Maryan ran, she called some organizations that link biological children with the parents who gave them up. By February 1995 she was talking with her birth daughter on the telephone.
And by the next day, Michelle was driving from Marietta, Ga., to Virginia Beach to meet the birth mother she had wondered about for years. Maryan soon learned that at the same time she was going through her shoe box, Michelle was writing her letters, even though she had no idea where to send them.
``I really believe that somewhere out there in the ozone, we were connecting,'' Maryan said.
Maryan says she feels like Michelle's mother, but not her mom. ``I would do anything in the world for her,'' Maryan said. ``That comes natural.''
Up until the time she met Michelle, Maryan regretted giving her up. Now she knows she did the right thing. ``She turned out to be such a lovely person, and her mom and dad are so nice.''
Maryan isn't afraid to use her name this time around, now that she's relayed a most important message to her birth daughter: She was loved right from the beginning.
Here's to Maryan and to all mothers who do their level best, who keep on searching for what their heart tells them is right, who never abandon love.
``I carried this around for so many years,'' Maryan said. ``And now I'm free.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Michelle McWhorter, left, and Maryan O'Neil
by CNB